The Generosity of Poetry - Mary

 Of all of the readings for this week, the keynote talk by Janine Beichman connecting the Haiku to the generosity of poetry was the most interesting to me. Let me start there.

Beichman speaks about Masoaka Shiki reviving the practice of Haiku, where Shiki describes sitting down for an examination and completely emptying his desk. "A seventeen syllable verse would emerge before I could write a page" (FYI -- all my quotes from Beichman will be rough since it was a recording), and Shiki would write the verse on the lampshade! I found this story absolutely enthralling. Beichman comments on it noting that he writes that he "failed the final examinations of 1892" but that she understands that poetry--specifically the seventeen syllable practice--became for Shiki "a particularly convenient way for him to write about his joy at being alive." Beichman goes on to elaborate the relationship between haiku and mindfulness practices, and how these poets came to understand the practice of creation as they were writing as one way they understood of found a kind of similar wisdom as a creator. She also connected it to the profound ability to write ten or twenty poems without moving from where you are, noting that Shiki (or maybe it was someone else!) would instruct students to stare at their feet once they felt they had exhausted all the environment around them. Finally, I felt her comparison of the two translations towards the end--one interpreting the poem as being written from his deathbed, adn the other translator interpreting it as a memory of friendship--as incredible. Beichman describes the poem as a fan and she writes that not only the creator but the translators--and, generally, we could apply this to all readers--use their associative imaginations when reading and in that way "possess the power of life and death over the poem." I loved this talk and will return to it and share it.

I also really enjoyed the podcast on Yosano Akiko, and was moved by all the readings of her poetry. I was a little perplexed at the juxtaposition of her writing as feminist and revolutionary, and yet Carpenter writes in her epilogue of her translation of Machi Tawara that the tanka "tended to become stale and conventional; this difficulty was compounded by poets' continued use of outmoded 'literary' language which made the poems hard to understand and kept them seemingly remote from daily experience." I suppose this confused me: what was the state of tanka when Akiko was writing? What happened between the two revolutionary women writers? Is it the turn at the end of Akiko's career that made her work less received?

I also (and I'm so sorry to say this) did not find the examples from Tawara very interesting. This could be thranslator? To discuss!