I suspect that this Japanese form is as new to many as it is to me. I enclose a copy of an excellent explanation from the equally excellent Verve Poetry team in Birmingham
This article features the winning and shortlisted poems from February’s Poem of the Month, a short (and borrowed) description of what a Zuihitsu is, and includes details of ways you can write more poetry, and support us supporting poets like you.
Speak Now or forever regret it was the theme for this Poem of the Month. Conversations, arguments, opinions, shared secrets, saying what needs saying, oppressed voices, and critique, were posted to us from across the country celebrating one of our greatest human tools, speech.
Interestingly, not many submissions subverted the litany of noise we’re reading, perhaps because enough is being said already, and we need to talk about other things. Which is why this months winning poem Pillow Book Talk: a Zuihitsu for Sei Shónagon — Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana was so refreshing to read, and you need context to understand our thinking….
If you look it up you will learn that Zuihitsu is a Japanese literary form dating from around 1000 A.D. when Sei Shōnagon wrote The Pillow Book, a collection of personal essays woven from fragments of texts, ideas, thoughts, notes and observations.
Zuihitsu is neither prose poem or essay although it can sometimes resemble both. To ‘follow the brush’ suggests a certain not-knowing of what will happen, that whatever might result from the process will be down to discovery rather than plan. There is a strong sense in zuihitsu writing that the creation of order depends on disorder. Zuihitsu demands as its starting point, juxtapositions, fragments, contradictions, random materials and pieces of varying lengths. I like this. This, it seems to me, is also how most things in life are, how people are, how thinking is, how poetry should be.
Written by Cheryl Moskowitz for The Poetry School (Verve Festival Partners)Read the full piece here;
poetryschool.com/theblog/follow-brush-making-zuihitsu-poetry/
With this in mind, Alex has formed a poem that questions, praises, learns from, and speaks to Sei Shònagon, and from here, lets herself ‘follow the brush’ in response to the original The Pillow Book. The poem is full of observations; sleep deprivation, aggressive intimacies, lists of ‘things’, and, ingeniously, contains even a poem on Tornados within the poem. The more we read this, the more immersed in it we are. It’s like a film.
Garyswordz 
