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
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
