This is a rough overview of Ko-Yin's areas of creation and activity. It’s written in the third person and in the style of a literary encyclopedia. Why? To see what it looks like!

LIFE

Sachio Ko-Yin was born in 1972. He is the only child of Adrianna St.John, poet, and a Confucian philosopher Hideo Takashima. He attended formal school to the 6th grade, after which his mother, inspired by the doctrines of anarchism, removed him. From that point to the present, he is entirely self taught in European philosophy, English literature, and Greek and Roman classics.

His driving mission in life is poetry. He decided on the career of a poet at age ten when he fell in love with Lisa Charde ,and at age thirteen, he wrote both his first epic poem , 'Pantheistic Lines', and his first verse-drama ,'Queen Syrinx , in four acts.Over the years he has written forty books of lyrical poems, a large collection longer narative and dramatic verse , an epic poem in ten books ,and fifty one journals.

 By the time he was twelve , he had fallen far from what Lisa had showed  him in poetry  and was quickly spiraling into criminal behaviors . At thirteen , he drasticly changed diection  overnight , having happened on a poem by Lord Byron . He spent the Whole night writing a new Lisa poem, and from that point on was overtaken by a maelstrom of energy, reading the British romantic poets, then reading everything they read. For example, Shelley introduced him to Plato and The anarchist Godwin. From that moment on his education became a rapid wave of inspiration in the humanities, though thoroughly deficient in the Sciences. Since he had been previously freed from the constraints of school, his daily routine was organic, spending whole nights reading major poems, (playing his flout at the ‘gates of dawn’) living on bread and ‘black wine’ (coffee) and smoking his pipe on roof tops or trees.

The tendency of all his early poems are to the world of imagination and aesthetic spirituality .To a great degree this can be attributed to his early childhood life . In his early life the home he grew up in was troubled and violent in the extreme, but the boy found refuge in the arts and nurtured in music by his mother’s harp and piano performance. His imaginary world became full of mythological creatures and vivid experiences of the spirit of nature.

The physical house he was raised in was very old, with a long history of supposed supernatural incidents .Family members and visitors reported strange encounters with extremely strong presences, and with classic 'poltergeist' activities. While the boy was raised in an atmosphere that strongly tended to the paranormal, this 'occult' element was tempered by his father's Buddhist practice and his mother's Catholicism, both traditions guiding the boy in the direction of contemplation. Against his father's wishes, he studied with a nun and received first communion at age ten. The mystical tradition of Christianity introduced his mind to a treasure house of medieval arts and legends. But the boy saw no conflict between this and the Buddhist path to enlightenment.

At age eleven, he still could barely read or write, probably do to the chaotic nature of his home life. But he began to improve his reading as he became engaged in books on magic and the supernatural. He devised elaborate magical rituals and wrote his first little book on the subject, 'Magical Spells and Dances' based on his belief that the apple of Eden empowered humans with the gift of sorcery.

From age sixteen to nineteen he studied classical ballet with Irene Fokine, grand daughter of choreographer Michael Fokine.His life as a dancer came to an abrupt end when he was expelled.

At age nineteen he entered the anti-war movement, for the first time putting into practice his long held commitment to nonviolence and anarchism. He founded the Anarchist League (which publishes the periodical 'Anarchia') and co-founded the Root and Branch Collective with his comrade and lover Melissa Jameson and others who were driven by the pacifist vision.

While training in Buddhism, he affiliated with the Society of Friends as a distinctly non-Christian pacifist, serving on several committees and teaching at the Friends Nursery school. His esoteric practice also led him into   freemasonry, where he was made a master mason, like his mother's father, and served as the Senior Deacon of his temple. .Soon after being 'raised ' he went on to the thirty second degree of the Scottish Rite. Throughout, he continued his affiliation to 'irregular' Masonic orders.

At age twenty five, his life took a dramatic turn. He and a fellow pacifist enacted a 'ploughshares' action at a nuclear missile silo, cutting  through the gates ,setting off the alarms , painting a mural on the blast cap and symbolically hammering on the lid and tracks so as to beat  'swords in to ploughshares' . In keeping with there Gandhian beliefs, they waited at the site for forty five minutes till the arrival of the military police, greeting them warmly with a message of disarmament. They both were convicted of sabotage and conspiracy. Ko-Yin was sentenced to a two and a half year sentence.

Prison was ideal for poetry, and while serving his sentence, in addition to writing his 24 preludes to his ‘spiritual bride’ Agnieszka, he wrote the first verse-play of his dark tetrology, ‘Verfallen’. He and fellow Buddhists made there prison life a monastic experience, to the extent possible, and they started an unauthorized poetry group called the ‘Francois Villon Society’in honor of the fifteenth century burglar-poet.

Since his release, due largely to the patronage of l----p-----, he has completed his epic poem and five verse-dramas. This period is perhaps his most productive to date.

THE APOCRYPHON

   The Apocryphon is an epic poem in ten books. It creates its own mythology in the framework of the Greek primal myth and explores the ordeals of initiation through the stories of Eteius, a trickster diety whose imagination teems with universes. The Titans seek to destroy his cult by imprisoning him, and in his isolation and resulting insanity his imagination overflows the boundaries of him self, and his prison becomes a portal to his ‘word realm’ or incarnated imagination.

     A Titan wonders through the portal and witnesses the struggles between the brothers Krato and Anarchos, and the myth moves through the Island of the Serpent and the stories of Queen Eudaimonia.

     Over all, the mythology and cosmology of the poem are extremely complex, and often explore many levels of symbolism resolving in monism.

      Each line of the poem is a thirteen syllable meter of alternating hexameters and pentameters. Each book is comprised of a thousand lines divided into ten cantos.

THE DRAMAS

      The recent verse-dramas consist of the Verfallen Cycle and three ‘Syrinx’plays. Each of these plays are built on a mythic autobiography where the author’s friends, family and fellow poets take on mythic proportions, and instances in the author’s life are used to enter the human psyche.

      The Verfallen Cycle is divided into four tragedies,1) The Beads, 2) The Ancient Word, 3) The Bridal Bed and 4) Thanatei.

       Of these four, The Beads is the shortest and the most abstract, being a symbolic painting of life in prison ,where the prison it self is an emblem of hidden memorys of childhood horrer.

       In The Ancient Word, the figure of Arius (from the Apocryphon) prepares to enter his ancestral home, where the hidden memories of suffering are buried under piles of refuse in the house, until it is unenterable. Lisa appears to him and leads him through the ordeal of facing his origins as a form of initiation. Through the excavation of the house the refuse serves as a geological time clock, revealing an anthropology of madness.

        The Bridal Bed is a tragedy in only the broadest sense of the word, that is, the tone of ritual seriousness, and in serving as the third of a tragic cycle. But the actual subject is closer to a mystical comedy, being the story of Agnieszka and Arius, how they met before his imprisonment, and the nature of there spiritual marriage. In this way, it speaks explicitly of the themes alluded to in The Beads, The actions that lead to imprisonment and the approaching doom of facing the memories of the ancestral home.

         [ Thanatei

            queen syrinx

             the revels

              ousia]