“Japanese poetry has the human heart as seed and myriads of words as leaves. It comes into being when men use the seen and the heard to give voice to feelings aroused by the innumerable events in their lives” (Tsurayuki 3). I don’t usually include long quotes in this newsletter but I really love this quote and think about it often as I reflect on reading this text. It is not often the case that when I pull a work a name off the Small Works list that someone I know has intimate knowledge of their work. I know someone through a friend who grew up in Japan, and interacted with Ki No Tsurayuki in their education in high school. I have still connect at a deeper level about this work but they pointed me in the right direction with this author, and I set out to read some of the Kokin Wakashu which Tsurayuki was responsible for compiling. In addition to beginning the work of compiling all of the requisite Japanese poetry at the time, in the ‘waka’ style of poetry, Tsurayuki also wrote the p
A Random Number Generator A Spreadsheet A Reader Follow along as I work through the classics of literature, poetry, short stories, essays, whatever is in the Peguin and Norton canons plus some other stuff they are missing.