It was a good exercise to make slides that show Japanese characters going from top to bottom and the lines going from right to left.

都城の詩人、 富松良夫は「南九州の宮沢賢治」と呼ばれているようです。興味深い人です。

The motivation for the exercise came from last week's opportunity to see a talk about a local poet. Paul Goodman wrote somewhere about the importance of “incidental poetry.” His example was the dedication of a local monument or park. The comment about incidental poetry came to mind again when the speaker said that the local poet Tomimatu Yoshia wrote the local school's song. The writers Ueno Hidenobu and Kawahara Kazuyuki are known for singing a school song by Miyazawa Kenji.

Unless I get a chance to read Practical Typography (by the writer who also did Beautiful Racket)the troubles with punctuation will make me display these poems with html and css3. But in the meantime this code works for the contemplation of simple Japanese poems on a screen.

I had to write an extra utility, character->string and then kept acclimating myself to naming conventions with string-separate. It was while working on these poems that I saw the similarities among the empty list '() and (blank 0) along with cons and vc-append . There never seems to be a need for iteration loops once you get used to recursive procedures, aux or helper functions, and accumulator or keep expressions. Maybe I can use this approach as part of a Ogden's Basic English-style approach to a Basic Scheme (or Basic Racket) that gives humanities students the most widely useful expressions for programming tasks on computers.

Last week's talk about a local poet reminded me of I.A. Richards. I read that he used to put a poem on a slide up before large groups of people. William Empson may have written a poem about the slides.

I like the simple slides, maybe I'll use them to contemplate poetry while staring at a screen. On the other hand commercial presentation software ( PP ) seems too flashy.

The loud colors distract from contemplation on the poem. If putting poems up on a screen can be constructive, a simple way to see simple slides may be useful.

Using DrRacket to show poems in the tradition of I.A. Richards seems appropriate. As learners of poetry and programming we want grounds to approach an “overwhelming sense of correctness” (fn:1) ... to reach a judgment that we can have confidence with.