Event

The haiku poet Masaoka Shiki has a reputation as a radical and an iconoclast. In 1893, when he was only twenty-six, writing from his perch at the newspaper Nihon, he claimed that only one in ten of the poems written by the great Matsuo Basho was worth reading. Truly sublime poems, he wrote, were as sparse in Basho's work as "stars in the morning sky." In 1898, now all of thirty-one, Shiki claimed that the waka poet Ki no Tsurayuki "was a dreadful poet and the Kokinshuvastly overrated." At the same time, in his headlong rush to modernize Japanese poetry and to establish the haiku as poetic form expressing the individual artist's sensibility, Shiki is said to have put an end to linked verse -- thus essentially, as one critic has put it, "sound[ing] the death knell of collective versification." In these moments, Shiki seems to want to leave the past and other poets behind.  And yet a closer look at Shiki and his work reveals a poet with an encyclopedic knowledge and a deep appreciation of the literature of Japan's past and a poetic practice shaped by the convivial sociality of haiku composition. In this talk, I will introduce Shiki and his work as a writer who, exquisitely aware of his own mortality and disability, was committed not to tearing, but rather repairing the fabric of tradition. Masaoka Shiki, I argue, is perhaps modern Japan's most compelling example of what it means to "activate" and "respond to the past," even while making it new.  

Dr. J. Keith Vincent is Associate Professor of Japanese & Comparative Literature and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Boston University