Shirane and Beichman
Three misconceptions seemed familiar to me about haiku’s history: the tone and content were “solely” about the beauty of nature, it was standalone, and it was always poetically “serious.” Fascinating to learn from Janine Beichman that it was often about pain and death, it was originally part of prose or a longer chain of verse, and (from Early Haikai and Poetics) that it could also be irreverent, satirical, crass. It amused my inner sixth-grader to read “Princess Saho / with the coming of spring / stands pissing.” Parody is often inherently limited, maybe because it isn’t as open to interpretation and it relies on a desire for contradiction, an unchallenged status quo. Then once the status quo has been challenged, well, what next? It makes sense that haikai would be going stale when Bashō revolutionized it.
Bashō’s “haikai spirit” which “interaction of diverse languages and subcultures” reminded me of Emma Ramadan’s talk. Was the poem about the octopus pots, if in the shadow of a massacre, really “intended to be humorous and sad at the same time”? It seems entirely sad to me. Maybe humorous in a cosmically absurd way? Like we all crawl into our own traps/toward our own death? (I align with Beichman's reading that we are the octopus.)
Yosano Akiko
It’s striking that the Yosano Akiko translator so desperately wants to “forget” that she became pro-war later in life. Akiko seems interesting—a little unhinged. Doesn’t really surprise me that she flipped on her principles. So many famous writers, as the (annoying and interrupty) host points out, have followed the same pattern.
Machi Tawara
I enjoyed reading about Salad Anniversary and what a smash hit it was. Anyone else reminded of Rupi Kaur's first book? Not necessarily the content, but the popularity. I don't think they've made a musical of Kaur's book, however.
I wanted to read more of Carpenter's translations of the poems in Salad Anniversary and found this one:
“Oh yeah?!” the new catchphrase–
in the classroom, student conversations
get by on just “Oh yeah?” “Oh yeah!”
Here are a few more if anyone is curious
https://bookopencom.wordpress.com/2018/02/10/salad-anniversary-by-machi-tawara/
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