Poems

I have been writing short poems about for four months. The short poems I have just referred to are tanka poems in Japanese.

Tanka is of course a very popular kind of poems among Japanese. But it seems that tanka is not so popular as haiku which is also another kind of short poem in Japan. The name haiku is well known among foreigners. In fact I saw the article in USA Today yesterday, which told there would be haiku contest.

I often read tanka before, but I had never thought of writing it myself. I believed that I wasn't the poet-type man if such human being sorting could exist.

Then why did I come to write tanka suddenly in mid-October last year? I don't know why such unusual ideas appeared to myself even now, but perhaps one of the reasons was concerned with a poem book called Hyakunin-issyu. Hyakunin-issyu means One Hundred Poets' Poems. I read it with my e-pal through net chatting. It was very amuzing and exciting experience and naturally I began to write some poems myself soon.

I don't know how to write tanaka well. I haven't read so many tanka books in my life. I can only remember I loved Takuboku Ishikawa's poems while I was young. Last October before writing poems, we, that is I and my e-pal, tried to read his poem books through the net. They were A Handful of Sand (Iciaku-no-suna) and Sorrowful Toys (Kanasiki-gangu). The poems listed there were much more pessimistic than I had supposed to be. I thought Takuboku's poems were somewhat romantic. But anyway reading his poems gave me and my e-pals the impression that we could enjoy poems together.

Then we read Misuzu Kaneko's poems. Her poems also gave us very happiness, I think. After that we read Hyakunin-issyu. I and my e-pal had a little different opinion about some poems of course, but it gave me such satisfaction that writing tanka poems came across to my mind. I think I can only guess the reason, for even now I don't know what made me write poems.

Hyakunin-issyu has 100 poems edited by Teika Fujiwara about 1000 years ago. And on new year days some people enjoy playing hyakunin-issyu cards. Perhaps many Japanese know some of 100 poems. Of course I learned about them when I was a senior high school student.

But as soon as I began to read them, I noticed I almost forgot them or couldn't understand what meaning they have. So reading it was like I read it for the first time. Slowly did we read the poems, and tasted the flavors people felt about 1,000 years ago. Yeah, it was the slowest reading I had ever had. We read on for 15 days till finishing it. Each day we read it for about a few hours, so the total time seems to have reached about 30 hours. If we usually try to read it, we can finish it in half an hour, so you can guess how slowly the speed of our reading was.

Anyway we enjoyed the reading itself. It was as if we had some puzzles to solve. We didn't know many poetical technique, but it didn't lessen our pleasure of reading tanka poems. Then while reading the poems, I started to write poems suddenly. I wonder whether the expression of 'writing' poems is right, It may well be said that I suddenly began to 'make' some poems.

After a while, my e-pal began to write tanka poems herself, and we talked about tanka almost every night. It was very enjoyable to write poems and read them which were concerned with well-known facts.

Now my mail-magazine is somewhat delayed since it was approved of publication. So I did write this essay in a hurry. I continue to write about tanka poems in the following essays.

I know writing essays isn't easy, of course. I had some hesitation about writing essays, for I haven't written English essays for a long time. Anyway I'll try to do my best to continue my mail magazines now that the dice is cast. I intend to write on as many topics as possible.

Thanks a lot for reading my poor first essay.


February 24, 2004