Tag - poetry

 
 

POETRY

Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Mar 25, 2017
'Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet': Unpacking ancient poetry wars
Teika lived from 1162 to 1241, and was a highly influential Japanese poet. Paul S. Atkins' new study of his work aims to reintroduce him to a non-native audience and to analyze why his verse had such a large impact on the trajectory of Japanese poetics.
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Mar 13, 2017
Toto rolls out droll toilet humor with a whiff of class
Sit back and relax as this week's Bilingual column splashes on the results of Toto's 2016 Toilet Senryu Contest.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Feb 11, 2017
'Something Other Than Other': The poetry of Philip Rowland captures quotidian Tokyo life
Tokyo poet Philip Rowland's third full-length collection of verse, "Something Other Than Other," quietly resonates with profound images of the quotidian humanity he finds around him.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Feb 2, 2017
12 international students win Josai University poetry awards
The Josai University International Modern Poetry Center has awarded 12 prizes in an effort to recognize international students who have created original Japanese poetry works.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Nov 12, 2016
Remembering the forgotten woman of Japanese modernism
Chika Sagawa is an anomaly in the history of Japanese poetry. Born in Hokkaido as Aiko Kawasaki in 1911, she became one of Japan's first modernist poets, refusing to use the traditional poetic forms of tanka and haiku. The nation was changing in the early 20th century — Westernizing, nationalizing, militarizing — and she built new poetic forms to express this shifting landscape. The world she created was one where horses go mad and women turn blue; where "the sky has countless scars" and "eyes are covered by clouds."
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 17, 2016
Dylan surpassed Whitman as the American poet
Bob Dylan has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist, celebrating the capacity for self-invention as the highest form of freedom.
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / JAPAN TIMES GONE BY
Jun 4, 2016
Aviator dazzles Emperor; Poets inaugurate new national association; Beatles face press; Mount Unzen erupts
100 YEARS AGOWednesday, June 7, 1916
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
May 18, 2016
Giving voice to foreign talent via the spoken word
Tokyo's English poetry scene gets a shot in the arm with a lively event night and new journal.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 19, 2016
'National Treasure Irises Screens: A Legacy of Poetic Allusion'
April 13-May 15
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Jan 16, 2016
'It is I who rule' — Japan's 'Manyoshu' morning
What fun civilization is in its infancy! How bright and fresh the world looks at the dawn of consciousness! Listen:
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jan 14, 2016
In annual poem, Emperor recalls trip to Palau to mourn war dead
Emperor Akihito has recalled his trip last year to Palau, the site of fierce fighting in World War II, in a poem recited Thursday at the annual New Year Poetry Reading Ceremony at the Imperial Palace.
Japan Times
LIFE
Apr 11, 2015
Takuboku Ishikawa: engaged observer
The society of Takuboku Ishikawa's era was in dramatic political flux, and its complex issues became his personal obsessions. After his death, Takuboku's preoccupations came to be seen as a symbol of the social and emotional upheavals of his times.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Mar 2, 2015
Poetry by Fukushima residents to be released on CD
An album of poetry composed by people affected by the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear disaster will be released March 11, the fourth anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that triggered the crisis.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / 20 QUESTIONS
Jan 24, 2015
Stephen Gill: 'Don't believe everything you hear or read'
University lecturer Stephen gill on haiku, hiking barefoot and Kyoto ice-cream
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jan 1, 2015
Imperial Couple release 'waka' poems to mark New Year's Day
The Imperial Household Agency released on Thursday several 31-syllable "waka" poems written by the Imperial Couple in 2014 to celebrate New Year's Day.
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Oct 20, 2014
Subtle humor of haiku's cousin senryū is on a roll
"Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit," philosophizes the long-winded Polonius in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." That's also a fitting description of senryū — a form of short poetry defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "a three-line unrhymed Japanese poem structurally similar to haiku, but treating human nature usually in an ironic or satiric vein."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Sep 27, 2014
Read up on books about books about Japan
Revving up the metabolism of culture with the pulse of new artistic voices, a good literary journal doesn't usually have much to do with profit — it's all about circulation. Japanese literary journals enjoy a healthy transmission here, thanks to the financial backing of big publishing firms. How do English literary journals fare?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Sep 6, 2014
So Happy to See Cherry Blossoms
From great disaster flows great poetry, and this collection of haiku, collated by Madoka Mayuzumi on her visits to the areas affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 and translated into English, offers insight from those who lost so much.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 23, 2014
A Great Valley Under the Stars
A vibrant collection of subdued observation, the poems in this small volume, "A Great Valley Under the Stars," contemplate meaning everywhere — from a truck-stop toilet, over stones in the New Mexican desert and under the great expanse of sky referenced in the title.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
May 10, 2014
What the Sky Arranges

Longform

When trying to trace your lineage in Japan, the "koseki" is the most important form of document you'll encounter.
Climbing the branches of a Japanese family tree