was a Japanese poet, photographer, editor, and graphic designer associated with Dada, Surrealism, and visual poetry. He founded the VOU Club and its journal VOU in 1935, and later became especially known for his photographic "Plastic Poems" or "Plastic Poetry".
Kitasono was born in Ise, Mie Prefecture, Japan. According to background material prepared for a LACMA exhibition, he originally aspired to become a painter, but gained early attention as an avant-garde poet. Over the course of his career he also worked as a critic, graphic designer, magazine editor, and photographer.
In 1929, before founding VOU, Kitasono was among the contributors to Ciné, the avant-garde poetry magazine founded by Chirà « Yamanaka.
In 1935, Kitasono established the VOU Club and its avant-garde poetry journal VOU. VOU was published in 1935–1940 and 1949–1978, and invited a revolving group of poets alongside artists, composers, and architects. LACMA exhibition materials also emphasize Kitasono's activity as an editor and graphic designer for poetry and visual-art journals, including VOU.
Among the VOU circle's members was the photographer and poet Kansuke Yamamoto. In the postwar period, VOU-associated visual poets discussed in overviews of the group include Shà Âhachirà  Takahashi, Motoyuki Ità Â, Toshihiko Shimizu, and Setsuko Tsuji.
LACMA exhibition materials describe Kitasono as a poet-artist whose early work was shaped by Dada and Surrealism, and emphasize his activity as an editor and graphic designer for poetry and visual-art journals, including VOU. The same materials note that his "Plastic Poems" belong to the broader field of visual poetry and appeared across his graphic output, including book covers.
A LACMA exhibition backgrounder further states that, in the mid-1950s, he began making what it calls "Plastic Poetry", a photographic genre he invented after being inspired by Surrealist photography by regular contributors to VOU. The backgrounder describes these works as photographs of tabletop arrangements of unrelated elements staged against clean, open space, and notes that Kitasono used such photographic "plastic poems" to replace textual poetry especially in works intended for an international audience.
In 1938, Kitasono co-edited the Surrealist poetry journal Yoru no Funsui with the poet-photographer Kansuke Yamamoto and other poets.
Material from Kitasono's library and related avant-garde holdings is preserved as the "Kitasono Katsue Library" (Ã¥ÂÂÃ¥ÂÂå Âè¡ÂæÂÂ庫) at Tama Art University Art Archives Center.
English-language scholarship on Kitasono includes John Solt's monograph Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902-1978) (1999). Solt also translated a selection of Kitasono's poems as Glass Beret: The Selected Poems of Kitasono Katsue (1995), which received the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.