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The muse hung airy as a blimp over Tokyo's Imperial Palace, where a top event of Japan's literary season, the annual poetry party, went into its lyrical finale. Seated before a huge golden screen, Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako harkened approvingly to verse by 15 finalists chosen from a record 17,238 entrants trying their hand at the formal 31-syllable waka. Then they listened solemnly while their own poems were read. The imperial family does not compete in the contest itself, this year featuring the subject of "Clouds." Hirohito's effort, read five times:
A white cloud like a sash
Hovers over Nasu peak
Soaring beyond the plateau.
Nagako's waka, read thrice, also lost something in translation:
Changing and rechanging form
The white clouds float
Into the distant blue sky.
Crown Prince Akihito wrote:
Trailing numerous white threads
A rolling cloud drifts
In the open sky.
Next year's subject: "Windows."
For her walkout during an operatic performance in Rome (TIME, Jan. 13), Soprano Maria Meneghini Callas was set down for the Rome opera season. The ban on Manhattan-born Singer Callas came from the implacable Rome opera authorities, who were heartily seconded by Rome's prefecture. Ostensible reason: the mere sight of Maria onstage again might incite Rome's already outraged opera fans to riot.
Benign and serene on a telenquiry program in Chicago, white-maned Conductor Leopold Stokowski, who admits to 70, disclosed that baton-waving gives him both uplift and insomnia: "It's a mystery to me, but one receives enormously something back from the music. It makes me feel strong. After a concert I hear the music all night. I can't sleep that night. All night I hear the music, and I hear the bassoons and the oboes and the different instruments." His view of applause for a performance? "What would you suggest as an alternative to applause? Supposing we had no applause? Then what? I can't understand—after one's heard beautiful music, then you make this noise. But I can't find an alternative."
Exhibiting their persistent disregard of perennial protests by Britain's League Against Cruel Sports, Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Mother Elizabeth journeyed to Westacre, by their presence lent royal sanction to a meet of the West Norfolk Foxhounds. With them, and showing an avid interest in the hill-and-daling of the baying pack, were Princess Anne, in corduroy slacks and polo coat, and Prince Charles.
Festooned with paper streamers that almost gave the scene an air of capitalist merriment, Poland's billiard-bald Premier Josef Cyrankiewicz and his pearl-neck-laced Actress-Wife Nina danced without much abandon. Their restrained revelry did little to heat up a state ball on the first night of this year's Warsaw Carnival.