Our first time in Osaka for the Japanese UK Poetry Exchange, and the city has a reputation for experimentation, in music certainly, so we partnered up with the brilliant venue Environment 0g. This event was always designed to be more of a salon than a camarade, with a much smaller number of poets, and a kind of playful exchange of performance and ideas. Our host, Junja, shared with us his collection of Seiichi Nikuni’s concrete poetry before we began, and played us Nikuni’s sound poetry too (which I didn’t know existed and have been teaching Nikuni for years) before playing his unique DJ set using vinyl’s of poet’s readings, especially Anne Waldman and John Giorno. Then we had readings from Rina Kikuchi and John Newton Webb before Colin Herd and I did a collaborative one hour conversation poem, as an experiment. It was all heightened by the venue, underground, near the busy strip of Osaka, but hidden away, with just a small group. It was really productive and intimate and we talked for long after, precisely because it was so different to the size and energy of the Kyoto and Tokyo events. https://www.theenemiesproject.com/osaka