Monthly Archives: January 2024

A Day in my Head – from Silent TV to the Badgermin

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Fountains Sneinton Market 2015

It has passed into Monday now, but I am still on Sunday thinking.

I rose before Julia, but I’m still a little slow and she made it downstairs before I did, only to find that the TV, which has been playing up a bit recently, had no sound. I was looking at WP comments when she told me this, but even so, a feeling of dread enveloped me. Over the years I have come to rely on TV more and more for distraction.

I can spend hours on the computer, but with it being in the dining room it is a bit lonely and anti-social. I could, i know, balance it on my knee in the living room but I took a decision to stop doing that several years ago and do not regret it. I could also read, though I do find myself doing less of it. This is a worry, but I am sure it can be addressed in retirement by getting a big reading lamp. At the moment I am still feeling wiped out by the cough/chest infection which also makes me feel less like reading.

Fortunately we found the solution to the silent TV by searching online. Switch it off, unplug it, restart. It burst into action. I cannot think why it worked, but it did. Why is it that a TV that can bring me superb colour pictures from the air and from the internet, bombard me with far more information than I will ever need, and pause a film when I need a cup of tea, still needs to be switched of and on again. I never understood that with computers, but years ago I could see they needed the help. These days, with all the advances in science, why is it still necessary? And where does BBC1 and 2 go every night? For the last couple of months they have been disappearing. I keep hoping they will correct themselves but they don’t, so it looks like another internet search may be needed.

Fountains Sneinton Market 2015

Finally, after being stimulated by a Tootlepedal Blog to look up the composition of an orchestra I found mention of an Ondes Martenot.  It’s like a theremin, but apparently a lot better. Whether it’s better than a badgermin is a different question.

All I can say is that it’s not been a wasted day.

Photos are some archive shots from December 2015 in the days when Julia used to work at the Leisure Centre. Some may call them blurred – I prefer “abstract”.

Tanka & Tanka Prose

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I’ve covered Haiku. I’ve covered Haibun. “Covered” may be over-stating the case – probably safer to say I’ve added a few random thoughts to the thousands of words of serious debate that goes into the subject. I’m now going to do Tanka and Tanka Prose in one go. They are simpler than the others, so I can do that.

A Tanka is a five line poem, originally with lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. It is now, in English, a five line poem of variable syllable count. You are allowed to use poetic devices in writing it and you don’t have all the rules of a haiku. I avoided it for years, because I was having enough trouble with haiku and Haibun, then I realised it was a much more forgiving form.

Tanka means “little song”. It is complete in itself and a lot of them are love poems, because that’s what they were hundreds of years ago. They are still popular today and the royal family traditionally write them at New Year. Love, courtship, nature, impermanence, life, death, and marriage, sadness – that sort of thing.

I have to say that I took to it immediately. I’m now finding it a bit harder because I am, as usual, starting to worry about doing it well. It’s that internal editor again. There are some good articles here and here. Sorry to land you with lots of reading, but they explain it better than I can and, to be honest, Julia is cooking banana bread, which makes my brain close down. You will be getting very little thought from me for a while.

The tanka has the advantage of opening up the world of the Tanka Prose. The Tanka Prose is simply a Haibun that uses a tanka instead of a haiku – there is no Japanese name for it. This is  a shame as Tanka Prose is an inelegant name for an excellent poetic form. There is some discussion whether the prose piece should be written differently to the prose in a Haibun (because poets love complication), but I just write it and nothing bad seems to happen. Editors seem to think you can write in a variety of styles for Haibun, so I can’t see them tightening up on Tanka prose just yet. However, don’t bet on it, anything can happen . . .

However, for now, I love Tanka Prose because, quite simply, you can say what you want to say without the rules getting in the way. Sometimes you need rules, but sometimes you don’t.

Behind the waterfall at Newstead Abbey

I’ll just add a link and an example now, as I have covered most of what I need to say in the preceding two posts.

This is from Cattails October 2023.

There are lots of good poems in Cattails, I quote mine because I am the copyright holder, not because it is the best.

Crepuscular rays at Rufford Park

Crepuscular rays at Rufford Park

Paper Cities

Simon Wilson, UK

My wife’s mother watched American bombers glistening in the sky, saw the bombs fall
and, later helped clear the debris from the dropping of an atom bomb. She told me
stories of what happens when you drop incendiaries on a city of paper houses and
taught me how to fold a paper crane.

On the other side of the world my mother tried her gas mask on and practised hiding
under her school desk. In October 1940, a German bomber flew low across the school
and dropped two bombs. She picked up a piece of bomb casing in the school yard while
it was still warm.

We discuss this with the kids as we fold paper cranes for a school project. It means
more to them, when told in terms of grandmothers, than all the pictures on TV.

familiar folds
I have not made
the thousand yet . . .
one of the children asks
for blue and yellow paper

 

Haibun – One Step Beyond

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Moving on from haiku, we have the Haibun. When I started writing Haibun they were simply a mix of prose and one or more haiku. Simple. I have an example of one in a 15-year-old magazine which was approximately six sections of prose broken up by 5/7/5 haiku. It was horrible, yet it fell within the definition of Haibun at the time and the editor of a magazine (admittedly a general magazine) had thought it fit to publish.

Inevitably the Haibun has acquired a few more guidelines since then. They call them guidelines rather than rules, I forgot to mention that in the last post, they call them guidelines, but they are, if you want to be published, definitely rules.

So, prose and a haiku. It used to be so simple . . .

My Orange Parker Pen

You now need to give the title equal weight with the text and haiku. And you need to have a juxtaposition of text and haiku similar to the relationship between the two parts of the haiku. They often refer to “link and shift” at this point. It’s one of those fashionable things that I don’t fully understand. In theory, I grasp it. In practice, I’m not so good. If you don’t have it, you get told that you lack it. If you have too much of it, you get told it you aren’t making sense. Basically I just chuck some words down on a page, select an editor and send it off. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I let them sort it out. I just like writing.

Don’t think for one moment that I don’t have an opinion on all this, I just can’t be bothered to argue. The only way to win the argument is to become an editor and I’m far too lazy for that.

My approach is that I like writing the prose section so I write prose sections. I then add some haiku, because you need haiku to make a Haibun. There are arguments to suggest that you don’t actually need a haiku, but that’s a similar argument to the tomatoes argument – we all know tomatoes are a fruit but we all also know you don’t use them in fruit salad. Some things just aren’t worth the effort.

Orange Parker Pen

At this point it all comes down to my attitude to rejection. I have honed my skills to a point where most rejection merely bounces off the hardened shell I have developed over the years. There are lots of words, there are lots of editors. Acceptance is nicer than rejection, but rejection isn’t a bad thing – it’s part of the learning process and it’s only the opinion of one editor on a certain day.

There I am, with my prose and my haiku. I then add a title. It isn’t always a brilliant title, but it’s usually better than the working title I started with. I have a terrible habit of forgetting to change the working title, which is often quite blunt. Some years ago an editor suggested I went with “What the Moon Saw” instead of “Not another Dead Deer Poem”. I agreed , though I still think my working title had certain features that the more sensitive title lacks. Rereading it, I would probably write it slightly differently these days. The haiku, I now see, is lacking in a number of respects. However, every publication is an encouragement to do better, which is what is important.

There are other things to look at. The standard format these days, which seems to be a growing trend, is a couple of hundred words followed by a haiku. It’s also possible to start with a haiku, have one in the middle or have a “braided” haibun where you split the three lines of the haiku up within the prose. It’s not something I’m that keen on. I struggle with haiku as it is and I really don’t need the extra work.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

If you write prose with a structure and a distinct ending (I admit mine sometimes actually have a punchline, which is probably bad) it’s often a good idea to have the haiku first, so the two don’t interfere with each other.

I like to write at least one in every submission that starts and ends with a haiku. That allows the editor to suggest I omit the first one as it doesn’t add to the poem. They are often right, but it is worth doing as it gives them something to do and distracts them from the other faults in the piece.

Two more things then I will finish.

Type of language. Two points of view. Some people think you should use pared down haiku-style language in the prose. Others think you should try to be different to avoid being boring. I’m sure they are both right depending on circumstances.

And for now, I forget the other . . .

Random photo

Sorry, I’m sure the other thing was important, but can’t recall it. It’s now 12 hours after I finished the first draft. This one is slightly more polished, believe it or not.

I forgot to mention, for instance that they seem to have started as travel journals and that the most famous one is by Basho. It has several different names in translation. In English you can get The Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore by David Cobb or Stallion’s Crag by Ken Jones.

That wasn’t, however, what I forgot. That’s still bothering me.

I seem to have veered off the subject of haibun and written about how i write them. Sorry if that leaves you feeling short changed but there are plenty of other articles about if you want all the technical stuff. I like to think, as a man of small education, who took over 60 years to get round to writing the word pedagogical, that it’s my role in life to demystify poetry.

Like TESCO I adopt the pile it high and sell it cheap model. And if you do decide to have a go, remember that the important thing really isn’t the title, the prose, the haiku or the relationship between the whole, it’s the persistence. Write one, send it off, get it rejected, send another. Go on, write a haibun for 2024 and send it to a magazine.

Haiku – an explanation

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Welcome to an explanation of Japanese poetry. I am writing it because I have been asked, not because I am filled with zeal to show off my knowledge, and by the end of the explanation I feel I can guarantee that nothing will be any clearer than when I started. This is the nature of Japanese poetry and the mist that surrounds it. In the UK we are still debating if poetry should rhyme, in America (the home of complexity) they are debating concepts which require at least two degrees before you can even start to understand the vocabulary they use. Look at most of the poet bios in an American haiku/Haibun magazine and you will see what I mean – degrees, stellar careers and huge numbers of publications are the norm.

However, I was asked, I have had a go and this is the result. This is just the haiku explanation. Haibun and tanka will be next.

A haiku is a poem of three lines with syllables arranged in a 5-7-5 pattern. Everybody knows that and it is there multiple times on the internet. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. It never was particularly accurate, and it hasn’t been representative of actual published haiku for years. Classic haiku writers didn’t always write in this format and the word syllable is wrong in this context.

The word which the Japanese use for a sound unit is “on” and it is much more, or less, than a syllable. The word “haibun”, to take information from Wiki, is four “on” rather than our two syllables and “on” is actually two “on” rather than one syllable. That is simple compared to the next fact – the word “kyo”, which is clearly two syllables in English, is one “on” in Japanese.

And that, when added to various opinions and translations, is why there is confusion.

The seventeen syllable model is alive and well in junior schools and various other places which need a quick fix for poetry writing classes. However, it is now generally accepted that if you are writing in English, 12 syllables are about right. It is considered desirable to write a poem that can be read in one breath, if you want a more aesthetic way of looking at things. I’m not sure about other languages, but I’m sure they all have definitions of varying subtlety.

That is the easy bit.

There are more rules than syllables, which is where I always get lost. In no particular order – haiku should be about nature, they should have a season word, they should be in two parts, they should be separated by a cutting word. There should be no repetition, rhyme, title or other poetic device. They should feature only concrete images. They shouldn’t be single sentences, shouldn’t be sarcastic and should involve “haiku aesthetics” – there are whole articles about aesthetics. It includes age, impermanence, being broken, being unknowable and other similar things.

If they don’t include this sort of thing they may be senryu, which are similar but without much of the baggage. They have extras in the form of human nature, sarcasm and even crudity.

Alternatively, it could just be a bad poem or a greeting card verse. And just to add another layer of mystery and complexity I will add some links in a moment. They are for reputable haiku magazines (you can tell they are reputable because they have been rejecting me for years) and here you will find poetry of exquisite quality which disobeys many of the rules I have just discussed.

Perhaps I’m not the best man to ask about this . . .

Heron’s Nest

Wales Haiku Journal (who used to accept some of my haiku but stopped when editors changed).

Cattails (who accept tanka, tanka prose and Haibun from me. I tried haiku but failed and gave up.)

Goose poem – Anderby Creek

End of an Era

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Last night, when I went to bed I took enough pills to rattle and enough spray to inflate a medium sized party balloon, I coughed and spluttered my way through the night, but at a much reduced level compared to many of my recent nights. Julia had applied hot water bottles to the bed, my breathing was improving (though far from acceptable), I have a doctor’s note for up to two weeks and, after discussing it with Julia over Christmas, I had definitely decided that I was going to retire in May rather than keep going until November. Although that decision comes at the cost of 6 months of wages, it also allows me to take some control of the direction of my life, work towards the house move and take things a little easier.

The earthworks and that stone is all that remains of Fotheringhay Castle – birthplace of Richard III

My current working situation is that I am squeezed into a small gap in a shop with a damp problem, where I use a faulty second-hand computer and an old camera which I provide myself. I work with two people who, though pleasant enough, have a number of increasingly irritating idiosyncrasies and I am, quite honestly running out of patience. I could go on, but I won’t.

I have been worrying about the decision to go in May as, despite our recent pay cut, I had agreed to stay until November. However, things change and decisions have to alter. After the pay cut, it felt like I had a slight vestige of control and, by going in May, was still in control of my destiny (even if illness was the main driver).

The Falcon and Fetterlock that tops the church.

All that changed just after 9.00 this morning when I had a phone call from the shop owner, during which it was suggested that I might like to leave in May, due to my increasing ill health. If I do this it seems it will also allow him to change his plans for the shop. I have no doubt that concern for my health has some part in the suggestion, but, being completely honest, know that the majority of the suggestion is based on financial motives.

It’s not a big thing, but did leave me feeling a bit flat. Having lost any vestige of control over my life, I sat down, drank tea and spent twelve hours reflecting on how my life has been a complete waste and I even lost effective control over the timing of my retirement.

As I photographed the church and castle I was surrounded by the song of the grasshoppers 

I have been a great disappointment to myself over the years, and even in choosing the time of retirement, I have proved to be a failure.

However, I’ve learnt a few things in the last 66 years and will be using them to full effect as I try to fill retirement with as much as possible.

The pictures are selected from an old photo card I found filled away in a box on my desk (as I call the dining table where we haven’t dined for twenty years or more). Some I’ve used before, but I think some are new. The header picture is from one of the days the peacock from the village came to see the farm guineafowl.

Creaking gates, they tell us, hang the longest

Detail of old gate

Old gate, Northamptonshire

 

I can never resist an old gate . . .

Two Poems Published

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I finally found the energy to have a look round the net today. It’s been a while. My apologies to all the people I have been neglecting, I will get round to doing some meaningful reading and writing, I promise, but it’s going to take time.

I took a trip to CHO and found two poems by a sadly neglected Nottingham poet. He is currently being ignored by his wife who thinks he is now well enough to make his own hot drinks. After two weeks of fetching and carrying she has abandoned the nurturing model and is adopting the survival of the fittest model. This involves me using a kettle or dehydrating. A weak and quavery voice and a raspy breath is no longer, it seems, the way to get endless tea.

She will be sorry when I keep her awake tonight with the howling of random wheezes in my bronchial tubes.

Tomorrow I am having blood tests and, probably, another consultation with the doctor.

Tonight, however, I am going to provide links to my two poems that are in CHO. This is one that started off being about swans and ended up being about a cormorant.  No, I don’t know how I manged it either. Editing is a wonderful thing. And this is the other – it’s just another one about arthritic fingers so don’t get too excited. I really must try to write about larger themes this year.

I’m currently considering a poem on the importance of continued breathing. At the moment I’m still doing the research but if I continue my slow recovery it’s likely I could start writing it in a week or so. I’m also thinking of writing one about eating chocolate, not sure when I’ll write it but I’m off to try a bit of research now.

10p P is for Post Box

2023 – The Last Post

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Yes, I know it’s slipped round to 2024, but these things happen.

Somehow, with my frequent slippages of time and my good intentions about punctuality never quite working out, it is appropriate that I am late. I have just, as usual, fallen asleep in front of the TV, woken and made a decision about whether or not to blog. Really I should go to sleep, but he urge to write is strong.

I am finally beginning to feel like I am recovering from my chest problem, It’s far from a full recovery, but I am at least starting to feel like I am making progress. It took a while at the beginning as there were symptoms from several things to unravel and I spent at least a week getting worse. Even yesterday, I felt very weak. Today I have begun to feel a little better. It’s surprising that you can sleep for 8 hours at night, then snooze through a lot of the day, and still end up feeling tired, but that’s how I am at the moment. While you are sleeping, you are healing.

Yesterday I decided I wouldn’t make any submissions for December. There seems little point in rushing work which can be left to mature. There are plenty of opportunities for submissions in the next few months – better to do something decent than rush into doing something badly. It always seems slightly rude not to support an editor who has accepted work in the past, but it also seems slightly rude to send something when you know it isn’t your best. There is so much more to making a submission than merely writing it and sending it off.

Photos are mainly Julia.