and painful. Already the limits of “postwar” were being exceeded in the work of Hiraide Takashi and Inagawa Masato. These two poets were blurring the boundary between poetry and criticism, poetry and prose, and questioning conventional ideas of what comprised the modern in Japan (The New Modernism, 2010). Statistically there are about two thousand poets and more than two hundred poetry magazines in Japan today. The poets are divided into five groups: (1) a group publishing the magazine, Vou, under the flag of new humanism; (2) Jikon or time, with neo-realism as their motto, trying to depict the gap between reality and the socialistic ideal as simply as possible; (3) the Communist group; (4) Rekitei or progress, mixing Chinese Han poetry and the traditional Japanese lyric, and (5) Arechi or waste land (Sugiyama, 254). The Western poets who appeal to the taste of poetry lovers in Japan are principally French(Verlaine), Paul Valéry, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire; and Rainer Maria Rilke is also a favorite (Sugiyama, 255). English poetry is not very popular except among students of English literature in the universities, although Wordsworth, Shelley, and Browning inspired many of the Japanese poets in the quickening period of modern Japanese poetry freeing themselves from the traditional tanka form into a free verse style only half a century ago (Sugiyama, 256). In more recent women’s poetry, one finds an exploration of the natural rhythms of speech, often in a specifically feminine language rather than a high, literary form, as well as the language of local dialects (The New Modernism, 2010). All of these strategies are expressions of difference, whether sexual or regional, and map out shifting fields of identity in modern Japan against a backdrop of mass culture where these identities might otherwise be lost or overlooked. List of Japanese Contemporary Poets Fujiwara Akiko Takashi Hiraide Toshiko Hirata Iijima Kōichi Inagawa Masato Park Kyong-Mi Sagawa Chika Itō Hiromi Wago Ryōichi Yagawa Sumiko Yoshioka Minoru Takagai Hiroya See also Various other Wikipedia articles refer to subjects related to Japanese poetry: Anthologies :Category:Japanese poetry anthologiesKaifūsō, oldest published kanshi collection List of Japanese poetry anthologiesMan'yōshū, Nara period anthology Nijūichidaishū, 21 imperial waka anthologiesOgura Hyakunin Isshu, collection of 100 poems by 100 poets selected by Fujiwara no Teika Important poets (premodern) Kakinomoto no Hitomaro Ariwara no Narihira Ono no Komachi Izumi Shikibu Murasaki Shikibu Saigyō Fujiwara no Teika Sōgi Matsuo Bashō Yosa Buson Yokoi Yayū Kobayashi