Tag Archives: persistence

How to Write a Tanka Prose

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Buzzard pursued by crow

This an answer to a query raised in the comments, but it’s something for everyone to read. Have a go, you might like it.

First, read this. Then abandon thoughts of haiku and haibun for a moment.

If I were starting again I would start with tanka prose. These are like haibun in that they contain prose and a poem, but they are more relaxed.

The trouble lies with the poem. A tanka is a small poem (5-7-5-7-7) according to general wisdom. This isn’t true. That syllable count should be the maximum. You can write fewer syllables.

Some editors like to preserve the short-long-short-long-long layout, others don’t mind as long as it has five lines. It’s just a poem and can include poetic effects, though probably not rhyme. As such, it is free from all the baggage that comes with haiku, and all the conflicting views of editors.

Little Egret at Aldeburgh

You can find tanka and tanka prose in Contemporary Haibun Online, Quail Eggs and Cattails. These are all available online. They are also easy to submit to if you want to have a go at being published.

Rather than listen to me, just read tanka and then practice. If I write ten tanka (which can take between twenty minutes and a week) you can be sure that at least one will tail off without being finished, and a couple will clearly be rubbish that can’t be helped by editing. Even after editing it’s likely that only two or three will be good enough to retain. That’s normal. Just keep writing and eventually you will get there. Don’t take notice of your internal editor until you have written a batch, or you will never actually finish a poem.

Eventually you will have enough to send off. Do it. You won’t be published unless you make submissions.

I send out a batch, one is probably accepted, the rest come back. I add another and send them out again. Usually one of the rejects will be picked at this point. I sometimes send things out three four times before I get fed up with them. By that time I usually have replacements written.

Little Egret – Blacktoft Sands

Next – tanka prose. They are like a haibun but with a tanka rather than a haiku. There is some discussion whether a haibun should be in haiku-like language (ie terse and often slightly stilted). You don’t have that with tanka prose, just write what you like. If you can write a blog post you can write a prose section for a tanka prose.

Then write the tanka to go with it. Some people claim to write the haiku/tanka first then write the prose section. I can’t do that. I write the prose and then write a suitable tanka.

Here are some comments I had recently.

“I think the haiku are not nearly as successful as the prose in your haibun.”

“After a careful review of your poem, I regret that I have had to pass it on.”

“Unfortunately, your work did not quite fit the shape that the issue ended up taking.”

“I’m afraid I don’t get this piece. Is it me or is its meaning or intention too obscure?”

The lesson from those comments is that not every submission ends in success and it’s all par of the process.

Heron

So, to summarise – read, write, submit, expect rejection, read, write, submit . . .

Eventually it will work out, but expect some rejections to begin with. At the start the rejections can seem depressing, overpowering and inevitable. Eventually you will get an acceptance, then another, and it will gradually build up . . .

There’s a lot of other stuff tha goes into writing a good tanka prose, and eventually I might learn some of it, but for the moment I find that the best way to work is to write plenty, submit a lot, shrug off rejection and recycle the rejects.

The recycling is key to my writing – it saves effort, and when a reject is accepted it proves that editing is a matter of opinions and rejected work is not always bad work. And above all, it’s about hard work and  persistence rather than that ephemeral thing we call talent

Good luck.

Cormorant, Lowestoft, Suffolk

Modern Manners

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250 words. Not much time. A head full of gibberish.

Somehow the sight of an empty page scares all my words and good intentions away . . .

At the doctor this morning I looked out of the window (the waiting room looks into an internal quadrangle of raised beds and weeds) and watched a single strand of spider silk thrumming in the wind. By the time I go home I had forgotten all about it. However, it has just returned.

Just before going to the doctor the door bell rang. It was a representative from a local builder, energised by sunshine and the desire to fill his wallet at my expense.

Julia listened to him, because she does. He has a job to do, so it’s only fair to listen. However, he kept going and she had to step in and ask him to stop as we were about to go out. She asked him three more times and he kept going on. She even gave him her phone number because she is too nice to cold callers. He kept going and trying to organise a call, either in five minutes, or later in the day.

To be fair, you have to be persistent when you are selling, and I couldn’t fault him from that point of view. However, I didn’t want to be late for the appointment at the doctor.

I went to the door. He started to tell me he would like to clear the moss off our roof.

“Why?” I asked.

He said that some people didn’t like the look of it.

“Well I don’t mind it and my wife has already told you we need to go out so please stop and go away.”

It is important here to repeat that I said “go away”. I did not use a very tempting alternative, I was calm and restrained.

“Well,” he said, in the manner of a Victorian matron, pouting and gathering his skirts around him, “there’s no need to be rude.”

I pointed out that I wasn’t being rude, just telling him to go away because we had to get ready to go out and he’d ignored Julia’s previous attempts to ask him to leave.

I find there’s a lot of this about these days – people seem to think that you should listen to them and do what they want just because they keep on talking. It seems to be a common doorstep technique these days. It’s the technique used by a conman – keep talking and hope that people will be too polite to say no.

Sometimes you have to stop them. Sometimes you have to say no. I have also been known to ask people “What’s it got to do with you?” when they ask personal questions.

Yes, it’s “conversation” to some people, but some just ask too much. I lack the linguistic skills to fend them off, and if a couple of attempted evasions don’t work, I just ask. They soon get the idea.

However, I don’t see it as being rude. If it’s acceptable for a man to knock on my door without being invited, or for someone I don’t know to ask personal questions, surely it’s acceptable for me, after several ineffectual attempts to put a stop to it, to be blunt.

Everybody then knows where the line has been drawn.

I didn’t swear, I didn’t make any personal remarks, I just asked him to stop and told him to go away.

I’m not going to ask whether you think I’m right or wrong, but I am going to ask if anyone has a better way of dealing with it.

It’s a kestrel on his shoulder.

 

It’s a Haibun

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Here’s a poem for you. It was first published in The Haibun Journal in April 2025. I could say it’s a comment on art and the people who think that four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence is music. If I had a Masters Degree, as many poets seem to have, I could probably get away with that.

But I don’t. I have a City & Guilds in Poultry Production, so I settled for writing a piece about being desperate for inspiration. I’m told that writing poems about writing poetry is almost guaranteed to get you turned down because editors see so much of it, so I got lucky here. Well, I got lucky the third time I submitted it, which would make a good case study on persistence.

Originally it was a tanka prose but it became a haibun, removing the tanka and using a haiku that I’d previously had rejected when it was sent to a haiku magazine. “Three Minutes Thirty Three” was originally “Six Minutes Sixteen”, I added the bit about alliteration making it poetry and substituted “watching birds” for “watching daytime TV”. Whether those qualify as improvements I’m sure. There are probably a couple of tweaks I would make if I ever get round to that poetry book, but otherwise I’m happy with it, which is not something I say about all my published poems.

Anyway, this is the finished version. For now . . .

Two Hours Twenty Two

An hour and forty eight minutes pass before I dredge inspiration from the depths. I know this because I set a timer to put myself under pressure to produce. If John Cage can do 4′ 33”, I thought, I can do Two Hours Twenty Two. It’s not accurate, but it is alliterative, which makes it poetry. If I’d set off with Cage’s piece in mind, I would have settled for Three Minutes Thirty Three and passed the rest of the morning drinking tea and watching birds feed in the garden.

a blackcap
sings from tangled thorns
—the stalking cat

 

 

 

 

Persistence Pays Off

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If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

I found that quote yesterday when replying to a comment, so if you saw it then, I apologise for the repetition. I was actually looking for another quote, but I thought that one would do just as well. It is also good enough to bear repetition.

Robin, Arnot Hill Park

For some reason my thoughts of writing always centre round this time of year. I am sitting in a book-lined room, with busts of historical figures on my shelves. It is pleasantly warm, bees are buzzing the lavender, the scent of lilacs drifts in through the open glass doors and I smile as I put my fountain pen down and look at another finished manuscript.

Reality is always a little different. I have no glass doors, my writing room is lined with chaos and the scent of toast fills the air.  I have two small busts on my shelves – Cromwell and Dickens. I chose Cromwell because I like Cromwell and I chose Dickens on account of the quality of his beard. I have tried to enthuse myself to read Dickens again but I’m failing.

Tulip

On the other hand, re-writing Wilkins Micawber as an amateur detective has a certain attraction. Pea souper fogs, opium dens and mysterious, gaunt, black-clad figures do all the work for you. All you need is talent and time . . .

Meanwhile, back at the poetry, which requires little time and, let’s be honest. only a smattering of talent, I have had some more acceptances. last week I had three accepted by one editor – a haibun, a tank and a haiku. They have never accepted a haiku off me before. Then this week I have had a haiku accepted by a magazine which has been resisting me for some years. They used to accept things, then the new editor stopped. Now, with a new editorial team, they have accepted one again. It just goes to show the power of hard work and persistence. I haven’t really improved as a poet, but I am getting more published, so it has to be the work rate and the persistence, though I suppose there are talented poets out there who would take issue with me about my approach.

Feeder with Greenfinch

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Resolution and 8 Years on WP

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Well, we managed to work out how the little toerag in London pulled off his scam. Or nearly pulled off his scam. It was the buyer, not the local postman who was at the bottom of it. I won’t say more as it might become a police matter. Let’s just say that despite the work we did in the shop, and the Post Office did, eBay came close to undoing it all. At mid-day it all seemed to be over, with the evidence we needed, and eBay promising to put a stop to the fraudulent claim and ban the buyer. An hour later they emailed to say that after more requests from the buyer they had found in his favour and refunded the £500, leaving us out of pocket to the tune of £500 and a £500 coin. After another hour on the phone they agreed we were in the right and it looks like we will be OK. However, the disorganised way they have carried on gives me little confidence.

The other big news of the day is that I have had a haibun accepted by CHO, or Contemporary Haibun Online. It’s the first one they have taken in about three years and represents a lot of persistence. I don’t just talk about persistence, I do actually practice it. I’ve not been producing a lot and I nearly didn’t send anything this time, but I did, and less than 24 hours later I had an acceptance. This is editing at a high level of excellence. It might be three years before I get another one in, so I’ll enjoy the moment.

Finally, I had a message from WP a few days ago – seems I’ve been here 8 years now. It seems like a long time but, to put it in context, I’m currently wearing boxer shorts which are older than that. It tool me several weeks after registering to find the nerve to write something. Now look at me, it’s hard to stop me wittering on about something every day. Even if that something is about another dull day in the shop. At least today was a bit more exciting.

The header picture is guinea fowl sheltering under a picnic table during a rainstorm, the first picture I posted on WP.

Haibun – Another Place, Another Time

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This is a haibun that was published in The Haibun Journal. It’s a print journal and I wasn’t able to link to the haibun at the time as they don’t appear online. I thought its time had come, because  the Six Nations Championship is underway so the subject of rugby seemed appropriate. It’s also a bit of light relief at a time of lockdown and news about irrelevant royalty.

It is set in Mrs Botham’s Tearoom in Whitby. They don’t generally have a harpist, but they did on this particular visit.  I enjoyed eating crab sandwiches whilst listening to harp music. In my mind the haibun is dedicated to the two ex-players in the tearoom who both smiled and whispered to their long-suffering wives when the tune started.

I learned a lesson in persistence for this submission. I submitted three haibun and had one accepted, which is general practice as most magazines only take one haibun per writer per issue. Sometimes, of course, they don’t take any.

One of the rejects was sent out straight away with a quick spruce up, I agreed to a couple of edits and it appeared in an online journal shortly after. The other was sent out three more times before being accepted last week..

I think this is the only time I’ve managed to place an entire submission of three – normally I give up if one keeps coming back.

Botham’s Whitby

Another place, another time

We climb the stairs to the tearoom above the cake shop. The presence of a stairlift reveals much about the age of the clientele.

In the subdued lighting, we move back to a time of elegance. People pour their tea from plated teapots emblazoned with the teashop name. Hot water jugs are de rigeur. In the corner a harpist plays.

The tune she was playing was, my wife said, with a note of warning in her voice, called The Ash Grove, but I remembered it better as a traditional rugby song about the Mayor of Bayswater. He had, as I recall, a pretty daughter. Judging by several strained expressions around the place, I was not the only one. It was like a trumpet call to an old warhorse.

wives’ fixed smiles
the husbands remember
past glories

First published in The Haibun Journal October 2020

 

Botham’s, Skinner Street, Whitby

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Stairlift at Botham’s tearoom, Whitby

Endings and Beginnings and Keeping Going

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Two days ago I published a  link to my latest published haibun. That night I had an email to discuss some changes to a submission I’d made just before Christmas. I’ve made them so I’m hoping for an acceptance there. Then last night I had a n acceptance for four poems. They are senryu rather than haiku (based on human nature rather than nature) but the line is blurred in English language Japanese-style poetry. It was a bit unexpected as I’ve never been much good with the short poems and, to be honest, never expect much. To have four accepted at one time is close to being unbelievable, and puts my total of short poems published (well, theoretically published – they won’t actually be published until next month) up from two to six, which is a big jump.

It’s quite a good way to end the year – all I need to do now is find a good way to start the New Year.

It goes to show what happens when you set your mind to something. I had a rest at the beginning of the year. I had had a series of rejections, one of my favourite magazines closed and there was a change of editor at another one – a man who has never accepted anything from me, and continues to accept nothing from me. I admit I did give up for a time, but you can’t keep a good man down and at the end of  July, after a lapse of nearly a year, I started submitting again.

Twenty submissions. Nine acceptances. This includes an acceptance from a magazine that turned me down three times previously.

The moral of the story is never give up. And if you do give up, remember that you can always start again. It’s not meant to be easy.

This is a lesson that can be applied to many things, and one which I really ought to remember, because I’m very bad at letting things lapse.

Latest News – just had confirmation the changes are acceptable and I therefore have another acceptance. This is a good end to the year.

 

 

The Last Days of Lockdown

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It’s the final week of the second lockdown, and I will be returning to work next week. We will be sticking to our pre-lockdown work pattern of four days a week and, because of the way it falls, I won’t be back in until Friday. I intend to make the most of the next four days.

I don’t have much in the way of poetry  writing to do at the moment because there are no deadlines until January. I think I have everything I need for then, and just have to polish a few bits. I will continue writing, but there is no urgency in it for the moment. I have quite a lot written and am polishing it for January.

At the moment I have a magazine article in progress. I’m struggling with it because I’m writing a list of information which I am reusing from an obituary. The life was interesting, but the process of writing about it is not so interesting.

I have also just had another  haibun published. Try this link to see it – same as usual, scroll down to Simon Wilson. You may like to try a few of the others while you are there. Last week I also had a haiku published in Presence, but that’s a print magazine so there is no link. This is, I think, the fourth time I submitted to Presence, and my first success. I was beginning to give up hope, but thought I’d give it another go. And with that brief word on the importance of persistence, I will leave close.

Monday – Bloody but Unbroken

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The Featured Image is also my coded warning that you are about to enter a poetry post. If the word culture affects you like it affected Hermann Goering, you may want to look away now. Apart from the fact Goering never said it, and the original version is, to be honest, a lot less snappy. I often find quotes are like that when you actually check them out.

That calls for another quote.

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

I think I mentioned last week that I was sending some haiku off to an editor that has already turned me down twice. I may improve, or I may wear him down, but one way or another I’m not going to admit defeat.

Well, today, just a week after sending, the email came back. To be fair, he doesn’t hang about. I’ve been waiting for eight weeks for one editor to get back to me, which isn’t long compared to some, but os long enough when you are waiting for an answer.

To be honest, I almost prefer a quick rejection to a long drawn out acceptance. And I definitely prefer a quick rejection to a slow one. You can send the haiku out again once they come back. In fact that’s how I ended up with the submission in question – eight of them had been sent out before.

The one that was accepted had been turned down once before, which just goes to show…something…

I’m not sure what.

And yes, it is another acceptance. I was so convinced it was going to be a No that I spent ten minutes sitting grinning at the screen. I now stand at submissions 10, acceptances 4, rejections 2.

Again, that noise you hear is the smugness alarm.

The rest of the day was truly awful, but who cares.