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Gian Piero Persiani, "Poets, Patrons, and the Public: Poetry as Cultural Phenomenon in Courtly Japan" (Brill, 2025)
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Marshall Poe
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Jingyi Li
Hello and welcome back to another episode of New Books in Japanese Studies, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I'm Jingyi Li from Occidental College. Joining us today on the channel is Giampiero Preziani, a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Illinois. His new book, Poets, Patrons and the Poetry as Cultural Phenomenon in Koihli, Japan, was recently published through Braille. In this book, Jampiro takes a boldly broad view of Waka, a form of medieval Japanese poetry. To analyze this poetry Genre against the social and cultural background of medieval Japan. Welcome, Jean Piero. Thank you so much for joining us today.
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Giampiero Preziani
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
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Jingyi Li
Before we start talking about the book, can you tell our listeners a bit about yourself? What do you teach and research about?
- [02:50]
Giampiero Preziani
Yeah, so I was born and raised in Rome, Italy, where I was also educated. But then I received my PhD from Columbia University under Haro Shirane, and I've been moving around a little bit, and I'm currently assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. I specialize in pre modern literature of the 10th and 11th centuries, particularly the relationship between literary forms in literary, sinaitic and vernacular forms in Japanese, and more recently, the connection between writing and place, writing and geography. In terms of teaching, I teach a broad range of courses from Japanese Literature and Translation to Introduction to Classical Japanese and even contemporary culture, Culture, Popular culture, Contemporary East Asia.
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Jingyi Li
I'm sure they're all very popular topics among students these days. So this book is a systematic discussion of waka poetry in Japan's medieval period. Can you begin by telling us what is waka for our listeners who may not be familiar? Can you tell us about its format, themes, and maybe some famous works of waka in history?
- [04:02]
Giampiero Preziani
Yeah, absolutely. So waka is a form of Japanese language poetry. The very name waka means the songs of Yamato. So the Songs of Japan. Yamato is an ancient name for Jap, and initially the term referred to a wide range of forms and meters. But by the 9th century it mainly indicated short poetry in 31 syllables, arranging 5 units of 5, 7, 5 and 7, 7 syllables respectively. It was very popular throughout the pre modern period and it's still widely practiced today in its modern incarnation, which is called tanka, which is exactly the same format but without the this older restrictions of theme language of the classical poetry. In terms of themes, poets could of course, compose on whatever crossed their mind. But over time, composition on set topics called daie, became very prominent. That means that poets didn't always choose what they composed their poems about, but were given a topic also. As the practice of collecting poems into anthologies became popular, two themes in particular became very prominent. The four seasons and love, because these are the two themes that are most given most attention in these large anthologies. And if you heard about Japanese poetry, chances are that you know it as a poetry of nature or as a poetry of love. In terms of famous works, the origins of the genre go back to prehistory, to the oral songs that were sung during rituals and such. One of the earliest texts that we have is the. Which is a large anthology compiled in the late. In the second half of the eighth century and includes some 4,000 poems. Another important early work is the Koki Wakashu, which means collection of yamato poems old and new, and has the distinction of being the first anthology to be commissioned by imperial order. Over time, 21 imperial collections of poetry were compiled between 905, which is the date of the first one, and 1439, which is the date of the last one. And two of these are available in English translation, the Kokin Wakashu that I mentioned. And then the eighth anthology, the Shinko Kinukashu, which was translated into English by Laurel Rod. And over a thousand years of history. There's so many works, right? Hundreds of texts. Another work that listeners may be familiar with is the Hyakoni Shu, which translates to 100 poets, one poem each. And it's a collection of 100 poems by 100 representative poets edited in the first half of the 13th century. It's kind of a greatest hits of Waka between 712 50. There is a card game based on it and also a popular anime and film series. So it's one of probably the best known waka work today.
- [07:17]
Jingyi Li
So throughout the medieval period, Japanese poets compiled so many waka anthologies, There are dozens and dozens of them. And so far, many studies on waka have focused more on smaller bodies of these waka collections, either on selected poets or just a few collections of them. So what drove you to take such a broad view of waka and its history?
- [07:46]
Giampiero Preziani
Yeah, thank you for the question. So, like its more famous grandchild, haiku, waka is very short, As I said, Only 31 syllables. I call haiku the grandchild of waka because it directly descends from waka. Over time, poets, waka poets started experimenting, composing waka in four hands. One poet taking care of the first three lines of 17 syllables, and another poet doing the last two 14 syllables. The poet started to link these into sequences, and eventually the 17 syllable unit, which is the first half of awaka, basically broke off as an independent poetic form, which is what we today know as haiku. And just like haiku, because it's so short and it's in the local language, not in literary Chinese, it was fairly easy to compose. Waka were fairly easy to compose. That means that there was a large number of practitioners, each of whom composed hundreds or thousands of poems over the course of their lives. So many poems also means a lot of different texts by different authors produced at the Same time for different reasons. So when I first encountered this genre, my question was, how do we talk about something so vast and so decentered and so dynamic? Clearly, we can't just look at one poem, one author, one work. Well, we need to grasp this thing in its entirety. So I started looking around for tools that would allow me to do that, that would allow me to kind of grasp a complex form such as waka. And I didn't have to look very far because there are so many. Over the past decades, this. In disciplines such as sociology of art, literature, the history of the book, and art history have developed all these sophisticated models to conceptualize complex cultural phenomena involving a large number of people. For example, we have Pierre Bourdier's concept of the literary field, Howard Becker's theory of the art world. In the field of the history of the book, we have Robert Darton's communication circuit. Then we have Franco Moretti's idea of distant reading. So I. I took something from all of these approaches and created my own Dr. Frankenstein style kind of analytical framework to make sense, to try to grasp this complex thing as a whole. In the book, I compare what I did to what a visitor to an art gallery does. When looking at a large pointillist painting. You need to put some distance between you and the painting to see it properly, because if you stand too close, all you see are these colorful dots. But when you finally step away and kind of look at the canvas in its entirety, you see that it's actually a coherent whole made of many little parts. So the result of this kind of choice I made is kind of this bird's eye view of waka as a cultural phenomenon that shows all the different factors and people who were involved in it, as well as all the different domains of life that intersected in the flourishing of this form.
- [11:13]
Jingyi Li
It's quite an amazing form of poetry. So I studied the 19th century, the Edo period, and this poetry form remains strong even till the late 19th century, even into the early 20th century. But as a product of the courtly period of Japan, how do you think the birth and evolution of waka reflect the social and cultural context of that time? And I think our listeners will particularly be interested in who were writing these poems and who were reading them.
- [11:47]
Giampiero Preziani
Yeah, the short answer is every educated person composed and kind of read or heard these poems. There are some signs that even uneducated people outside the court and in the provinces compose waka, but that's not something I addressed in the book, so I won't talk about it. So let's just say that every educated person did so. That includes emperors and consorts, members of the senior nobility, court officials, bureaucrats, men, women, and so on. What's interesting is that the way people from different groups and different social backgrounds approach waka was different and was kind of conditioned by their social identity. One of the things I try to show in the book is that our modern understanding of poetry is an act of individual creativity through which the poet bears their soul, so to speak, didn't really apply in the pre modern period, or did not always apply in ancient society, including societies including medieval Japan. There was much less creative freedom, and there were much stronger constraints on the work of the poet. Because poetry was composed in real life situations in the presence of others, the poetry had to conform to the expectations that governed these situations. For example, a poem by someone of lower rank addressed to someone of very high rank, had to express the proper level of deference and praise for the recipient. Or a poem composed at a banquet in spring had to address themes and imagery that were considered suitable for that setting. And not doing that would have led to, I don't know, punishment or negative consequences for the poet. What this all means is that there was a much stronger connection between what you wrote, your literary behavior, and your social position. So in chapter one of the book, for example, I identify three different types of poet and show that each type tended to use poetry in ways that accorded with their social Persona. For example, poets from the lower ranking officialdom often used waka to plead for promotions and appointments for their superiors. And you never see this kind of pleading poetry from poets of high rank. And by contrast, poets of very high rank would rarely, if ever, compose a poem on command at the behest of someone else, of someone important, because they consider doing this unbecoming for someone of their status. So they would always delegate to others. And I also finally addressed the case of women poets and discussed the way the social understandings of femininity and literary femininity affected the work of female poets. From my assessment of the corpus, it seems that, by and large, female poets tended to conform to socially accepted definitions of femininity, not so much because they had to, but because it was the best way to get the benefits and goals that their society offered them.
- [14:56]
Jingyi Li
So you mentioned earlier about the importance of literary Chinese in the evolution of waga, so I want to turn to that for a little bit. So literary Chinese, or some might refer to as literary Synodic, was quite flourishing during the Heian period and the medieval period. As well, what's relationship between waka poetry and literary Chinese?
- [15:25]
Giampiero Preziani
Yeah, I talk about this in the last chapter of the book where I give an overview of the whole literary field of the time. And I kind of look at the literary hierarchy for many reasons. Writing in literary Chinese or literary cynic was the most prestigious and highly valued kind of writing. Writing literary synodic includes the Confucian classics and sinitic prose and poetry, as well as religious texts such as Buddhist sutras, which, which were also written. I mean, the ones that circulated in Japan were written in literary sinitic. And at this time in history, the vernacular genres, including waka, did not enjoy a particularly high status. Waka was kind of right below writing in sinitic. And then at the very bottom of the literary pyramid, you had prose and especially fiction, which was considered, was. Was looked down on as a basically a genre that only delivered lies to readers. So because of this kind of situation of hierarchical arrangement of genres, waka had a kind of complicated relationship with writing cynatic and cynic poetry in particular. I say complicated because on the one hand, waka matured as a genre by incorporating many features from poetry in Chinese. Many of the rhetorical techniques and themes used in waka were either directly borrowed from poetry in Chinese or were influenced by poetry in Chinese also. Another example is the custom of putting together these anthologies of poetry by imperial command was also a custom of Chinese origin. And in fact, the first imperial anthologies of poetry compiled in Japan were anthologies of poetry in Chinese, not waka. So there was, on the one hand, this kind of huge debt that waka owes to writing and poetry in cinniti. But on the other hand, because of this situation of kind of hierarchy, vernacular poets of waka also felt a need to establish their genre, which meant trying to carve a space for it in a literary landscape dominated by writing in sinitic. So whatever their views of writing sinitic were at a systemic level, they were in the position of somehow having to combat the encounter the hegemony of sinitic writing and win acceptance for their literary form. And then actually there's a whole separate conversation to be had about female writers, because female writers were denied access to forms of writing in literary sinitic. So for them, writing in the local language in Japanese wasn't just one choice among many. It was really many of them considered writing in the vernacular language as sort of the writing medium of their own, so to speak. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
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Jingyi Li
And breathe.
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Giampiero Preziani
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Jingyi Li
It's such a fascinating topic to think about this almost love and hate relationship between the Yamato liberal tradition and this literacy, Celtic or literary Chinese kind of trad tradition. If any listeners are interested, I think we have previously an episode on a book called Rethinking the Sinosphere that might be helpful to understand this question further. But back to your book. So from your examination of the education, circulation and consumption of Waka during this time period, how do you interpret Waka's relationship with political authority? And I posed this question because a lot of these people, well, it's a poetry form written by a lot of court people who, some of them held political authority. So what, yeah, what's. How do you understand this relationship with political authority? And what about the roles of the poet and the audience who are also likely courtly people in this relationship.
- [21:43]
Giampiero Preziani
Yeah, yeah. So from the very beginning, waka was so closely connected with power. Many poems in the Myoshu, for example, in the oldest extant anthology of waka, are by emperors or other powerful figures. Also, all the earliest waka anthologies were compiled by imperial order and served as a kind of symbol of the sovereign's power and magnificence. Other examples of poems were often composed by royal command or at the behest of a powerful figure. So composing a poem in these contexts, when you were commanded to do so by a figure of authority, was very much equated to an act of subservience, or at least amounted to stating your allegiance and loyalty to authority. But that said, there were also more horizontal kind of poetic exchanges. For example, in everyday context, poems were exchanged between friends and lovers and family members without such clear connections to hierarchy. But even in these more informal exchanges, however, power always played a role. For example, in the book, I argue that these everyday exchanges in fact contributed to weaving together the court community and to building and strengthening the alliances on which political power depended at the time. Historians talk about the heyem. This period I'm looking at is a period of when there was a stakeholder kingship, which means that whoever ruled ruled with the support of a network of fellow stakeholders. So in this context of mutual dependence, waka was a form of poetry that allowed courtiers to network and exchange niceties with each other. So one of my arguments that it did play a role in kind of enabling this kind of, this form of power. As for the audience, depending on the nature of the exchange, the role of the audience was different. So, for example, in the case of poetry composed by royal command, the recipient was the sovereign, the figure of authority. In the Confucian tradition, soliciting poems from the subjects was one of the ways through which the ruler ruled wisely and ensured the well being of his subjects. So that's one case. Then, in more informal exchanges, the audience could be a peer or a close relative. Here, the relationship was less dominated by hierarchy and was more reciprocal. So both parties strengthened their connection through the exchange of poems, despite these political.
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Jingyi Li
Games that were embedded in the circulation and composition of waka. In your book, you also argued that waka was dominantly popular around this time. What were some of the reasons that waka was so popular? What drew the audience to it?
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Giampiero Preziani
Yeah, so one of the things I say in the book is that for art to flourish, you need not only artists, but also lovers of art, people who enjoy art And Waka was no exception to this. Waka wouldn't have flourished the way he did without an extremely high level of interest in it in contemporary society. And these Heian period courtiers didn't simply like poems. They actively sought them out. They kept the best ones in their notebooks, discussed the ones they liked with friends, imagine, developed stories around them, and even drew pictures inspired by them. Today, we would say that some of them were obsessed with poetry. Now, all these gestures point to a high level of interest in poetry that's comparable to what may be the interest there is today in popular music or celebrities in modern societies. So as for why this level of interest, well, there's many reasons. One thing, one is that you had to know poetry because it was required knowledge. But beyond this, many actually wanted to know poetry and learn more about it and know as many poems as they could lay their hands on. Some studied poetry because they wanted to learn from the great poets of the past to get better at it. Also, poems were often by people that the audience or the recipient would know personally. So knowing their poetry kind of fed their curiosity about these people they knew about. It was also a way to keep up to date with people's affairs. And one reason that is less frequently talked about for Waka's popularity is that poetry was a sort of storehouse of wisdom that people could use to interpret their their own life and make sense of it. If you pick up any heian, any text from this period, for example, any fictional text from this period, you will see that characters often cite poems at specific points to comment on or to highlight what is happening to them. By doing this, these characters are not just trying to show off their knowledge of poetry, but they're using poetry to really understand the situation and make sense of it or unpack it. And I find this social use of poetry fascinating because it's very human. And it's also at odds with the image of Japanese poetry from this period as an elite occupation for snob aristocrats. It's something that we all do. We reference sayings or proverbs or. Or snippets of books that we're familiar with. When we go through similar experiences.
- [27:51]
Jingyi Li
With new forms of poetry evolving throughout the medieval period. So in the book you briefly mentioned linked verse as well, and later other forms of poetry, do you observe any changes in this kind of popularity of Waka among its audience?
- [28:12]
Giampiero Preziani
Yeah, as you noted, over time, new forms emerge. Renga, linked verse. In the medieval period, around 1400, it peaks in popularity. And then haiku Slightly later, a couple of hundred years later, it starts to really become popular. But throughout these changes, waka continued to enjoy popularity. So it wasn't a case of one new form kind of replacing the other, but more like coexistence and simultaneous flourishing.
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Jingyi Li
That's really good to hear. Well, now that we're talking about poetry, I have to ask you this question. What's your favorite waka poem? And would you mind sharing that with us?
- [28:58]
Giampiero Preziani
Yeah. This is a very hard question. When I get asked, I always find it very hard to answer because one of the things I say in the book is that to understand waka, you need to look not at one poem or a few poems, but all of them. So when I'm asked, okay, what's the best poem? I always struggle to answer. So I'm gonna give you two poems that I like without claiming that they're the best. So one is by a poet called Fujiwara Nuteka, who's one of the most, perhaps the most important poet and expert of poetry of the 13th century. And I'm just gonna read a tentative translation by me. It goes like this. The floating bridge of dreams of a spring night breaks in the sky, Banks of clouds part over the mountain peak. And I'm going to give the Japanese for the listeners who are curious. It goes, haruno yo no yomeno ukihashi todaite. The poem not only contains stunning imagery, but beyond describing this very majestic and alluring landscape, it also references the love affairs of the Telo Genji. The Floating Bridge of dreams is the title of the last chapter of the Telo Genji, which deals with ill starred romance between the characters Kaoru and Ukifune. So you have these multiple layers of meaning, the beauty of nature, real life experience, and references to literary history, all overlapping and resonating with each other in the poem. So that's one. And the other one is one that I used as the ending of my book because while it laments the end of a love affair, it also seems to leave the door open for something new that hasn't happened yet. So I thought it was a fitting way to end a book about poetry. And this goes like this. If there is a thing that prompts even more regret than losing one's life, it is to wake from a dream whose ending one has not yet seen. And so there you go, my two favorite poems.
- [31:10]
Jingyi Li
Could you. How do you interpret the second one for our audience who haven't got a chance to read your book yet?
- [31:20]
Giampiero Preziani
Yes. So. Well, the beauty of this Is that so? It's about some lamenting the end of something. Right. When you wait, then the lover in the morning must part from their beloved and go home. So this dream has been too short lived. And the poem is saying that that's even worse than losing your life when you have to wake up from a dream without seeing the ending. Referring to the love affair. Yes. So that's more or less the idea.
- [31:53]
Jingyi Li
They're both very, very beautiful poems. I almost feel bad for adding this last question to such beautiful poems, but this is a question that I think a lot of us are concerned with these days. In this digital age, when AI can easily compose a waka poem using algorithms, how do you, as a researcher and as an educator, convince the reader and especially the younger generation to read more poetry and to maybe even compose their own poetry and to find inspiration in waka poetry?
- [32:38]
Giampiero Preziani
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna give a positive answer for a change. Where there's a lot of negative thoughts around AI these days, but. So poetry historically has been seen as a language that gives you access to the interiority of a person, to their most authentic feelings. So in Asia, in East Asia, for example, all the foundational texts of East Asian poetics, from the Shijin to the Kokinshu, present poetry as the expression in words of feelings and ideas felt deep within the heart. So poetry is historically the language that gives you the most direct access to a person's interiority. And no matter how hard the AI tries, how good it becomes, it will never be able to express interiority because it has no interiority. So I think that the spread of AI might bring new interest in forms of language that either closely reflect or give access to the person, the actual person behind the words. So there will be so much kind of soulless drivel floating around. That language that carries someone's voice, gives you access to their, you know, heartfelt feelings, might come to be more highly valued. So I'm not so worried for the future of poetry. It's other forms of writing, maybe they have less of a strong connection with the interiority of the writer. There are endangered.
- [34:13]
Jingyi Li
I definitely appreciate your positivity and optimism, and I hope this stays the case. Thank you so much for your time for joining us today and thank you to our listeners for staying with us. That was Giampiero Preziani with his new book, Poets, Patrons and the Poetry as Cultural Phenomenon in Courtly Japan. This book is currently available in hardbook and ebook. This is Jingyi Li. Stay tuned for our next episode on new books. In Japanese studies.
- [34:48]
Giampiero Preziani
It was really a great conversation.
- [34:56]
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