Albert Saijo

[7] In his writing of this period, Saijo expressed a commitment to the United States as a melting pot and support for those who volunteered for the U.S. Armed Forces.

Bill, Saijo attended the University of Southern California (USC) and earned a bachelor's degree in International Relations with a minor in Chinese.

[13] Throughout his life Saijo remained in contact with those he had met at Heart Mountain, and relied on these connections for employment, housing, and religious instruction.

[15] Masatsugu argues that Saijo's emergent interest in his Japanese heritage, including haiku and Zen, and his involvement in the Beat Generation, "were enabled in part by the shift in racial discourse and the re-presentation of things Japanese in American society",[13] as fears of a "Yellow Peril" receded and Japan became a Cold War ally to the U.S.[11] At around this time Saijo also met Jack Kerouac, who was already an established writer.

[15] Kerouac, Saijo and Welch took a road trip together from San Francisco to New York, during which they bonded over haiku and Buddhism, and composed poems as they went.

[21] Saijo and Kerouac became friends, bound by a shared wanderlust and appreciation of Zen Buddhism, cool jazz and alcohol.

[20] Rob Wilson has argued that the character of Baso functions as a "link to Zen Buddhism and the Orient for Kerouac, who found the West Coast U.S.A. closer in expansive sentiment and lyrical existence to Asia than to Europe".

[22] A photograph of Saijo, Kerouac and Welch composing a poem together in New York was featured in Fred McDarrah's book The Beat Scene.

[29] His poetry in Outspeaks is written entirely in capital letters and punctuated with dashes, resembling the work of the poets of the Beat Generation,[28] yet though his poems take a stream-of-consciousness form Saijo did not adhere to Kerouac's mode of spontaneous prose.

[3] In his best-known poem, "EARTH SLANGUAGE WITH ENGLISH ON IT" he explains his style by expressing a wish for a "UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR", a "BIRTHRIGHT TONGUE" with "NO FORMAL-VERNACULAR OR DEMOTIC-HIERATIC OPPOSITION".

[31] In her review of Outspeaks in the alternative literary journal Tinfish, Juliana Spahr described Saijo as "a new [William] Blake".

[19] Rob Wilson identified Outspeaks as one example of poetry from the area surrounding the Pacific Ocean bearing the markers of two types of postmodernism: "writerly experimentation and textual play ... as well as the concerns of belonging to and expressing a distinct, particularized and limited model of identity, affiliated voice, sentiments of nationhood, and (post)colonial heritage".

[32] Wilson interprets Saijo's use of the plover as a signifier of "'ANIMAL CIVILITY,' living on edges and borders, embodying nomadic movement, improvisation, and risk, jazzy flights between solitary foraging and communal roosting: anarchic and poetic existence on a small budget.

The exhibition included work by 29 artists responding to poems by Saijo that were published posthumously in the Bamboo Ridge Press house magazine.

[36] In December 2014 Tinfish Press announced it would publish a collection of Saijo's work from the 1980s and 1990s entitled Woodrat Flat, to be edited and introduced by the poet and activist Jerry Martien.

[37] In a review for Queen Mob's Teahouse Greg Bem described Woodrat Flat as "a firm but mindful book, one whole composed of many meditations ... a mature book, too, one that can justify its own worth, its own righteousness, and, adversely, its own meek way of cupping a spoonful of quiet here and there to be dripped over the illuminated absurd of the modern world.