I found the readings on haiku fascinating, especially in how the sources approached the form from multiple perspectives about its historical origins and its present-day developments. I was surprised to learn that, much like Catullus in his own context, haiku was once considered a relatively new or contemporary poetic form, and that it was associated with a more common, accessible class rather than elite literary culture. This reframing challenged my prior assumption of haiku as something already fully “classic” and canonized. It reminded me of the relationship between Noh drama and Kabuki.
I was also struck by the formal detail that although haiku is often presented as three lines in translation, it is written vertically as a single line in Japanese. As a Chinese reader, this made me crave seeing what these poems actually look like in their original script rather than only encountering them through romanization or translated line breaks.
Finally, I was drawn to the stories of the two poets discussed. One poet’s shift from pacifism to supporting Japan’s war in China unsettled me, especially since the podcast host seemed to brush past this ideological transformation rather quickly and insisted that she was this "first feminist" poet of Japan. The other poet’s rise through writing haiku as a teacher rooted in contemporary settings felt forward-looking. This tension made me reflect on Chinese literature today: I often find myself longing for a similar sense of continuity and reinvention. Contemporary writers rarely compose classical Chinese poetry in a genuinely creative way, and when they do, the work often feels constrained by inherited vocabulary and subject matter.
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