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Paper short abstract:

Thinking with and through examples from the 9th through 15th centuries, this paper discusses votive waka as efficacious objects produced on and for particular “emergent occasions.” I develop an interdisciplinary conceptual vocabulary for the lyrical, occasional poetics of devotion.

Paper long abstract:

This paper works to situate and theorize the particular history and poetics of votive waka within a comparative, interdisciplinary framework. Drawing examples from the long history of Japanese poetry offered to deities, I argue that waka are distinguished by their specifically literary ability to incorporate efficacious and affecting forms of language within their brief compass—kagura, prayers, incantations, intertexts—and as objective repositories or reliquaries in which human energies (kokoro) might be stored up and repurposed to work in and through some ongoing situation.

Taking a cue from the English poet John Donne, I develop the idea of the “emergent occasion,” a temporal category that describes the urgent and disorienting force of a phenomenon that makes itself felt from somewhere beyond the control of the individual subject, perhaps in the realm of the body—illness, eros, the precariousness of travel—and of the social: isolation, mourning, exile, and frustrated ambition. I track poets who turn to waka as they are “overfilled with feeling” (omohi-amari). I therefore describe the “votive occasion” as a special case of the emergent: as a set of strategies deployed to invoke and charm the deities through the incantatory power of poetic language, to make new vows or remind the deities of their existing obligations in the world, and to direct the attention of the deities toward specific occasions and circumstances that require intervention.

These features of waka poetics invite comparison to other votive practices, Japanese and otherwise. As the art historian Christopher Wood (writing about medieval European as well as Mexican votive portraits) has suggested, “the subject matter of the ex voto is the transformation of the time of emergency back into everyday time.” Georges Didi-Huberman has likewise written that the votive object gives shape to “psychic” rather than historical or social time. Putting these and other art historians in conversation with the Japanese tradition’s own schemas for thinking about lyric poetry, and making use of Thomas Greene’s classic work on poetry as charm and incantation, I ask how, in various senses, votive waka give “form” to the emergencies of inner life.