'The beauty of imperfection': a look at Japanese poetic forms
Things Japanese is a six-week Writing School evening course with Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana on Japanese culture and poetical forms. The course will introduce forms such as the haibun, tanka, zuihitsu and senryu, and seek to demonstrate what kind of pieces of writing these might be a good fit for. It will also consider Japanese cultural concepts such as wa, (和) (harmony) and wabi sabi (侘寂), loosely translated as 'the beauty of imperfection'.
Another session will look at the idea of writing from a gaijin, or outsider perspective, and writing between cultures. Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana has a Masters in Japanese and in writing poetry, and during her 10-year sojourn in Japan experienced Japanese family life, and researched the country’s culture and poetic forms.
The six-week online poetry course on Zoom will run from Wednesday 8 May - Wednesday 12 June, from 7-9pm. Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana's first collection, Sing me down from the dark, was published by Salt in 2022. She has been a teacher for 27 years and lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne with her teenage son, Ryoma.
