Waka-Cola: A Tanka Guide to Pop Art

Begun two decades ago as a tanka sequence dedicated to Roy Lichtenstein, R. W. Watkins's Waka-Cola is the long-awaited fourth title in the Poetical Perspectives series from Nocturnal Iris. Throughout the volume, Watkins pays tribute to most of the major American masters of 1950s and '60s pop art and neo-dada, utilising the Japanese tanka-or waka-form of poetry to emulate their styles and concepts. Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal and Ray Johnson are celebrated ever so imaginatively by Watkins, all the while adhering to the traditional 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic structure. The result is a short collection that both demonstrates the poet's ability to transcend the perceived limits of the waka form, and serves as a poetic reflexion of the mid 20th century New York art scene. Highly visual in their application and pop-cultural in their subject matter, these poems foreshadow similar projects forthcoming in the PP series; so watch this space....