Tanka time

Last week I extolled the pleasures of tanka, the 5 line Japanese lyric poem. Tanka Online provides a great overview. I encouraged others to tanka, and share their work here.

I'm pleased to post a poem by Marjorie Power, of Corvallis, Oregon. She offers a tanka mosaic, a series of tankas linked together in mood, tone and story. She strays from the traditional count of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables per line, and maintains instead 31 syllables per stanza. This poem is soon to be published in the The Hawaii Pacific Review.

Spring Dusk, Yachats

Salal blooms –
pale pink droplets, red stems.
Its leaves go gray with fungus.
My cousin, too, is uniquely
beautiful and unhappy.

If you love someone
who has everything
but still sounds hollow,
after sunset listen only to the ocean.
Gather shadows.

Try a narrow path
used by rabbits and deer.
Disappear among shore pines
and Sitka spruce. Be your absence.
Be present to that.

Return to the beach
where the ocean grows dark
and the tide delivers your name.
Where the hollow might stroll
and the new moon rises.

Along the rocky trail,
a blast of fragrance
offered by wild roses
while their cultivated sisters
hunker down, play it safe.

— Marjorie Power

Coincidentally, I am writing spring, too. I stray a bit from the traditional line count (and take comfort in first knowing the rules, and then breaking them). I like the idea of linked tankas, the way in which they stand strong as one stanza, and gather even more strength as a group. I'm not sure, with these, if they are better individually or linked. It wasn't until the end of the week — after I had written on, about and through gloomy weather — that I realized a theme.

Pulling Spring

Beauty surrounds
I press against wind and cold
fight against ocean
no longer see abundance
just this lashing fatigue

This static grey day
wears away the art in me
all color scrubbed
faith fades, milky and weak
is this winter’s gloom, or mine?

The sky stays in place
everyday, like a job, shows
up, pays attention
seeks no answers beyond the
ether of the everyday

— Drew Myron

Burst, blue, blooms

Crocus burst from damp earth
moody sky their only demand
how little it takes
framed by light and hope
to close winter’s heavy door

Sky turns from slate to shine
I want to wear this weather
Spring, I say, show me
a bit of blue, a dash of warm
She opens a closet of blooms

— Drew Myron

Revision joy

The Thursday night sessions with the Young Writers have taken a new hue. Preparing to publish our annual book, we have moved from free-write to tight-write and it’s been a bumpy transition.

Rework and revise don't invite joy. Work sounds like, well, work. And so we resist. We don’t want to work. We want to sing with words, to feel and release and breathe with relief. We don’t want to wrangle and second-guess.

To the teens, I say: Editing is part of the art and process of good writing. You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly run a race. You practice and train. You slog through the rain and cold and move your body against sleep and sleet until your breath is easy, your legs long and lean.

They hear: Writing is work.

I don’t know how to create an appetite for editing. I look to other writers for back-up:

Wally Lamb, bestselling author, says:
Learn to love revision. Listen to suggestions about what you might add, cut, reposition, and clarify in your work-in-process. Welcome such feedback with gratitude and humility, returning to your words with sharper insight. Make mistakes, lots of them, revising draft after draft of your continuing story.

Kim Addonizio, poet, says:
If you don’t think your work needs revision, here’s a tip: Don’t try to be a poet. You will never — I mean never — be any good.

For a bit, we are buoyed by encouraging words. Our initial disdain turns to inadequacy: Where to start? What to delete? What to keep? We need direction, guides, rules.

There’s no lack of writing guides, but where are the can-do books on the art of revision? I’m not talking Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Grammar guides are abundant. I’m looking for an encouraging, practical, you-can-do-it guide to take us from raw goods to polished gems.

It's a slippery thing, writing, editing, art. It's not paint-by-numbers, I know. The joy of creation is in finding your way. But surely there are rules we can follow and then, with knowledge, break.

What's your process? How do you begin, and end? For you, is it all instinct and choice, or are there defined rules and routes?

Tanka anyone?

long winter night . . .
my mind wanders back
to a northern stream
that once answered
my every question

— Jeanne Emrich

The tanka has me rapt.

For days now, my every experience searches for a short form verse that will compress, nuance and make it mean more.

Do you tanka? Cousin to the haiku, tanka is a 5 line lyric poem with Japanese roots. Like haiku, a tanka poem offers concrete images, understatement and control. A tanka has a specific form but — here’s the good part — the rules are a bit elastic.

Traditional tanka requires a 31 syllable count with lines of 5-7-5-7-7. But the modern American tanka allows for fudging.

Tanka Online tells it best: The contemporary tanka in English may be described as typically an untitled free-verse short poem having anywhere from about twelve to thirty-one syllables arranged in words and phrases over five lines, crafted to stand alone as a unitary, aesthetic whole—a complete poem. Excepting those written in a minimalist style, a tanka is about two breaths in length when read aloud.

“The tanka aesthetic is broad and all-encompassing,” encourages poet/instructor Jeanne Emrich.

With an anyone-can-do-it spirit, the site offers a Quick Start Guide to Writing Tanka. It’s a manual, an art form, a get-up-and-go guide!

I like the attitude. And then I found Jack Cantey. He’s writing a rush of tankas, posting five to six poems on his blog each week.

That Erodes

I’m done with it all,
he says, drunk on wine and paint.
Winter is a force
that erodes like wind and waves.
It eats us in creeping bites.

— Jack Cantey

Inspired by Jeanne and Jack, I thought I was ready to tanka. I wrote and counted. Rewrote, recounted. Turns out the seemingly simple short form is deceptively — and wonderfully — complicated. I like the challenge.

How about you? Have you tried a tanka? Send me your work. I’ll post them here, and we’ll toast to tanka — the new, old, short form poem.

Instructions

Proving that simple is good, these easy-to-use instructions are courtesy of Anthony Burrill, a designer and illustrator working in print, moving image, interactive and web-based projects. The aphorism above was created for Wallpaper magazine. See more of Burrill's work here.

Is this a message?

Poems find me. They work their way across a page, my screen, sneak into my home and settle in, waiting for me to pay attention.

Today, Starfish by Eleanor Lerman, jumped out. I wish I had written it. Good work stirs in me the lovely ache of appreciation and envy. Do you feel this, too? The last line in the first stanza is so just right: is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Starfish

Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

From Our Post Soviet History Unfolds by Eleanor Lerman,
published by Sarabande Books.