Much as I hate to enter into any kind of
my culture is better than yours discussion, when it comes to comparing the poetry of the
English-speaking world with the
Japanese form,
Limericks kick ass.
I took this up with a
Japanese Oracle DBA I met in a bar in
North Sydney once, and although
his English was pretty poor, my
Japanese vocabulary is about 3 words, and I had had more than six beers, he seemed to agree*.
Haiku as a poetic form is almost totall inaccesible to the
average person, either in English or Japanese. A limerick, on the other hand, is usually constructed of simple words, has a catchy and memorable meter and rhyme, and
most importantly, is smutty.
Unfortunately, the
cultural elite choose to largely ignore the tremendously popular and catchy style of limerick poetry, in favour of
unstructured,
free-form modern poetry.
I know I'm going out on a limb here, but I think this is one of the main reasons that
Japan lost the war.
* maybe he was just trying to get rid of me
There was a young poet from
Kyoto
Who's performances noone would
goto
He said with a tear
if noone will hear
The paper will
send back my photo
(pretty
lame, I know)