Category Archives: Tanka Prose

A Brief Outline of the Day to Come

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It feels like a poetry day today. I have been building up to it and as I only have 17 days until the end of the month, I really need to get a move on.

The last few days have been research days and I am making progress towards (a) an article and (b) the talk for the Numismatic Society. It occurred to me last night that to finish the article I will need some photographs, so that can’t be finished until I next visit Suffolk (not sure when that will be). The talk, on the other hand needs a lot more work and I need to get a move on. Most of the work I did yesterday (plus some I must do today to complete it) went into researching what will end up as a couple of minutes in the talk. That needs photos too. He was a local man so this will include at least one picture of a house he lived in (maybe 2, but I think the rest have been demolished) and  his grave. Possibly the grave of his son-in-law too, depending on how far I spread the research.

That’s another place where I miss Julia. She wouldn’t let me spend hours sitting over a keyboard, she’s make me get up and do something, which is sometimes annoying, but also sometimes a good thing. Last night, after a day tapping away with bad posture, I felt like i was tied in knots.

When I finish this I’m going to have another cup of tea and sit in front of the TV

for a while as I revert to the old ways and make some poetry notes with a pad and a fountain pen.

My Orange Parker Pen

 

Poetry, Proverbs and Poppies

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I’m feeling a bit like the proverbial full bookshelf. It’s the one where you force another book into it and something falls off the end . . .

I’ve been writing more about coins and medals recently – the three short articles for the Numismatic Society’s Facebook page are the thin end of the wedge, I’m preparing others too – and I seem to have stopped writing poetry, as if it just fell off the end of the shelf. One minute it was there, now it’s gone. I have three unopened poetry magazines and nothing in the pipeline.

 

This has coincided with doing more reading again (which is a bit like recharging my batteries after so much poetry writing), more research and more retirement planning.

Little Gidding

I’ve just had three poems published, while I’m on the subject. Not sure if I’ve posted the link before (my memory is getting worse). The magazine is Contemporary Haibun Online, which is always worth a read and I am here, here and here. Sorry, I suppose I could be more subtle or inventive with the links, but I’m not.

 

In themselves, they are a great indicator of time passing. Poetic time is very distorted. One poem actually started five or six years ago. It has changed substantially since I started it, and been rejected four times. Two others were written last autumn after I went to a couple of family funerals. One harks back to a time when I was 16. That is now 50 years ago. That thought is hard to grasp. I have let 50 years slip by and would be hard pressed to tell you anything I have done in that time.

Maybe that’s the theme for my next poem.

It’s poppy time again

The Day Part 2

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Sunset, Codnor, Notts

It has not been a wasted day. I have mustered my rejects from the last round of submissions and have improved several of them. I have identified my new list of targets, including one that has resisted me so far.

In non-poetry matters i have cleared a small patch of desk and finished the first draft of an article on medallions. It’s only for the Numismatic Society but it’s a start.

Julia is at the hairdresser so I am now going to make soup and something for the evening meal. This is a twofold win. First it saves her having to cook and second it means the house smells good when she walks in. With any luck I will remember to tell her that her hair looks nice. I have a terrible record of forgetting that.

All that work and it’s only just mid-day.

Sunset and chimney pots

I made soup (sweet potato and chilli) and a mixed vegetable hash (though it could have been stew or more soup). This raises an interesting point bout my cookery. Change a few ingredients and it becomes something else. For a moment I felt guilty at serving general purpose slop over the years, then I realised that Sunday Lunch, roast pork and sausages with roasted veg are all basically the same thing too – just roasted veg with dead animals. Yes, you need Yorkshire pudding for one, apple sauce for another and different flavours of gravy, but they are all pretty much the same too. Having sorted that out in my mind I no longer feel so bad.

It’s not “chicken liver parfait, with pear chutney, pickled cranberry ketchup, chicken skin & toasted sourdough” as offered by one of our local restaurants, but it ill do. Incidentally, if I could be bothered I would definitely book a meal here – even at £45 per person for three courses it looks good compared to ringing Just Eat and ordering second class food to be delivered lukewarm. I suspect that one of my faults over the years has been that I have settled for second best. I like fried chicken, burgers and generic curry but “pork tenderloin with sticky miso glazed cheek, apple & BBQ hispi cabbage” sounds so much nicer. Maybe I should have valued myself more highly.

(And yes, I did remember to mention that Julia’s hair looked nice.)

Sunset, Langley Mill by-pass

Ducks and Stuff

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Mandarin Duck – Arnot Hill Park

I’ve just been tidying up my email box. Deleting 100 emails on top of the hundreds that I do as they come in, makes me realise how many I get and how much I have let things get out of hand. Recently I red how part of you can be contained in another person (the example in my case being that without Julia I would lose all memory of family addresses and dates. It’s a bit like that with emails. Much of my life is contained within the email system and if I lost access to that I would find aspects of my personality disappearing too.

But enough philosophical rambling . . .

I’m just about to start writing poetry again (having been derailed by my recent arthritis outbreak), and I was looking up an email from an editor. I wanted information about the next submission period but was hooked by his comments on rejecting my previous submission. I thought I had passed the point of being annoyed by rejection, but it appears I’m not. I don’t want to give too much information because it’s not fair to discuss editorial comments in public, but he editor in question said that the poem didn’t make sense on a literal basis.

Duck – Arnot Hill Park

If I was aiming for writing that made sense on a literal basis i would write travel guides or text books. I’d actually have a chance of making money if I did that. But I write poetry, which is supposed to be full of imagination, allusion and layers of meaning. I don’t recall ever reading that it had to make sense. It’s hard enough to write as it is, without needing it to make sense too.

That email is stored two spaces below another that complains the haiku in one of the haibun I submitted “isn’t a haiku at all”. When I look back at it, I see his point. It was written in haste as I struggled to make a deadline and I wasn’t as sharp at editing as I should have been. This comment I have no problem with, just in case you were thinking I was being unfair to editors. It is, after all, the job of the writer to write poetry of such stunning beauty that an editor cannot resist it.

And with that in mind, I am off to write a poem about ducks. I like ducks and they are fun to feed. They aren’t quite as multi-faceted as swans, but if you are writing limericks they are easier to rhyme.

Floating Feathers – Arnot Hill Park

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

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

The Best Poem I Ever Wrote (Nearly)

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I spoke to Number Two Son in Canada last night. I had been intending to nag him for some time in a gently paternal way, but thought I’d wait for him to call as it’s cheaper to nag on his bill. As it turned out, he is ahead of me. He has already made some steps towards signing up to do some professional qualifications and is also seeking a pensions advisor to bolster his pension arrangements. Clearly we have a telepathic link. We all want our children to better than we have done, and both of mine already have. This is the advantage of starting off with a parent who is a fairly low benchmark.

A few nights ago I wrote the best poem I have ever written (apart from the one about the Kingfisher, but I’m keeping that under wraps for now). It has taken three years to write and has been through many versions. I sent it out last month and it came back, but I had another look, tinkered with it let it rest. I am going to look at it again tonight and see if I still think it is the best I’ve ever written. There is a chance I will spot a new crop of faults. Even if I do, it’s till going out again – after three years it’s time for it to do something. It’s a bit like kids – there’s a point when they have to go.

White-tailed Bumblebee

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as good as I thought, so I made a couple of changes (I hesitate to say improvements). looked at it and decided not to send it out after all. The real problem is the subject – the field that hosted the Battle of Naseby in 1645. I’m not sure if it’s a wide enough subject to appeal to editors. I’m still, in truth, smarting from being told that my Adlestrop poem was too obscure. That was in February last year and I’m still annoyed. I’ve just been looking to see if it was ever accepted elsewhere. The trouble is that there is a black hole in my record keeping after the computer broke down and that brings a lack of certainty.  Did it go unpublished, or can I simply not find the acceptance?

My contention here is that if I am reading an American poem I am expected to, be able to place the South Boston Aquarium  or a red wheelbarrow or a road not taken, so why not Adlestrop? When Frost wrote about the road not taken he was possibly referring to the road taken by his friend Edward Thomas , writer of  Adelstrop and was wondering whether to stay with his family or to join the army. For back up I’m citing this article, which mentions Adlestrop and gives some brilliant examples. It’s only short, and worth reading just for the two examples.

Dog Rose

Apart from the question of obscurity (which is easily solved by Google these days) how about a footnote? I personally find them condescending in most cases – is the writer merely seeking to show how clever they are? But they have their place.

The brilliant poem? In the end it wasn’t necessary. I found one that was just as good, tinkered and sent it off. This morning I woke up and thought of an extra line that would have improved it greatly . . .

As someone once said, you never finish a poem you just set it adrift.

The Power of Planning 2

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If you have come straight here, you my need to go back to what is Part 1. However, it isn’t listed as such because I didn’t know it was going to be  two-parter when I started. Or even when I finished, to be honest.

hat happened was that I drifted off at a tangent and didn’t realise I was going to want to revisit it.

So, the poetry plan. First we need a target that is Specific. We will go for the acceptance of 50 Japanese style poems and 25 “ordinary” ones. That’s four a month for the Japanese and two a month for the others.It’s not a huge target, as I’ve already had thirty one accepted in the last ten months.I’m thinking that I will end the 12 months on about 40. Fifty is not a big jump from there. The twenty five is a bigger jump, as I haven’t submitted any fr a couple of years, but at two a month I should be able to do that. To be more specific I am going to go for 20 Haibun/Tanka Prose, 20 Tanka and ten haiku. I’m not very good at haiku so that is probably the biggest challenge.

That’s specific done. Measurable is easy enough – acceptances of poetry submitted  in the months of August 2023 to July 2024. It can be a bit tricky measuring poetry as the lead time after acceptance can make counting tricky, which is why I’m counting acceptances.

I’ve already covered Achievable in the Specific category – none of the figures I’ve quoted are outrageous and I’m sure the Japanese figure is going to be realistic as I hardly submit any haiku at the moment. The other figure, the twenty five is a bit more speculative, but not unrealistic. I have lost count but I think when I was submitting free verse a few years ago I had bout ten accepted by decent journals.

My Orange Parker Pen

Realistic already seems to have been fully covered from the writing point of view. From the publishing point of view, there should be enough openings to get this number of poems published. There are some magazines where i do badly, as in always get knocked back, but there are enough to take fifty and I will just have to up my game and try harder to crack the others. That’s the thing with targets – with targets I try different magazines, without them I tend to withdraw to my comfort zone.

Time? Twelve months. I assumed that from the beginning.

I will now need to set my diary out for 12 months, including all the likely magazines and submission windows. Then I will have to remember to keep a total and compare it to the plan. That’s it. Simple.

Now let’s see what happens.

Stone on the Floor