1 Casimiro de Brito

2 Portugal
 
3 Yes. We have a kind of poetry named “Quadra Popular”
 
4 This form is composed by 4 verses. It’s a popular form of poetry but great Portuguese poets (as for example Fernando Pessoa) composed as well the so called “quadras populares”.
 
5 That’s a long history, since the beginning of the language, and even before because the form is used as well in the “Cantigas Galaico-Portuguesas” and, as perhaps you know, those “Cantigas” are considered by the world greater specialist of micro-poetry, Prof. Emeritus Stephen Reckert (see: “Beyond Chrysanthemum”, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1993)  of the King’s College, London,  one of the four main forms of micro-poetry of all times:  the others are the Japanese Haiku, the Chinese quatrains and the Spanish “villancicos”.  
 
6 I suppose I am the first Portuguese to work the Haiku, since 1958, when I was for a while in Westfield College, in London; now we have three or four poets working the haiku; we had a meeting about that matter last month in the University of Pisa, Italy, because the professor of Portuguese there is writing a doctorate thesis on my haiku, and something else.
 
7 Just in the work of three of four poets.
 
8 It was a kind of cut because generally Portuguese poets (of course there are a few exceptions) were not so concise, I mean, the influence is more connected with the simplicity then with the themes, but I know, as you know, that nowadays something is changing with Japanese haiku, and the only proof of that is the Anthology of 100 haiku of XX century we published (me end Ban’ Ya Natsuishi) in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.
 
9 Here you have in attachment something I wrote about that and read in Tokyo a few years ago.