Organizer: Janice Brown, University of Alberta
Chair: Sonja Arntzen, University of Alberta
Discussant: Amy Vladeck Heinrich, Columbia University
As American poet Jean Garrigue observed: "Every line a poet writes is autobiographical." While this seems an accurate assessment for much of poetic composition, there are at the same time certain poets whose work seems to stand out from that of others as more deeply personal, more powerfully centered in actual experience, closer to the life as it is lived. It is in this sense that we offer 'autobiographical' poetry by Japanese women poets as the focus of our panel.
In spite of the obvious differences generated by the passage of time and the corresponding transformations of language and culture, we have chosen to include poets from both the pre modern and modern periods for two reasons. First, we find there are certain commonalities shared by Japanese women's autobiographical poetry of whatever era. Of these, we identify in particular the centrality of the role of poetry in the life as well as the perception of poetry as life shaping. Secondly, we are interested in obtaining a wider perspective of Japanese women's poetic practice in a tradition which privileges certain forms and/or conventions of that practice (such as waka) but up until recently has denied or ignored others (such as shi). Whether waka or shi, however, we would like to examine the ways in which poetry empowered certain women poets, helped shape and in turn was itself shaped by their lives, and finally, gave impetus to their own poetic theories and/or other works.
Each paper will focus on one poet, two from the pre modern era (Michitsuna's Mother of Kagero nikki; Izumi Shikibu of Izumi Shikibu nikki and Hinamieikagun) and two from the modern era (Yosano Akiko of Ichininsho, Do shite uta wo tsukuru, Waga uta and other poems; Hayashi Fumiko of Aouma o mitari). One of our panel members is herself a tanka poet, opening up further opportunities for exchange and discussion.
Sonja Arntzen, University of Alberta
The tenth century Kagero Diary by Michitsuna's Mother can be described as the record of a life lived as a series of moments for poetry. The initial impulse for the author to write was poetry, in her case, waka. Particularly the first book of the work is more like a waka collection with prefaces for poems rather than a diary. Yet as the work progresses, the proportion of prose to poetry increases and the autobiographical character of the work strengthens. This paper will examine the movement from lyric poetry to autobiographical prose in the Kagero Diary and the relationship between poetry and prose.
The following issues will be explored:
Sumiko Shinozuka, Kyoritsu Women's University, Tokyo
Izumi Shikibu, a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, is one of the most famous and exquisite poets in Japanese literature. She left behind more than fourteen hundred poems in her personal collections. All of her poems are in the thirty one syllable waka form. Waka generally had two kinds of functions in the Heian period: one was to serve as a vehicle for self reflection; this type of poem may be called a monologue poem. The other function was to serve as a means of communication between two people; this type of poem may be termed a dialogue or exchange poem. Interestingly Izumi Shikibu seems to have recognized an essential difference between these two types of poems. Moreover, she seems to have been interested in creating a poetry world through her arrangement of her own poems. This paper will describe the characteristics of Izumi Shikibu's poetry through an examination of two of her works, Izumi Shikibu Diary, which is composed only with poems exchanged between Izumi Shikibu and her lover, and the Hinamieikagun, which is like a poetry diary composed only with her monologue poems.
As a poet myself of tanka (the term generally used in the modern period for poems composed in the waka form), I find Izumi Shikibu's work instructive for my own composition. Since the tanka form is very brief, this possibility of creating new poetic worlds by composing groups of poems is particularly intriguing. Moreover, the difference between monologue poems and exchange poems also draws my attention. In this age, we can only write monologue poems because even if I tried sending my poems to someone, it is unlikely I would get a reply. Perhaps that is why I am particularly enchanted with Izumi Shikibu's monologue poems which are full of solitude and self reflectivity.
Janine Beichman, Daito Bunka University, Tokyo
Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) defined her poetry as the expression of her feelings and thoughts, with special emphasis on the inclusion of imagination, fantasy and visions-"what the world," as she said, "commonly dismisses as delusion and idle dreams." "My poetry," she also wrote, "is my life." At the base of Akiko's poetics, then, is the double assertion that the only authentic voice for poetry is the first person, and that true poetry is fundamentally autobiographical.
Such a poetics, difficult enough for a man in traditional Japanese society, should, logically speaking, have been impossible for a woman, whose life script demanded total subordination to the demands of husband and family. In andocentric societies in general, the very phrase "woman writer" is an oxymoron, and any woman who wants to write is liable to be caught in a psychological double bind. How did Akiko get around the limiting life script of women? I do not mean in terms of biography, for here the facts are rather clear, and the path by which she decided to rebel against her family and enter upon a career as a writer is well documented. What I mean is in her poems, where each time she sat down to write she was committing a subversive act in terms of the society in which she lived.
Writing was like skiing down a slalom course, skillfully evading the poles of the gendered mindset that hindered expression, in order to arrive at the bottom, the completed poem. How did Akiko do it? The answer I will present focuses on two kinds of poems, those in which Akiko depicts herself in the act of writing a poem, and those in which Akiko depicts herself giving birth, in other words, poems about the artist and poems about the birthing woman. These show that Akiko's conception of the artist transcended gender, and that as a woman she redefined her sex.
In her poems on making poetry, she depicted a creative intelligence that was ungendered. These poems take place in liminal, non corporeal, non earthly realms, with the artist, a transcendent non corporeal being, swimming in a metamorphic sea or flying through a metaphoric sky. In her poems on birth, Akiko aggressively promoted an identification of the birthing woman with a warrior who faces death, and compared her to the sun in her ability to die and be reborn: birth was redefined in a way that contradicted all conventional ideas of it as dirty, shameful and an experience which a woman must passively "bear." In this way, she redefined the female sex as something active and admirable, equivalent in value to the male.
I will ground my thesis by reference to Akiko's defense of the importance of birth and her assertion of the artist's transcendence of gender in the essay Ubuya Monogatari, and then illustrate it by reference to several of Akiko's poems, including: Ichininsho, Do shite uta wo tsukuru, Waga Uta, Kanashikereba, Daiichi no Jintsu, Ubuya no Yoake, and several tanka.
Janice Brown, University of Alberta
This paper will examine the poetry collection Aouma o mitari by Hayashi Fumiko (1903 1951). Consisting of thirty four shi, or poems in free verse, Aouma o mitari is one of the first poetry collections by a woman to appear in the Showa period. Written between 1924 and 1928, the poems chronicle the coming to writing of a major Japanese literary figure.
Similar to many writing women of her day, Hayashi attempted to construct a female subject based on the material of her own life. Rather than prose, however, Hayashi chose poetry as the means of exploring personhood, finding it easier to jot down her thoughts and feelings at random. For Hayashi, poetry became an enabling factor, giving shape and cohesion to an otherwise chaotic and marginalized existence, and Aouma o mitari, Hayashi's first major poetic oeuvre, became the definitive text upon which all Hayashi's later fictional personae would be modeled.
This paper will look at Aouma o mitari as an exploratory first text in which the poet seeks for and eventually creates a viable textual self through the donning and subsequent casting off of various self chosen guises. It will identify three areas of major concern to the poet in her search for subjectivity: the question of personal freedom; the problem of relationship; and also the necessity of making one's writing one's "work." Further, this paper will show how Aouma o mitari, assembled from a batch of disjointed poetic pieces, is in fact a carefully constructed arrangement of poems, in which disjunctive and disruptive elements are brought into harmonious resolution, a poetic "sourcebook" for all of Hayashi's later prose works.
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