Looking at Japanese Poetry

In due course I will be running a workshop as part of the Whitleigh Words Festival 2015 on Japanese Poetry.  Below is a poem which caught my eye several years ago and was written by Tamura Ryuichi, Japan's most popular modern poet:

A Man Who Writes a Poem

A man who writes a poem
floats in space
No one can tell
where the buoyancy comes from

A man who writes a poem
is like a pianist
whose hands are already moving
before the key's been chosen consciously
His hands precede him
His hands caught by the sound cannot escape
which is why they struggle

The sound guides the hands
and the hands
trying to escape the sound
drag him along
somewhere

    Where?

To see the shape
of a man writing a poem

Jump off the highest place in the world
upside down

And then your falling eye the wrong way up
might catch a glimpse
of a man writing a poem
floating in space
inside the gloom

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We will look at this and more traditional styles of Japanese Poetry.  Workshop details available through the Whitleigh Words Festival website.

Plymouth Poetry - Past and Present

Poetry about Plymouth - Past and Present.  Well, I wonder who started the ball rolling on that one then?  It always makes me smile when someone 'borrows' an idea you have had (and published) by then masquerading it as their own.  When I published Inspeximus:  Poetry from the Manors of The Roborough Hundred I realised I was writing for a very niche market.  Not everyone likes history.  Few understand specific local history and even fewer people these days read poetry.  So, when I see a certain 'historic' institution in Plymouth deciding to have an open evening for people with 'Plymouth Poetry Past and Present' as a grand theme, I fall off my chair in laughter.

Remember.  You heard it here first.

Remember also that nepotism rules in some cities which have refused to unlock their minds but want all the benefits when things go right.  Truth is stranger than fiction in Plymouth.