Keibooks Announces January, A Tanka Diary, by M. Kei

Keibooks Announces January, A Tanka Diary, by M. Kei

Press Release – For Immediate Release – Please post to all appropriate venues

28 September 2013– Perryville, Maryland, USA

"Step inside this book and meet a magician—a man who knows the secrets of the sea and the land and the sky; a man who can catch the vastness of oceans and the smallness of sparrows in the same few words in five lines."—Joy McCall

Opening with the cold days of January and following the poet through a year of his life, January, A Tanka Diary, is the latest collection from the internationally respected tanka poet and editor, M. Kei. Melancholy, hopeful, or satiric, these are poems alive to the beauty of the world. He has the ability to capture subjects as small as a single snowflake or as big as history, all told with an intimate honesty. In Kei's hands, the ancient five line tanka poem breathes with contemporary life. 

Each tanka appears in the order in which it was written with a date attached. We can see the poet sitting down to write on New Year’s Day, and the multitude of poems and subjects that flow from his pen. We can follow him as he hikes and writes tanka over the bones of a dead deer, and as he explores the mysteries of the natural world. Of course, we follow him to sea in the company of sailboats and pelicans. 

A large collection, January, A Tanka Diary, contains 640 poems of which more than 220 have never been seen before. The rest are collected from the scores of venues in which he has published around the world. Fans of his work will no doubt recognize some of their favorite tanka, but will see them as they were written in the company of other poems from the same date. The author of Slow Motion : The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack, shows us that he is as sensitive to life ashore as at sea.

somewhere 

in the darkness

inside my heart

the lights of a distant city

are burning

empty

but still attached, 

two clamshells

something like

a husband and wife

my hand on the tiller

like Water Rat and Mole,

with no particular place to go

and no particular desire

to get there any time soon

Comments from Sanford Goldstein, author of Journeys Far and Near:

“In the past sixty-five years I cannot remember a tanka collection as long as M. Kei’s January, A Tanka Diary. The collection contains 640 tanka, 420 published not in his previous collections, but in journals and other places, and 220 new poems. It is a fascinating voyage of discovery of a Kei we have not known this well. The book starts from January 1, 2007, to the next January 1. It surprised me that Kei is so interested in flowers, birds, grass, clouds, sky—of course with his duty aboard floating vessels he is intimate with the ocean. The subjects vary of course, but what I found particularly fascinating is that the two final lines of the tanka bring a surprise and hold up the entire poem. 

“I have no room to cite individual poems, but one that appeals to me is a laundry day in which Kei’s larger underwear is drying outside with his son’s much smaller underwear. Another poem is about his daughter—Kei has come home, opens the refrigerator door to find the chicken inside had been plucked, so he knows his daughter had visited him. Poems of a sexual nature occur, one of which I once criticized as not being in the right order for a sequence. 

“Such an enormous undertaking cannot be read at a sitting. Take your time in reading it. On a second reading I discovered elements I had not thought of. Yes, do read it and experience a new tanka view of Kei’s world.”

Comments from Joy McCall, author of circling smoke, scattered bones:

“Step inside this book and meet a magician—a man who knows the secrets of the sea and the land and the sky; a man who can catch the vastness of oceans and the smallness of sparrows in the same few words in five lines. M. Kei blazes a trail. This is a big beautiful gathering, to keep forever.

“There is great sadness in these poems. There is deep longing. There is humour, too. He makes me smile. There are insights which surprise. There are poems of great beauty that catch the breath. There are everyday poems which remind us we are all human.

“This book will be going with me everywhere I go. I love every poem in it.  But if I have to pick a favourite, it's this one: 

it's a day like any other,

full of melancholy

pessimism,

and yet—somewhere

there are herons

“Some things are beyond my words. If you buy nothing else this year, not even food, buy this book.”

January, A Tanka Diary

ISBN 978-0615871561 (Print) 275 pp

also available for Kindle

$18.00 USD (print) or $5.00 USD (Kindle)

Purchase in print at: https://www.createspace.com/4407330

Also available in print and ebook at Amazon.com and other online retailers.

Keibooks

P O Box 516

Perryville, MD 21903 USA

<AtlasPoetica.org>

Fire Pearls 2 is #1 in Hot New Releases in Poetry Anthologies at Amazon

Thank you all! Fire Pearls 2 is rated #1 Hot New Releases in Poetry Anthologies at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/books/10250/ref=zg_bs_tab_t_bsnr

Fire Pearls 2 : Short Masterpieces of Love and Passion is a worthy successor to the classic of contemporary tanka poetry. Covering all aspects of love and passion from the delights of first love to the agony of abortion, over 90 poets featured in 750 poems present every aspect of the human heart from the romantic to the desperate. Edited and with an introduction by the well-known poet and editor, M. Kei, Fire Pearls 2 is an essential acquisition for lovers of fine literature.

Print for sale at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Pearls-Short-Masterpieces-Passion/dp/1489595023/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371759885&sr=1-7&keywords=M.+Kei

Kindle for Sale at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DHM0PUS

Further Thoughts on Lineation in Tanka

My article in the current issue of MET (#6), scratches the surface of the subject. I had not yet figured out for myself exactly what I was trying to get at when I wrote it, but went ahead with it on the assumption that if I stuck my neck out, somebody would respond by trying to chop it off, and that this would advance our understanding of the subject. I was right, somebody did, and it has. Here then is the response I made to him:

Japanese doesn't have meter; it does not stress or accent syllables. There is no variation in sound that determines line length, and in fact, spoken Japanese does vary from its written form. What the Japanese count are the kana, the written form. Thus, a word like 'desu' is written with two kana, and is counted as two kana, but is pronounced as 'dess', one mora. That the pronunciation varies from the written form is of little concern to the Japanese.

When dealing with classical waka, we never know what the originals are because old Japanese had many sounds that have disappeared from modern Japanese, and waka are always translated into strictly formal modern Japanese, which eliminates any irregularities. Thus, when we see Saigyo in Japanese romaji, we are seeing a modern Japanese translation of what Saigyo actually wrote. It is very rare -- and quite befuddling -- to confront the romaji inscriptions of classical waka. Translating from classical Japanese to modern Japanese is just as difficult and perhaps more so than translating from Anglo-Saxon to modern English. When we read Beowulf in English, we are not reading what the bard wrote. Yet if we are to confront the bard's word directly, we can make very little sense of it. So in reality, all our supposed adherence to the aesthetics of classical waka is complete poppycock: we are adhering to some translator's notion of what old waka were like. As far as I know, no one has ever made a direct translation from classical Japanese to modern English. Anything passed through a double layer of translation must depart far from the original.

Yet even in the strictest period of waka writing, under Ki no Tsurayuki and his influence, waka might vary by a syllable or two. When I was first writing tanka and adhering to the 5-7-5-7-7 format, I had a good friend from Japan who was a published poet. She constantly nudged me to not worry so much about counting syllables, telling me the Japanese didn't mind if it was off by a bit.

In the more flexible periods, eg, the modern era and the earliest eras, there was/is considerable flexibility. For example; the ancient form appears to have been alternating long and short lines, with lines varying from 3 to 9 syllables. When it was adopted by the courtiers, they seem to have settled on 5 and 7. Such a pattern is now seen as 'inherent' in the Japanese language, but it is long custom that has made it so. And yet, as noted, variation was still permitted.

I speculate that the Japanese settled on 5 and 7 for reasons having to do with Chinese influence, which saw the world made up of as sets of five -- five musical notes in the scale, five elements, five colors, five directions, etc, and natural harmonics, eg, the seven note scale, and so forth. Gagaku, the classical music of the same period as waka, is quite eerie to Western ears. It's based on the five note scale.

What sounded musical to a Japanese courtier of the Heian period will set the Westerner's nerves on end -- if you dislike bagpipe music, then gagaku will cause real suffering! I do not think we can import the Japanese classical musical system to our tanka and win any admirers. The Japanese model simply does not translate, either in syllables, rhythm, or sound.

See A Waka Anthology, Vol 1, for more details on ancient Japanese prosody.

Another thing to keep in mind is that tanka was not the only form, merely the most popular form. All kinds of forms were in used in ancient Japan, and the Japanese kept inventing new ones, like the ko-uta ('little song'). Thus, a thing that did not adhere to the tanka form might appear as a sedoka or ko-uta or Buddha's footstep poem or one of the many other forms. So the tanka poet was not confined to the 5-7-5-7-7 form; if a poem needed to be something else, it could be. Hell, even the acrostic survived in the courtly anthologies. When we fixate on tanka, we are ignoring the context which provided many more options to the Japanese poet than just 5-7-5-7-7.

Alas, we hear next to nothing about other forms. Thus, if I present a six line poem in a tanka context, the great majority of readers are not going to recognize it as a sedoka, they're going to think it's a defective or experimental tanka. If I use four lines, they aren't going to ask if I'm trying to do a Chinese quatrain or a ko-uta, they are going to see it as a radical tanka.
A Japanese reader would have no such problem.

Japanese rhythm is built on phrases, rather than words or lines. Generally speaking, waka have a single phrase per line. Japanese grammar being what it is, particles of various sorts demark groups of words as belonging together. In Japanese, these words are run together with no space between them, and are pronounced without pauses. This is very different from English with space and pauses between each word, no matter how important or unimportant they are. Thus a Japanese auditor can easily tell where the line breaks fall -- there is a pauses in the flow of sound. How many syllables are in that flow of sound doesn't matter. They aren't counting. They're registering the pauses between groups of syllables, along with certain grammatical markers, to know when a phrase ends and the next begins. English-language tanka is not built on phrases at all, which is why we can have enjambment and single words on lines, and other things. Our language is simply too different.

I could, if I was to imitate the Japanese rhythm, write tanka by eliminating the spaces between words. Thus the lineation would be completely irrelevant. Consider this:

thewoods thatseemedimpenetrable insummer arehollowin December'swind

Voila. A Japanese tanka in English. Written on one line with the breaks appearing at the ends of phrases. Counting syllables or morae is completely irrelevant; the breaks between phrases are obvious. Thus it becomes clear why the Japanese need not be too exacting when counting syllables. It also becomes clear that the need to take a breath is going to break the poem into 'utterances' if we can use that term to refer to the group of words sung between breaths. In poem of these size, two or three breaths is natural to an ordinary speaker; to utter a poem of this length in one breath or five is out of the ordinary, but perfectly feasible. To manipulate the breathing places is part of the poet's technique.

The above poem's breathing pattern is:

thewoodsthatseemedimpenetrableinsummer arehollowinDecember'swind

Such issues are given no attention by poets in English, except for a few who mention 'one or two breaths.' There is no discussion of the impact that such breaths give to prosody, or how such breaks might be exploited for literary benefit, or how they balance one another, or any such thing. The break at the end of L3 does have the virtue of dividing the poem into two roughly equal halves. Such a break is certainly easily accomplished by a singer with no special training. But why limit ourselves to what is simple and obvious?

When you get right down to it; the vast majority of tanka poets and readers working in English -- including most of the well known ones -- haven't a clue what really makes a Japanese tanka work, or what the equivalent is in English. As long as we keep on with our absolutely meaningless rubric of 'five phrases on five lines', we haven't a chance of learning anything about either Japanese tanka or English-language tanka. My article on lineation is primitive, I know, but I operate on the theory that sticking my neck out may provoke discussion, education, and improvement.

I thank you for raising the issue. I had not quite figured out for myself in any conscious way what I was getting at in 'Alternate Lineation,' my thoughts on the matter are much clearer now.

~K~

Bibliography of Books Containing Tanka in English

I was going to leave the bibliography to Denis, but since he was in the accident, I decided I might as well take all the data I had and turn it into a word document. The resulting bibliography contains approximately 325 entries. About 100 overlap with Ce Rosenow's Tanka Bibliography, but hers has not been updated since 2000. In addition, I tried hard to find old and obscure works, and put a tremendous effort into research.

I queried poets, viewed existing bibliographies, searched web sites, book reviews in journals, poets biographies, the Library of Congress card catalog, the catalogs of several colleges in the US and Canada, queried my colleagues, etc. Nonetheless, I have about 50 or more titles about which I do not have enough information to make a guess as to whether they contain tanka, and there are many more poets and editors yet to query. It's a neverending project, so I decided to post what I had so that people could start using it and hopefully send me additions and corrections. It is now posted at TankaCentral.com.

I also made some corrections as requested by Denis Garrison, and my 'A History of Tanka Book Publishing in English' is now posted to the Winter issue of Modern English Tanka. Essentially it's a narrative of information in the bibliography and contextual information and commentary, tracing the history of publishing tanka in English. It can be viewed at ModernEnglishTanka.com, Winter, 2006.

I regard both as being preliminaries works. There is so little scholarship on tanka in English that it's important to do this kind of fundamental groundwork to get started and open the subject for discussion and further research.

It's good to see it come to fruition because I've put a tremendous amount of work into this research. There is more to be done, but I don't plan on pushing as hard in it as I have been. I think my next step is to complete my acquistion of tanka anthologies and write about anthology publishing.

The anthologies containing tanka that I own or have on order are:

Japan: Theme and Variations
Sounds from the Unknown
Tomoshibi
Poets Behind Barbed Wire
Tanka in English
Tanka Splendor 1990
Tanka Splendor 1991
Tanka Splendor 1994
Tanka Splendor 1995
Tanka Splendor 1996
Tanka Splendor 1997
Tanka Splendor 1998
Tanka Splendor 1999
Tanka Splendor 2000
Tanka Splendor 2001
Tanka Splendor 2002
Tanka Splendor 2003
Tanka Splendor 2004
Tanka Splendor 2005
Tanka Splendor 2006
The Wind Five Folded
Footsteps in the Fog
Outcry from the Inferno
Heiwa: Peace Poetry
Quiet Fire
Book of Tanka
New Moon
Tangerine Anthology
Castles in the Sand
The Tanka Anthology
Unrolling the Awning
Searching for Echoes
Only the Bulbs
English Tanka Poems
To Find the Moon
Fire Pearls
Something Like a Sigh
A Thin Green Horizon

Books I want to acquire (if you are very nice, you will send them to me!):

Ishokurin (Transplanted Forest)
Maple
Tanka Splendor 1992
Tanka Splendor 1993
Cats/Chats
The Art of Haiku
My Neighbor's Life
Countless Leaves
Full Moon Tide
Moondust/Poussiere de la Lune
How to Haiku
Tulip Haiku
Rose Haiku for Flower Lovers and Gardeners
Tanka Calendar 2005
Tanka Calendar 2006
Invisible Tea and Haiku
Windchimes

~K~

Waka - Fun Example

Lest you think that all of the old waka were erudite and lovely paeans of lyricism, I want to share an example by an early courtier named Okimaro. He was an obscure member of the court, living and writing his verses around about the year 700 AD. At the time there was a game of composing poems that included various improbable items; Okimaro was good at it. His poems composed for the game have the natural rhythm of colloquial speech and present the aristocrats at home, letting their hair down. He gives us a picture as life as it was as opposed to the staged formalities of the royal court.

He was challenged to write a poem about chaps (leather leggings used to protect men while riding horseback), greens, a dining mat, and the beams of a house.

Sukomo shiki
Aona nimochiko
Utsuhari ni
Mutakbaki kakete
Yasumu kono kimi
~Naga no Okimaro, c 700 AD

Spread the dining mat--
Boil the greens and bring them on--
The lord is waiting,
Resting with his chaps off and dangling
Where he hung them from the beam.
~trans. Edwin A. Cranston, A Waka Anthology, Volume 1: The Gem-Glistening Cup, 1993

Nonetheless, he was a courtier and attended his Sovereign in the palace. Palaces in those days were modest affairs with thatched roofs, but all the same, they were large and elegant places compared to the hovels of ordinary people.

Oumiya no
Uchi made kikoyu
Abiki su to
Ago totonouru
Ama no yobikoe
~Naga no Okimaro

Here in the palace,
Even here there comes the sound:
Shouts of the seafolk
Keeping the netmen in rhythm
~trans. Edwin A. Cranston, A Waka Anthology, Volume 1: The Gem-Glistening Cup, 1993

This is not pastorialism, that would come later when the court became truly wealthy and lived separate enough from the ordinary folk to view them through a hazy ignorance that allowed room for Romantic fantasy. Okimaro's Sovereign lived in a palace close enough to see and hear fisherfolk at work, Okimaro was human enough to enjoy the sound and sight for what it was without any hint of condescension. This is a far cry from The Tale of Genji, written three centuries later, where Prince Genji, depicted as a compassionate man, is not entirely certain that the common folk are even human.

Hachisuha wa
Kaku koso aru mono
Okimaro ga
Ie ni aru mono wa
Umo no ha ni arashi
~Naga no Okimaro

Lotus leaves--
So this is the way they look~
What Okimaro
Has at home turns out to be
Nothing but leaves of taro!
~trans. Edwin A. Cranston, A Waka Anthology, Volume 1: The Gem-Glistening Cup, 1993

The lotus is a beautiful flower, the taro is a homely vegetable. Okimaro is not talking about horticulture! I wonder if his wife hit him with a frying pan when she heard this one?

Later such down to earth and humorous poems would be dropped from the canon of courtly poetry, but they could not be supressed. The humor would simply come out in a new genre: kyoka.

Waka Example - modern

There are various groups that admire the classical poetry of the imperial anthologies; they are trying to maintain those virtues in their own modern English-language poetry. Unfortunately, they tend to have rather narrow ideas about exactly what the courtly poetry was, resulting in an even more restrictive genre than the already limited genre of waka. I think it is entirely possible to maintain the lyricism and good taste of the courtly genre while expanding its subject matter and techniques.

For example, the classic 5-7-5-7-7 form does not have to be -- and should not be -- maintained in English. The Japanese language is polysyllabic, therefore the number of words in a waka is much smaller than an English-language poem and the content is therefore more compressed. Waka have a haiku-like succinctness that permits more ambiguity than the carefully spelled out English verses of 5-7-5-7-7. Simply put, 31 English syllables say too much and are not a true analogue to the Japanese originals.

Items such as punctuation and capitalization are also non-essential -- Japanese has neither. Punctuation is through verbal markers, such as 'kana' (a verbal exclamation mark), and other particles. When it is realized that Japanese punctuation uses up some of the syllables of the waka, then it must be understood that the actual content of a waka is even smaller than generally realized.

in winter
the pale sun and moon
share the day sky
leaving my heart
darker than ever
~M. Kei


The above poem is classically formed: an observation of nature comprises the upper verse and an emotional expression the lower verse. The two meld together to give a lyric description of a personal place-time. The number of syllables is 3-5-4-4-5 -- irregular and shorter than the traditional form. While some modern waka poets will accept non-standard lines, they still look for a pattern of short-long-short-long-long, which this poem does not meet. Yet to me, the counting of syllables is not nearly as important as the structure of the ideas and images. The poem is classical in its content, not its trivial details. Because it is shorter than the usual 'classic' English waka, it is closer to the Japanese originals in the amount of information it carries. When read aloud, it reads smoothly and could easily be chanted.

This latter point is one frequently overlooked by English language poets. The word 'waka' means 'Japanese song.' Waka were meant to be chanted or sung aloud and this is still an important part of the modern aesthetic. When the Emperor and Empress of Japan host their New Year's poetry reading party, the selected poems are chanted, not spoken. Western authors, influenced by free verse no doubt, do not give as much attention to rhythm and meter as they should if they intend to write truly 'classical' Japanese waka.

Waka Example - classical, courtly

My early poetry was written very much in imitation of the Kokinshu models. Though criticis of the work regard it as deadly artificial, I do not find it so. On the contrary, I found in it a model whereby I could graciously express my own feelings. The poem below may not be great literature, but it sure beats writing depressing angst-ridden diary entries like, "I can't believe he won't even email me, after all I've done for him. You'd think blah blah blah." Given a choice between poetry and somebody's emotional nosebleed, I'll take the poetry. I'm way too old to find anything interesting about angst.

For a certain man.

Though I was sure you
would not be coming, I still
waited at the door;
The cicadas' shrill singing
echoed in my empty heart.
~M. Kei

The above poem illustrates another element of the waka tradition that was also picked up by other genres: The headnote. Headnotes were used in the Man'yoshu as well, but with the brevity of the five lines they provided essential context to help understand the poems. During the time of the Kokinshu -- and most of Japanese history -- exchanging poetry was a proper way for people to share their feelings, conduct courtship, enjoy the pleasures of life, express their condolences, etc. Poetry was not a solitary business and the Western image of the tormented poetic laboring in a garret does not apply. The poets of the Japanese courtly tradition were respectable members of society who believed that graciously expressing themselves was an essential requirement for all educated, well-bred people. A view I happen to share, but one which is admittedly not the majority view in North America.

But look at it from another angle: Hallmark didn't exist. Japanese courtiers couldn't run to the drugstore and grab a card; they had to actually write something of their own to comfort the bereaved, profess their love, or otherwise express their emotional life. They couldn't buy it pre-canned. I started writing poetry to other people for the same reason: I couldn't stand the banality of Hallmark cards.

Hint for men: If you want to get women, write poems. Keep it short and as long as it's not too awful, your ladylove will be impressed. Trust me. It works. I speak from experience.

Waka

Waka is the most important genre of Japanese poetry. Nowadays it is called 'tanka,' a change in nomenclature that will be explained later. Yes, waka/tanka is even more important than haiku! It's certainly been around longer... more than a thousand years longer. It is also the bulk of the official imperial anthologies compiled over the centuries. In order to understand waka/tanka's longevity is is necessary to explore what it was the early waka poets and editors thought it was and why it mattered.

In the early 10th century two things happened. One, the Emperor Daigo gave orders in 905 that a collection of Japanese poetry (waka -- 'Japanese songs') be compiled and that it be written with the new kana syllabary. Kana had been evolving over time, but it was given its final form at this time. Prior to this time everything Chinese was the fashion and considered superior to everything Japanese. Nonetheless, there was a strong indigenous poetry tradition already, and Daigo, wanting to elevate the Japanese language and Japanese literature in stature, commanded the compilation of the Collection of Old and New Poetry, the Kokinwakashu, or as it is more usually known, the Kokinshu. The principle editor was Ki no Tsurayuki, a fine poet himself and the author of the first work of poetics in the Japanese language.

In the Japanese preface to the Kokinshu (there was a Chinese preface too, which is ignored because it has little interest), Lord Ki described the origins of poetry and critiqued several of the most famous poets of the Man'yoshu -- a heresy, given the great prestige of the early work and its principle authors. Ki's full article can be read in English translation at: http://www.humanistictexts.org/tsurayuki.htm#Origins%20of%20Poetry

It is worth quoting Ki at length as he defines the nature and purpose of Japanese poetry at this time. Given the immense influence of the Kokinshu right up to the present day, his definition forms an important basis for understanding Japanese poetry. Even those who reject his premises and work differently do so fully cognizant that they are rebels against orthodoxy and thus he continues to influence them even as they reject him.

"Our native poetry springs from the heart of man as its seed, producing the countless leaves of language. Multitudinous are the affairs of men in this world--what their minds think, what their eyes see, what their ears hear they must find words to express. Listening to the nightingale singing amid the blossoms of spring, or to the murmur of frogs among the marshes in autumn, we know that every living thing plays its part in the mingled music of Nature.

"Our poetry, with effortless ease, moves heaven and earth, draws sympathy from invisible demons and deities, softens the relations between men and women, and refreshes the heart of the warrior. Its origin goes back to the origins of heaven and earth, but its transmission to our time with regards to sunbright heaven began with the work of Shitateruhime and with regards to the earth, mother of metals, with the work of Susanowo no Mikoto. [The deity Susano-o is credited with being the author of the earliest Japanese poem to be recorded.--Kei]

"Thus, the heart of man came to find expression in the various modes of speech for its joy in the beauty of flowers, its wonder at the song of birds, its tender welcome of the spring mists, its mournful sympathy with the evanescence of the morning dew. As step by step, from the first movement of the foot, distant journeys are achieved in the course of time, as grain by grain high mountains are piled up from the mere dust at their base until their peaks are lost in the drifting clouds of heaven, so has the verse of our land, little by little, become rich and abundant."

If you're reading this, you must like poetry, and if you like poetry, how can you fail to be moved by Lord Ki's vision? The appeal is obvious and the 1111 poems of the Kokinshu -- all of them waka -- embody his editorial influence. Ki's admirers regard the Kokinshu as the greatest work of literature Japan has ever produced.

Unfortunately, the Kokinshu has its flaws as well. By Ki's time only the educated upper classes were able to participate in the literary life of the nation and their poetry reflects their culture, limits, taste, and biases. One of the things that made the Man'yoshu such a remarkable work is that it included poetry by common folk as well as Emperors; the songs of lonely frontier guards posted far from home are just as moving if not more so than the imperial elegies. No such lowly soldiers show up in the Kokinshu. The entire thing is in exquisitely good taste.

As an anthology it is extremely readable, Lord Ki and his team of editors (he didn't do it alone), arranged the poems by subject matter and with each topic, certain strands of logic and mood weave the poems together. A highly successful anthology, it became the mold for all other imperial anthologies to follow. Alas, the model became a straightjacket.

While the poems of the Kokinshu are the colloquial speech of the people who wrote them, they are not the colloquial speech of ordinary Japanese, and as time went by and the Japanese language evolved, the Kokinshu became more and more obscure, which required people with specialized education to be able to understand and appreciate, which in turn meant that the audience for Japanese poetry became increasingly rarified, elitist, conservative, and moribund. By the 19th century, it was petrified. A handful of waka families were engaged in making imitation Kokinshu poems that nobody but other waka families (...all six of them...) could understand. This would be the equivalent of scholars of Middle English writing imitation Chaucer stories and having that officially declared 'the one true literature of the United States.'

Nonetheless, the original works of the Kokinshu were not straightjacketed and obscure, they were lively and tasteful expressions of the people who wrote them, and many of them were extremely good. Translated into modern Japanese, they are still admired, and since poetry is so important to the Japanese people and the Kokinshu is a major work of world literature, a fair number of Japanese people make the effort to grapple with the poems in their original language.

Waka was my introduction to Japanese literature. I admired their lyricism and suppleness and still do, though I admit that they are, when looked at from a certain angle, rather 'mannered' poems. While this causes many modern readers to reject them, I ask myself, 'what is the purpose of the mannerism?'

Japan, like all nations, was afflicted with various disasters ranging from floods and hurricanes, earthquakes and fires, to epidemics and wars. The poets and editors of the Kokinshu, fed up with bad news, deliberately turned their back on such unpleasantness and excluded it from their poetry. Nowadays we often hear people lament, "Why is there only bad news on tv? Why don't they ever report the good things?" The mannerism of the Kokinshu is part idealism and part escapism, it is a deliberate rejection of the ugliness and misery of the real world and an attempt to create, at least in literature, a genteel utopia.

Impressed with the poems of the Kokinshu, I started off writing imitations of the courtly waka.

How many nights spent
lamenting with the fireflies
of Cloud Mountain,
hoping one will prove to be
an approaching lantern light?
~ M. Kei
Previously published in the 'Tanka Forum,' Simply Haiku Journal, Summer, 2006.


'Cloud Mountain' typifies the genre; the natural world is blended with human emotion. Love and nature were two major topics for the genre and continue to be major topics for modern poetry in every country, not just Japan. The poem is divided into the 'upper verse', composed of the first three lines, and a 'lower verse,' composed of the last two, with a pause at the end of the third line. This was an extremely common structure for waka, although others were used.


Full well do I know
that this transient pleasure
is like foam on the sea;
Yet even so I want it
to last a thousand years.
~ M. Kei
Previously published in the 'Tanka Forum,' Simply Haiku Journal , Summer, 2006.

This is also a typical waka, and demonstrates another technique that would become extremely common in the genre: Reference to older, more famous works of literature. In this case, Mansei's boat.


yo no naka o
nani ni tatoemu
asabiraki
kogiinishi fune no
ato naki ga goto
~ Sami Mansei


Our life in this world--
to what shall I compare it?
It is like a boat
rowing out at break of day,
leaving not a trace behind.
~trans. Steven D. Carter, from Traditional Japanese Poetry , 1991.


This is one of the most famous poems in all of Japanese literature and justifiably so. It shows how the human and natural worlds can be melded for great subtlety and depth. My verse was directly inspired by it and shows several features typical of such verses. First, it demonstrates that the poet is an educated person: he knows the classics. Second, it is a pretty good poem in and of itself. Third, it is a member of a growing class of derivative works. In this we can see individual excellence sowing the seeds of destruction for the genre. Over the course of 1300 years, how many original reworkings of Mansei's poem can be made? Eventually the subject is exhausted, and if only traditional subjects are permitted, the genre decays. By the late 19th century, waka had nearly aphixiated itself.

To a Western audience that has not overdosed on Kokinshu imitations, this poem has a certain appeal. I doubt it would go over nearly as well with a Japanese audience sick to death of yet another Mansei rerun.