This leaves the question of whether Sogi and his cohorts sawsomething in the waka of their day that scholars since have not; andthe answer would seem to be yes. For while many poets of that agewere satisfied with vain repetitions of familiar lines, a few intrepidindividuals still managed to approach the old form with vitality andartistic purpose. …
We called him the Professor. And he called my son Root, because he said, the flat top of his head reminded him of the square root sign. "There's a fine brain in there," the Professor said, mussing my son's hair. Root, who wore a cap to avoid being teased by his friends, gave a wary shurg. "With this one little sign, we can come to know an infinite range of numbers, even those we can't see." He …
Poems and poets : people greet them with scorn andpoke fun at them. Why is that? Because people take the realm of poetry to be the depic-tion of simple sensual beauty, self-complacent emotionalpain and dark melancholy—things not real mirrored in mor-bid sensibilities. If poetry required only a unique sensitivityand dreamy beauty, then hysterics and the mentally il…
With these few lines of remarkable self-awareness, the author of this di-ary, a woman of a thousand years ago known to us only as Michitsuna'sMother (936-95?), declares her purpose in writing about her life. Her textis part of a corpus of distinguished literary texts by women in the Heianperiod (794-1185). The texts of this corpus, including T…