28 Jan Readings Response – Cheryl

From the influence of Tang-poets on Basho's haiku and American popular culture on Tawara Machi's tanka, it was interesting to me to see that Japanese poetry has never been written in a vacuum and that it has always reflected the cultural tastes and sensibilities of the day. 

It also seems salient to me that both of their poetry draws heavily on the experiences of the everyday: Basho wrote not about not of the "stylish men and women of the great urban centers' floating world" but of the "mundane, everyday lives of farmers and fishermen in the provinces." 

While Tawara Machi's work, therefore, may seem radical to those who hold classical Japanese literature aloft as sophisticated and transcendent, we might see that in some ways she follows in Basho's tradition in appealing to the mundane and pedestrian. Reading the afterword on her tanka collection, it surprised me at first that something as literary to me as the tanka could hold such widespread appeal, but on reflection, with short form personal writing as purveyed by social media gaining so much traction in recent decades, I can see how short form poetry could land squarely in the intersection of an appreciation for concision and the desire to feel seen in a lonely world. 

Meanwhile, Yosano Akiko broke ground with her sensual tanka in her day. It seems to me that there is much precedent for the tanka as a genre of creativity and exploration, all the while preserving a rich literary heritage as Tawara Machi does in incorporating classical Japanese into her very modern works.