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Showing posts from July, 2019
Today's poem My inquisitive interest has been space in line for a long time. Each time I attend a workshop, I have asked about the meaning of individual space in a poem. I remember that white space is critical as well as black space as a comment of a poet and tutor in the workshop of A Casa dos Poetas in Portugal. In this viewpoint, I choose the poem. An American poet Linda Gregerson has written poems in a sinuous tercet form that is a formal vehicle for her. Every stanza is a left-justified block with an indented line called a “pivot line” by her. Of course, the meaning of space is varied depending on poets and poems. I like her poems based on her thoroughgoing research. Eyes Like Leeks by Linda Gregerson It had almost nothing to do with sex.                       The boy                in his corset and farthingale, his head- voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin                       was not                and never had been simply in our pay. O
Today's poem Derek Walcott is a highly literary poet. I have sympathy with his poems on the sea that can be imagined with a bit similar geography to that in Japan: surrounded by water. The Sea is History by Derek Walcott Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, like a light at the end of a tunnel, the lantern of a caravel, and that was Genesis. Then there were the packed cries, the shit, the moaning: Exodus. Bone soldered by coral to bone, mosaics mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow, that was the Ark of the Covenant. Then came from the plucked wires of sunlight on the sea floor the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage, as the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women, and those were the ivory bracelets of t
Today's poem My poem 'The Lilac' is for the last month in the 2019 calendar published by Clare Songbirds Publishing House. What a shame - terrible gender gap in Japan. (Also please see pp. 139-140 in the following report of the World Economic Forum, in particular, economy and politics.) http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf As long as not changed, I will write such a poem again and again for the future, for the next generation. https://bit.ly/2Xy64FZ