After Chess Boxing, the world now gets a taste of Poetry Boxing
Japan is a country where quite a few strange sports originate from; one of the strangest has to be poetry boxing though. Sometimes also called poem boxing, this interesting and odd competition is basically taking the excitement
of boxing and combing it with poetry. It is not the same as chess boxing which features one round of chess and then one round of boxing; poetry boxing is simply two poets battling in a ring reading their poetry and getting scored by judges. This interesting
sport is gaining in popularity all over Japan and one day soon it may just come to a boxing ring near you.
In 1997, a young man working at the Kanto Gakuin University in Japan noticed that a lot of students were afraid of public speaking. So Katsunori Kusunoki decided to do something about it. He wanted to come up with a way to
teach his students to overcome their shyness and reluctance to get in front of people and recite things. So he came up with an innovative way to address the problem.
He invented the competitive activity of poetry boxing which gave public speaking an innovative twist. It put two competitors in a boxing ring and turned public speaking into a boxing style contest. Kusunoki managed to turn
public speaking into a very popular spectator sport with hundreds of people attending matches. It basically pits two competitors against each other who stand in front of numerous people and several judges and recite their own original poems. Contestants have
3 minutes to deliver an original poem and the judges award points to the poets on content, originality, style and delivery of the piece.
After the event started to become popular, Kusunoki organised the Japan Reading Boxing Association and he became the president. The JRBA, as it is known, oversees the proper implementation and the rules and regulations of
the sport. The first actual bout that was organised by the JRBA was in 1999 and members of the public were allowed to take part. Later it was divided into a format where regional contests would be held culminating in regional finals and the winners of these
finals would then compete at a national final and a winner would be declared.
The best thing about this new sport is that it has gone a long way to reviving the dying art of poetry among the youth of Japan. If this sport can extend beyond Japan and start to become popular in other countries, there
could be a rebirth in poetry all over the world. Quality poetry is very hard to find today and a lot of young people have abandoned the literary format so it will be a great thing if the youth of the world can be enticed to engage in it again. By following
a boxing style where the competitors do not actually hit each other but they box with words will appeal to a lot of young sporty people.
The organisers of the event have decided to improvise a little bit with the format of the contest and a new final round was invented. In the final round, the two contestants will have to create a completely original poem
from a word that the judges throw their way. The winner last year was a contestant who produced a moving poem about butter. The latest addition to the sport is that a new division has been implemented. This new division will feature groups of poets reciting
different poems in a tag team style format.
It is these types of innovative and unique sports that combine two different genres to come up with something totally new and interesting that are the future of sport, apparently. By turning poetry recital into a sport, the
organisers of poetry boxing have invented a new activity that has the potential to cross borders, cultures and language barriers and engage the youth of the world. It is a very noble exercise and one hopes that it can become popular worldwide and extend beyond
Japan soon.
Tags: