Japanese poetry

Older forms of Japanese poetry include kanshi, which shows a strong influence from Chinese literature and culture.

Much traditional Japanese poetry was written as the result of a process of two or more poets contributing verses to a larger piece, such as in the case of the renga form.

Typically, the "honored guest" composing a few beginning lines, often in the form of the hokku (which, as a stand-alone piece, eventually evolved into the haiku).

In other cases, the poetry collaborations were more competitive, such as with uta-awase gatherings, in which Heian period poets composed waka poems on set themes, with a judge deciding the winner(s).

When they again met, the male god spoke first, saying the following verse: Chinese literature was introduced into Japan ca the 6th century CE, mostly through the Korean peninsula.

The two books shared many of the same or similar pieces but Nihonshoki contained newer ones because it recorded later affairs (up till the reign of Emperor Tenmu) than Kojiki.

Themes of waka in the books were diverse, covering love, sorrow, satire, war cries, praise of victory, riddles and so on.

The Heian era was also one in which developed an increasing process of writing poems (sometimes collaboratively) and collecting them into anthologies, which in the case of the Kokin Wakashū were given a level of prestige, due to imperial patronage.

There are strong grounds for believing that Ōtomo no Yakamochi was the final editor but some documents claim further editing was done in the later period by other poets including Sugawara no Michizane.

Compiled sometime after 759, the oldest poetic anthology of waka is the 20 volume Man'yōshū, in the early part of the Heian period, it gathered ancient works.

Yamanoue no Okura wrote a chōka, A Dialogue of two Poormen (貧窮問答歌, Hinkyū mondōka); in this poem two poor men lamented their severe lives of poverty.

There was a specific style among Azuma-uta, called Sakimori uta (防人歌), waka by soldiers sent from the East to defend Northern Kyushu area.

Kuge refers to a Japanese aristocratic class, and waka poetry was a significant feature of their typical lifestyle, and this includes the nyobo or court ladies.

The exchanged waka were called Kinuginu (後朝), because it was thought the man wanted to stay with his lover and when the sun rose he had almost no time to don his clothes which had been laid out in place of a mattress (as was the custom in those days).

Poets were expected to create a spring waka in winter or recite a poem of love or lamentation without real situations.

The Pillow Book (begun during the 990s and completed in 1002) and Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (c. 978 – c. 1014 or 1025), from the early 11th century of the Heian period, provide us with examples of the life of aristocrats in the court of Emperor Ichijō and his empresses.

Bai Juyi was quoted by both The Pillow Book and Tale of Genji, and his A Song of unending Sorrow (長恨歌), whose theme was a tragic love between the Chinese Emperor and his concubine, inspired Murasaki Shikibu to imagine tragic love affairs in the Japanese imperial court in her Tale of Genji.

About 1,000 waka, mainly from the late Nara period till the contemporary times, were anthologized by five waka poets in the court including Ki no Tsurayuki who wrote the kana preface (仮名序, kanajo) The Kana preface to Kokin Wakashū was the second earliest expression of literary theory and criticism in Japan (the earliest was by Kūkai).

Major poets of the Kokin Wakashū include Ariwara no Narihira, Ono no Komachi, Henjō and Fujiwara no Okikaze, apart from the compilers themselves.

Cloistered rule (Insei) refers to an emperor "retiring" into a monastery, while continuing to maintain a certain amount of influence and power over worldly affairs, and yet retaining time for poetry or other activities.

Bashō was also a prominent writer of haibun, a combination of prose and haiku, one famous example being his Oku no Hosomichi (or, The Narrow Road to the Interior).

[4] From the time of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), the hokku began to appear as an independent poem, and was also incorporated in haibun (in combination with prose).

They introduced new motifs, rejected some old authorities in this field, recovered forgotten classics, and published magazines to express their opinions and lead their disciples.

The category of "postwar", born out of the cataclysmic events of 1945, had until that time been the major defining image of what contemporary Japanese poetry was all about (The New Modernism, 2010).

Identity was no longer so clearly defined (The New Modernism, 2010) In 1990, a most loved and respected member of Japan’s avant-garde and a bridge between Modernist and Post-Modern practice unexpectedly died.

Yoshioka Minoru, the very embodiment of what the postwar period meant to Japanese poetry, had influenced virtually all of the younger experimental poets, and received the admiration even of those outside the bounds of that genre (The New Modernism, 2010).

The event shocked and dazed Japan’s poetry community, rendering the confusion and loss of direction all the more graphic and painful.

The Western poets who appeal to the taste of poetry lovers in Japan are principally French: Verlaine, Paul Valéry, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire; and Rainer Maria Rilke is also a favorite (Sugiyama, 255).

English poetry is not very popular except among students of English literature in the universities, although Wordsworth, Shelley, and Browning inspired many of the Japanese poets in the quickening period of modern Japanese poetry freeing themselves from the traditional tanka form into a free verse style only half a century ago (Sugiyama, 256).

The largest collection of haiku translated into English on any single subject is Cherry Blossom Epiphany by Robin D. Gill, which contains some 3,000 Japanese haiku on the subject of the cherry blossom.< Gill, Robin D. Cherry Blossom Epiphany, Paraverse Press, 2007 ISBN 978-0-9742618-6-7 > H. Mack Horton's translation of the 16th-century Journal of Sōchō, by a pre-eminent renga poet of the time, won the 2002 Stanford University Press Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.< Stanford University Press Awards >