Salon is running a competition for the best “country haiku”. This is my favourite:
Twelve beers and three chords;
The keys to reinventing
Most of life's failures.
Meanwhile, in Japan poets are tapping out tanka (31 syllables, 5-7-5-7-7) on their mobile phones:
UNLESS you knew exactly what she was doing with her mobile phone, you would take Chie Kato to be a typical Japanese 21-year-old. Her clothes are casual, her hair well cut, and her nails are polished. And, like every young Japanese, she is obsessed with her telephone.Even when she is not speaking on it, her fingers move as she sits on the subway, listens to a university lecture, or nurses a milkshake in a café.
But this is not the usual traffic of gossipy e-mails and flirtatious text messages — this is literature. For Ms Kato is writing tanka — the 31-syllable poems, like extended haiku, that have been a staple of Japanese literature for 1,300 years. And all over the country, young people like her are doing the same.
With three books of poetry to her name, Ms Kato is at the vanguard of what have become known as keitai tanka — “mobile phone poems” — that are written and distributed on mobiles. There is now a weekly keitai tanka programme on national radio, a keitai tanka magazine edited by Ms Kato, and numerous websites.
The article goes on to provide some examples of traditional and modern tanka, including one from Ms Kato.
On this day in spring
When the lambent air suffuses
Soft tranquility,
Why should the cherry blossoms flutter
With unsettled hearts to earth?
— Tomonori, 9th century
Kissing in the toilet of Lotteria
Maybe this is definitely the first and last time.
— Chie Kato, 21st century
I recollect the past
While the summer rain falls through the dark
About my grass-thatched hut, But,
Nightingale, singing at last among the hills,
Do not call out a freshening of my tears.
— Fujiwara Shunzei, 12th century
Gonna be a rock star, if I flunk my college exams alright, Mum?
— Anonymous, 21st century
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