`  == Re: Your comment on Talk:Uta monogatari ==  As I have already posted there, I do not intend to continue to clutter up the uta monogatari talk page with general discussion of literature and/or whether a different term is notable enough to be included in Wikipedia. I have already agreed to 's original compromise for me to allow him/her to create an article on  and for him/her not to interfere with articles on classical Japanese literature in the process. However, I feel the need to respond in more detail to some of the remarks you made. Tanka prose is a Western genre with roots in Japanese. 'Tanka prose' per se, is therefore not a Japanese literary form, and whatever terms, history, and ideas apply to Japanese prosimetra are therefore little more than background and marginalia when discussing the Western literary form. I attempted to find the 'Tanka Prose' article so I could read and comment on what it said, but it has disappeared. The removal of the article and the substitution of something completely irrelevant smacks of sabotage to me. This is a misapprehension of the issue that was at stake. I never argued that tanka prose was not a western genre. It was the article itself before  and I changed it that claimed ``tanka prose`` to be a literary genre dating back to ancient Japan. The article had long been included in Wikiproject:Japan and neither Tristan noir nor anyone else had tried to change that. Over half of the material in the article was either unsourced, or sourced in literature that made similar claims to ancient Japanese origins. Based on this, I saw it as appropriate to move the article to a more appropriate name, and to replace the offending text. So please, do not conjure up conspiracy theories about ``sabotage`` (I have been editing Wikipedia far longer than you have, and I have no interest in sabotaging it). The existing article on Uta monogatari has only a tenuous connection to contemporary Western tanka prose. It is rare for anyone in the West to write items that could be described as uta monogatari. The only things that come to my mind appear in Japan: Themes and Variations edited by Charles Tuttle back in the 1950s. Contemporary Western usage is 1400 years and several cultures away from the Japanese root. Please don't attempt to put material like that in Wikipedia articles about Japanese literature. The VERY OLDEST surviving work of what could be called Japanese literature is only celebrating its 1,300th birthday this year, and uta monogatari were first composed well over a century later. And again, the material that I removed from the article claims that there has been a constant stream of so-called ``tanka prose`` running through Japanese literary history from the time of the Kojiki to the present day. That was my principle problem with it  it didn't discuss western literary trends, it claimed to be an encyclopedic article about JAPANESE literature. If we are to judge tanka prose in Western languages by ancient Japanese standards, then that means we should also judge contemporary sonnets in English by Renaissance Italian standards. No, it would be a better comparison to say the previous article claimed that the poems in Psalms were the direct ancestor of the modern English sonnet, and wrote an article on English sonnets and classify it as Wikiproject:Judaism. That's ridiculous. Literature, by its nature, evolves and travels. Modern authors and critics view the past through the lens of their contemporary understanding. We're poets, not historical re-enactors. Wikipedia is not a place for original research. Articles on the history of Japanese literature should be based in historical facts first, literary theory second, and modern western poetical standards preferably never. Our goal is not to create perfect imitations of an ancient literary culture, but to write new and fresh works. Therefore, since tanka prose is a contemporary Western literature, it deserves its own page. As I said on the relevant talk page, fire ahead. Here's the link for you to edit: . But be aware that I'll be watching to make sure any new article on the subject of ``tanka prose`` does not make the same bizarre claims as the last one. Elvenscout's diatribe shows a profound lack of knowledge about tanka in English. Tanka has been written and published in English since 1899. Although it is not as well known as haiku in English, it's still a legitimate genre in its own right. I take offence at the use of the word ``diatribe``. It is a needless personal attack. I never said tanka in English were not a legitimate genre. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on McMillan's English version of the Hyakunin-Isshu, which I love. I have been producing my own English translation of my original Japanese-language waka for the last 6 months. A bibliography of tanka shows more than one thousand book length publications, including anthologies, collections, musical compositions, performing arts, illustrated works, and endlessly inventive other applications of tanka, tanka prose, tanka sequence, responsive tanka, shaped tanka, illustrated tanka, musical tanka, and more. I never disputed that. One may or may not argue, however, on whether it is orientalism or cultural imperialism or some such to appropriate another culture/language's literary form without truly understanding it, and then attacking trained scholars online for having different views. Although there are some Orientalist works in which novice authors attempt to imitate the Japanese waka, the vast majority of tanka are independent Western works. Japanese source material provides inspiration, but there's no reason why a poet writing in a Western language should be chained to the Japanese language, anymore than than they should be chained to classical Greek because that's the language Homer wrote in. I've completely lost track of what you're talking about. What does any of this have to do with whether or not the uta monogatari article should be subsumed into some pseudo-historical work on ``tanka prose``, when, as you have said repeatedly, the two come from completely different cultural backgrounds. For that matter, even though Shakespeare is one of the greatest poets writing in English, modern poets don't try to create imitation Shakespeare, either. The modern sonnet is not chained to Elizabethan England, and the modern tanka isn't chained to the Heian and Nara Periods in Japan. Well, actually if you try to write articles on Wikipedia about the history of JAPANESE literature, you should be prepared to cite mainstream academic sources within the field. Those sources are by their very nature tied to Heian- and Nara-period Japan when discussing the Isemonogatari, Man'youshuu or Kojiki.  Tanka Prose is a distinct literature that deserves its own page. I have said enough times now, but MAKE IT! Go nuts! Well, don't go nuts like the previous article did. Then I'm going to have to fix it again. ;)   `