Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist.
He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine.
Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic themes and forms.
Rexroth died in Santa Barbara, California, on June 6, 1982. He had spent his final years translating Japanese and Chinese women poets, as well as promoting the work of female poets in America
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Kobayashi Issa
Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese poet known for his haiku poems and journals. He is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan, along with Bashō, Buson and Shiki. Reflecting the popularity and interest in Issa as man and poet, Japanese books on Issa outnumber those on Buson, and almost equal those on Bashō.
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Although better known by his pen name Issa, he was born Kobayashi Yataro in 1763 on a farm in central Japan. -
Saikaku Ihara
Saikaku Ihara (井原 西鶴) was a Japanese poet and creator of the "floating world" genre of Japanese prose (ukiyo-zōshi).
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Born the son of the wealthy merchant Hirayama Tōgo (平山藤五) in Osaka, he first studied haikai poetry under Matsunaga Teitoku, and later studied under Nishiyama Sōin of the Danrin School of poetry, which emphasized comic linked verse. Scholars have described numerous extraordinary feats of solo haikai composition at one sitting; most famously, over the course of a single day and night in 1677, Saikaku is reported to have composed at least 16,000 haikai stanzas, with some rumors placing the number at over 23,500 stanzas.
Later in life he began writing racy accounts of the financial and amorous affairs of the merchant class and the -
Saigyō
Saigyō Houshi (西行 法師, 1119 – March 23, 1190) was a famous Japanese poet of the late Heian and early Kamakura period.
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Born Satou Norikiyo (佐藤 義清) in Kyoto to a noble family, he lived during the traumatic transition of power between the old court nobles and the new samurai warriors. After the start of the Age of Mappō (1052), Buddhism was considered to be in decline and no longer as effective a means of salvation. These cultural shifts during his lifetime led to a sense of melancholy in his poetry. As a youth, he worked as a guard to retired Emperor Toba, but in 1140 at age 22, for reasons now unknown, he quit worldly life to become a monk, taking the religious name En'i (円位). He later took the pen name, "Saigyo" meaning Western Journey, a ref -
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
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Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genèv -
Murasaki Shikibu
Murasaki Shikibu (Japanese: 紫式部), born around 978 in Heian-kyō (modern-day Kyoto), is widely celebrated as one of the most important and pioneering figures in Japanese literature. Though her real name is not definitively known, she is remembered by the sobriquet “Murasaki Shikibu,” a name derived from a combination of her most famous literary character, Murasaki, and her father’s official court position in the Bureau of Ceremonial (Shikibu-shō). This alias reflects both her literary contribution and her aristocratic lineage.
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She was born into the prestigious Fujiwara family, though to a lesser branch that did not hold the most powerful positions in court. Her father, Fujiwara no Tametoki, was a scholar, poet, and provincial governor. Recogni -
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was an American poet who, despite the fact that less than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime, is widely considered one of the most original and influential poets of the 19th century.
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Dickinson was born to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore -
Sei Shōnagon
清少納言 in Japanese
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Sei Shonagon (c. 966 -1017) was a Japanese author and a court lady who served the Empress Teishi (Sadako) around the year 1000 during the middle Heian period. She is best known as the author of "The Pillow Book" (枕草子 makura no sōshi). -
Muriel Spark
Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
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Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN f -
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems. A man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, Jonson had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets. A house in Dulwich College is named after him.
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See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Jonson -
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton once told a journalist that her fans thought she got better, but actually, she just became a poet. These words are characteristic of a talented poet that received therapy for years, but committed suicide in spite of this. The poetry fed her art, but it also imprisoned her in a way.
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Her parents didn’t expect much of her academically, and after completing her schooling at Rogers Hall, she went to a finishing school in Boston. Anne met her husband, Kayo (Alfred Muller Sexton II), in 1948 by correspondence. Her mother advised her to elope after she thought she might be pregnant. Anne and Kayo got married in 1948 in North Carolina. After the honeymoon Kayo started working at his father-in-law’s wool business.
In 1953 Anne gave birth -
Lisa Tuttle
(Wife of Colin Murray) aka Maria Palmer (house pseudonym).
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Lisa Tuttle taught a science fiction course at the City Lit College, part of London University, and has tutored on the Arvon courses. She was residential tutor at the Clarion West SF writing workshop in Seattle, USA. She has published six novels and two short story collections. Many of her books have been translated into French and German editions. -
Kamo no Chōmei
Kamo no Chōmei (鴨 長明?, 1153 or 1155–1216) was a Japanese author, poet (in the waka form), and essayist. He witnessed a series of natural and social disasters, and, having lost his political backing, was passed over for promotion within the Shinto shrine associated with his family. He decided to turn his back on society, took Buddhist vows, and became a hermit, living outside the capital. This was somewhat unusual for the time, when those who turned their backs on the world usually joined monasteries. Along with the poet-priest Saigyō he is representative of the literary recluses of his time, and his celebrated essay Hōjōki ("An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut") is representative of the genre known as "recluse literature" (sōan bungaku).
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(fr -
Ann Radcliffe
Ann Ward Radcliffe of Britain wrote Gothic novels, including The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).
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This English author pioneered.
William Radcliffe, her father and a haberdasher, moved the family to Bath to manage a china shop in 1772. Radcliffe occasionally lived with her uncle, Thomas Bentley, in Chelsea in partnership with a fellow Unitarian, Josiah Wedgwood. Although mixing in some distinguished circles, Radcliffe seemingly made little impression in this society, and Wedgwood described her as "Bentley's shy niece."
In 1787, she married William Radcliffe, the Oxford graduate and journalist. He often came home late, and to occupy her time, she began to write and read her work when he returned. They enjoyed a childless but seemingly happy ma -
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
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She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother -
John Allyn
Dr. John Allyn Jr. is a former film and music editor in the motion picture and television industries and was also a writer and director of industrial films in the aerospace field. Mr. Allyn attended the Army Specialized Training Program at Stanford University in 1944, majoring in the Japanese language, and also attended the Army Intensive Japanese Language School at the University of Michigan in 1945, receiving a B.A. degree from the latter. During the first four years of the U.S. occupation of Japan, he worked as Pictorial Censor of the Civil Censorship Detachment of G2, SCAP, in Osaka and Tokyo. After his return to the United States he entered UCLA where he received his master's degree in Theater Arts in 1951. He continued at UCLA where h
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Matsuo Bashō
Known Japanese poet Matsuo Basho composed haiku, infused with the spirit of Zen.
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The renowned Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉) during his lifetime of the period of Edo worked in the collaborative haikai no renga form; people today recognize this most famous brief and clear master.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_... -
Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus (Greek: Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος,c.535 – c.475 BCE) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom. From the lonely life he led, and still more from the apparently riddled and allegedly paradoxical nature of his philosophy and his stress upon the needless unconsciousness of humankind, he was called "The Obscure" and the "Weeping Philosopher".
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Heraclitus was famous for his insistence on ever-present change as being the fundamental essence of the universe, as stated in the famous saying, "No man ever steps in the same -
Michitsuna no Haha
Michitsuna no Haha (c.935-995) was a Heian period writer in Japan. Her true name is unknown to history. The term Michitsuna no Haha literally translates to Michitsuna's mother. She is a member of the Thirty-six Medieval Poetry Immortals (中古三十六歌仙 chūko sanjurokkasen).
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She wrote the Kagerō Nikki about her troubled marriage to Fujiwara no Kaneie, (who served as Sesshō and Kampaku,) which is a classic of Japanese literature.
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Ono no Komachi
Ono no Komachi (小野 小町?, c. 825 – c. 900) was a Japanese waka poet, one of the Rokkasen — the six best waka poets of the early Heian period. She was renowned for her unusual beauty, and Komachi is today a synonym for feminine beauty in Japan.[1] She also counts among the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals.
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Saigyō
Saigyō Houshi (西行 法師, 1119 – March 23, 1190) was a famous Japanese poet of the late Heian and early Kamakura period.
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Born Satou Norikiyo (佐藤 義清) in Kyoto to a noble family, he lived during the traumatic transition of power between the old court nobles and the new samurai warriors. After the start of the Age of Mappō (1052), Buddhism was considered to be in decline and no longer as effective a means of salvation. These cultural shifts during his lifetime led to a sense of melancholy in his poetry. As a youth, he worked as a guard to retired Emperor Toba, but in 1140 at age 22, for reasons now unknown, he quit worldly life to become a monk, taking the religious name En'i (円位). He later took the pen name, "Saigyo" meaning Western Journey, a ref -
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.
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Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaign -
Alexis Wright
Alexis Wright is from the Waanji people from the highlands of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Her acclaimed first novel Plains of Promise was published in 1997 by University of Queensland Press and was shortlisted in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, The Age Book of the Year, and the NSW Premier's Awards. The novel has been translated into French.
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Alexis has published award-winning short stories and her other books are the anthology Take Power (Jukurrpa Books, l998), celebrating 20 years of land rights in Central Australia; and Grog War (Magabala,1997), an examination of the alcohol restrictions in Tennant Creek.
Her latest novel, Carpentaria was published by Giramondo in 2006. An epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, fro -
Arkady Strugatsky
The brothers Arkady Strugatsky [Russian: Аркадий Стругацкий] and Boris Strugatsky [Russian: Борис Стругацкий] were Soviet-Russian science fiction authors who collaborated through most of their careers.
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Arkady Strugatsky was born 25 August 1925 in Batumi; the family later moved to Leningrad. In January 1942, Arkady and his father were evacuated from the Siege of Leningrad, but Arkady was the only survivor in his train car; his father died upon reaching Vologda. Arkady was drafted into the Soviet army in 1943. He trained first at the artillery school in Aktyubinsk and later at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, from which he graduated in 1949 as an interpreter of English and Japanese. He worked as a teacher and interpreter -
Ibn Tufail
أبو بكر محمد بن عبد الملك بن طفيل القيسي الأندلسي، هو فيلسوف وفيزيائي وقاضي أندلسي مسلم، ولد في وادي آش، وهي تبعد 55 كم عن غرناطة، ثم تعلم الطب في غرناطة وخدم حاكمها. توفي في 581 هـ بمراكش وحضر السلطان جنازته.
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كان ابن طفيل فيلسوفاً ومفكراً وقاضياً وطبيباً وفلكياً. يمثل ابن طفيل الأب الروحي للنزعة الطبعية في التربية عبر كتابه "حي بن يقظان"، والذي حاول فيها التوفيق الفلسفي بين المعرفة العقلية والمعرفة الدينية. درس على يد ابن باجة وخدم في بلاط أبو يعقوب يوسف حاكم الأندلس من سلالة الموحدين.
Ibn Tufail (c. 1105 – 1185) was an Arab Andalusian Muslim polymath: a writer, novelist, Islamic philosopher, Islamic theologian, physician, astronomer, vizier, and court official.
As a philosopher and novelist, he is most famous for writing the first philosophi -
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003.
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He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II.
After the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. He attributed his unadorned writing st -
Diane Seuss
Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. She earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988.
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Saikaku Ihara
Saikaku Ihara (井原 西鶴) was a Japanese poet and creator of the "floating world" genre of Japanese prose (ukiyo-zōshi).
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Born the son of the wealthy merchant Hirayama Tōgo (平山藤五) in Osaka, he first studied haikai poetry under Matsunaga Teitoku, and later studied under Nishiyama Sōin of the Danrin School of poetry, which emphasized comic linked verse. Scholars have described numerous extraordinary feats of solo haikai composition at one sitting; most famously, over the course of a single day and night in 1677, Saikaku is reported to have composed at least 16,000 haikai stanzas, with some rumors placing the number at over 23,500 stanzas.
Later in life he began writing racy accounts of the financial and amorous affairs of the merchant class and the -
Lady Sarashina
Takasue's Daughter, or Sugawara no Takasue no musume, (菅原孝標女, c.1008 - after 1059) was a Japanese author. "Sugawara no Takasue no musume" means a daughter of Sugawara no Takasue. Her real name is unknown. However, British scholar Ivan Morris, who translated her diary, referred to her as Lady Sarashina.
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She is known for her classic Heian period travel diary, the Sarashina nikki. -
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David Hinton
David Hinton has published numerous books of poetry and essays, and many translations of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy—all informed by an abiding interest in deep ecological thinking. This widely-acclaimed work has earned Hinton a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous fellowships from NEA and NEH, and both of the major awards given for poetry translation in the United States: the Landon Translation Award (Academy of American Poets) and the PEN American Translation Award. Most recently, Hinton received a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Fujiwara no Teika
Born in 1162
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Japanese classical poet, government official, and literary scholar, also known as Fujiwara Sadaie (藤原定家)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujiwar... -
Izumi Shikibu
Izumi Shikibu (和泉式部?, b. 976?) was a mid Heian period Japanese poet. She is a member of the Thirty-six Medieval Poetry Immortals (中古三十六歌仙 chūko sanjurokkasen?). She was the contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, and Akazome Emon at the court of empress Joto Mon'in.
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Hồ Xuân Hương
Hồ Xuân Hương (胡春香; 1772–1822) was a Vietnamese poet born at the end of the Lê Dynasty. She grew up in an era of political and social turmoil – the time of the Tây Sơn rebellion and a three-decade civil war that led to Nguyễn Ánh seizing power as Emperor Gia Long and starting the Nguyen Dynasty. She wrote poetry using Chữ Nôm (Southern Script), which adapts Chinese characters for writing demotic Vietnamese. She is considered to be one of Vietnam's greatest classical poet. Xuân Diệu, a prominent modern poet, dubbed her "The Queen of Nôm poetry".
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(from Wikipedia) -
Ono no Komachi
Ono no Komachi (小野 小町?, c. 825 – c. 900) was a Japanese waka poet, one of the Rokkasen — the six best waka poets of the early Heian period. She was renowned for her unusual beauty, and Komachi is today a synonym for feminine beauty in Japan.[1] She also counts among the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals.
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Lucien Stryk
Lucien Stryk was born in Poland in 1924, and moved to the United States in 1927.
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He was a student of the Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Maryland, the Sorbonne, the University of London, and the University of Iowa. -
Hanshan
Hanshan was a Buddhist monk, poet, and spiritual writer who lived during the Tang dynasty. Little is known about his life, including where and when he was born, or even whether he actually existed. In the Chinese Buddhist tradition, Hanshan and his sidekick Shide are honored as emanations of the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī and Samantabhadra, respectively. In Japanese and Chinese paintings, Hanshan is often depicted together with Shide or with Fenggan, another monk with legendary attributes.
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It is said that he was a recluse who lived in a remote region, and that his poems were written on rocks in the mountains he called home. He is said to have written 600 poems, of which 313 were collected and have survived. -
Li Bai
Li Bai (Chinese: 李白, 701–762), also known as Li Bo or Li Taibai, was one of the most celebrated poets of the Tang dynasty and remains one of the greatest poets in Chinese history. Renowned for his romanticism, vivid imagery, and effortless flow, his poetry has captivated readers for over a millennium. Alongside Du Fu, he is considered a towering figure of classical Chinese poetry. His works reflect a deep appreciation for nature, the joys and sorrows of life, and a fascination with Daoist philosophy, all infused with an unmistakable sense of personal freedom and spontaneity.
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Born in 701 CE, likely in Suyab (modern-day Kyrgyzstan) or what is now Gansu province, China, Li Bai spent his early years in Sichuan, where his family relocated during -
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Xue Tao
Xue Tao (simplified Chinese: 薛涛; traditional Chinese: 薛濤; pinyin: Xuē Tāo; Wade–Giles: Hsüeh T'ao, 768–831), courtesy name Hongdu (洪度/宏度) was a well-known female Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty, ranked with two other of the most famous women poets of Tang poetry, Yu Xuanji and Li Ye (李冶).Xue Tao was the daughter of a minor government official in Chang'an, which was the Chinese capital during the Tang Dynasty. Her father, Xue Yun (薛郧) was transferred to Chengdu, when she was still little, or possibly before her birth. Her father died while she was young, but it's possible that she had some literary education from him; her adult career also offered her the opportunity to learn from practicing poets.
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Since the girl's mother did not return to C