Chen-ou Liu's Translation Project: First English-Chinese Haiku and Tanka Blog

Friday, December 9, 2016

Selected Kyoka: Poems to Eat Kyoka

for Ishikawa Takuboku, author of Poems to Eat

her last words
you can write poems to eat
but I can't...
in my New Year dream
Sisyphus smiles at me

Haiku Pix review, 4, Fall 2011

Note:  “The name means poems made with both feet upon the ground. It means poems written without putting any distance from actual life. They are not delicacies, or dainty dishes, but food indispensable for us in our daily meal. To define poetry in this way may be to pull it down from its established position, but to me it means to make poetry, which has added nothing or detracted nothing from actual life, into something which cannot be dispensed with.” -- excerpted from "Introduction," Poems to Eat