Letterman’s just started, self can hear his voice, which sounds very tinny from where she is, in the bedroom. If she concentrates, she can make out individual words. His monologue was really funny, but when self found out his guest tonight was Huckabee, self lost interest.
In the bedroom, self takes up the anthology of Japanese Women Poets edited by Hiroaki Sato. Here’s an interesting passage from the Introduction (which is exceedingly long, which describes tanka and Gossamer Diaries and whatnot). The passage describes two different approaches to writing tanka, the traditional Japanese verse:
In the present imperial reign, the person known as Lord Shunzei’s Daughter and Kunai-kyo — these two are the most accomplished poets and need have felt no embarrassment among the ancient masters. Their methods of making poems are quite different. People tell me that Lord Shunzei’s Daughter, when making poems for official presentation, begins days in advance to read various poetry collections over and over; when she has looked them over to her heart’s content, she sets all of them aside, lights a lamp dimly in some isolated place, and works her poems out.
Kunai-kyo would have books and scrolls in front of her from beginning to end and, with the light on a low lamp-holder set very close to her, write down bits and pieces, never neglecting the work night or day. She thought about poetry so hard that she would become ill, once almost dying. Her father, a lay priest, would warn her: “You can’t do anything at all unless you are alive. Why do you work so hard at it that you become ill?”
But she did not heed his warnings and in the end exhausted her life and died, probably because of all her worries.
Self finishes reading the above passage with a feeling of overwhelming awe for the single-minded Kunai-kyo.
