from inside "The Ferris Wheel" -- an essay (3)

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By all means it causes some trouble if the world recognize this book as all of Japanese tanka. Why? Because tanka writers are excluded from the international poets' society or network( if exists), even from common people, as "uneatable fishes". What's uneatable fish? Me-ism, emotion, and feeling, if that's all tanka has, such a kind of poem are not valuable in our contemporary complex world. In fact, tanka writers will not concerned as poets and excluded from many of symposiums or conventions around poetry, literature, or art, and, (this is important) are not given places to express our ideologies or thinkings, and argue with poets or artists of other styles. Now, in Japan, the phenomenon is actually occurring. Many of tanka writers read poem books, on the other hand many of free poetry writers do not read tanka at all. Think what it means.

It is our--tanka writers' fault. There are too rare broadcastings to poets, artists, and the world from Japanese tanka writers. It is natural to think it is not exist that is not visible. When wandering around the web, some people accurately grip tanka and the correct understanding of tanka is developing; though there are some who still place tanka after spiritualism, zen>>haiku>>tanka, ignoring the simplest history of japanese short formatted poetry.

Furthermore, in tanka world in Japan, there exist movements and ideologies, in and out of "tanka group". All the way, there are few movements that tells about their works or activities out of Japanese-speakers' world. Of course it is necessary to get out of tanka group or tanka society to say what they are doing, or no-one recognizes even there we are. But it is not easy, because we do not evaluate what is important and what is not...

Generally speaking, Japanese people lacks imagination of living crisis, then it occurs a sense of crisis is in a cliche. They, or we, or I, cannot write what is out of imagination. On the other side of the world, there are people who were and are grown up hugging guns in their cradle. If they begin to write poetry (or tanka), my lukewarm tanka will be blown away soon.

Adversity puts out powerful literature. Now Japanese young people are cornered to deadline, no work and under least payment. New tanka may be born from those who are cornered. There appear and increase little by little young people, maybe in tanka writers also, who get into their sight, culture, society, and wars on the other side of the earth.


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