Tag Archives: tanka prose

Time for a Change of Pace

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Here’s a Tanka prose from a while back. I thought it was time for a more relaxed posting. It’s tempting, after my recent reading of a book of poetry criticism, to write about the poem. But I won’t, because it won’t improve anything.

This was first published in Ribbons, in Winter 2023.

The Shadow of the Red Kite

Simon Wilson, Nottingham, UK

The autumn sun warms my back as we sit in the old stable yard. My wife outlines her plans for the day and I run my fingers over the grain in the silvery surface of the weathered tearoom table. Our tea and bara brith arrive. Translated from the Welsh, bara brith means speckled bread, referring to the dried fruit that is its most noticeable feature.

Three wasps also arrive. Two fly away as my wife flaps her hand at them, but one lands on the table and stalks my food. It hauls itself over the rim and begins to gorge on the juicy centre of a raisin. My wife tells me to chase it off but I don’t have the heart. It is September and soon it will die. I can spare a little dried fruit for a fellow struggler.

She breaks off the conversation and points over my shoulder. I turn to see the distinctive silhouette of a Red Kite overhead. When I was a child, it was a very rare bird in the UK, and survived only in Wales. I remember the combined thrill and disappointment I experienced on a family holiday when I was ten years old–the profile and the flash of red that denoted a kite, but at a distance so great I could hardly see it, and never quite believed I had seen one.

kites in the sky
and mist on the mountains
with you beside me
if this is all life is
it is enough

 

Red Kites at Gigrin Farm

Boasting, Bragging and Blowing My Own Trumpet

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You’ve read the title, so brace yourself for a lack of modesty and some tasteless self-promotion.

Normally I wouldn’t warn people, but having recently seen that the University of Greenwich is issuing warnings to students about the disturbing content of jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, I felt I’d better follow the trend. I’ve never actually read Northanger Abbey, though I was traumatised by previous attempts to read Austen. Her books are just so dull when compared to the films and TV series. However, if I had read it, I doubt I would be distressed by the “gender stereotyping” I encountered. If they find that distressing how are they going to cope with Orwell, Hemingway and H P Lovecraft? Or even Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh and the Mr Men, who all cover some hardcore issues compared to jane Austen and gender stereotyping? If they need a warning about the horror of reading jane Austen, what about Shakespeare? Yes, Titus Andronicus, I’m thinking about you . . .

Love Locks at Bakewell

You see more gender stereotyping on reality TV than you do in a classic novel, and so far, unfortunately, nobody has thought to issue a warning about Love Island. I was going to add a link here, but have decided against advertising it.

Anyway, back to my warning.

I had another acceptance. That’s three from the seven I sent out. Allowing for the fact that three are competition entries (where I expect to wait months to find I wasn’t shortlisted) it’s really three from four. I’m happy with that.

That’s the warm-up bragging.

Peak Shopping Village

The other comes in the form of Contemporary Haibun 18, which is an annual anthology. Entries are sent in by the editors of magazines and poems are selected for inclusion. The goal, according to the Forward, is to present “some of the finest haibun, tanka prose and haiga created over the past year”.

Right at the back of the book, lurking in the “W” section, is one of mine. I know it’s not a mistake, because they wrote and asked. Waiting for the book to be published I was quietly smug, and when it actually arrived today I was, for a moment, very pleased with myself. However, it’s important to note that there are 91 other writers in there, and 24 of them have multiple entries, so I am going to show off now by telling everyone, and then I’m going to start making notes for new poetry.

That’s the problem with things like this – you have to keep working harder and harder to make sure the feeling of happiness continues.

An attempt at artistry

Adventures with a Keyboard

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It is done. It is not done well, but by the end I was just concentrating on the clock. My 7th submission departed my email box at 11.45pm, a full fifteen minutes before the deadline. The eighth, I had already mentally abandoned.

I have learnt some useful lessons about writing in the last few weeks, so it hasn’t been the chaotic waste it may look like from the outside. I’ve also learnt about time management. Or possibly I have relearnt that, as I tend to make the same mistake over and over – not allowing enough time, and always over-estimating my ability to work at high speed as the deadline approaches.

Turning on my email this morning I found I had already had one acceptance – an editor with superpowers. How can anyone work that fast? Also, of course, an editor with exquisite taste.

In my haste, Iet a typo slip through in the accepted tanka prose. This is embarrassing and amateurish. Unfortunately, in missing off the “t” from “the” I still made the word “he” and my lazy reliance on spellcheckers let me down.

Even worse, I woke this morning and remembered that one of the other submissions went off with a single word descriptive title title. You are supposed to be more complicated when submitting tanka prose and haibun. Unfortunately, I tend to start with a title that helps me find it when it’s mixed up with forty or fifty other poems. It’s something I’ve done before when I’ve been rushing. If the poem is good I will probably be asked to do a new title. If it isn’t, I will be able to come up with a new one as part of the edit. I’ve just thought of a good one whilst writing this.

Blood test now. See you later.

My Orange Parker Pen

What is a Haibun?

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I was asked recently, in the comments, for a definition of a haibun. The quick answer is that it’s some prose with a haiku. As answers go, that’s accurate, but not particularly useful.

It’s likely, if you look back at old poems, that it doesn’t actually have to have a haiku. However, try convincing an editor of that.

A haiku is a very short poem that, over the years, has attracted a lot of rules. In Japanese it has 17 “on”, which are sound units. They are not the same as syllables, though they were originally treated as if they were. In Japanese “haiku” has three “on”., but only two syllables in English. Originally we were told to write haiku in three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. If you check on the internet, you will still be told that. This is wrong.

We are now allowed to use lines of different length and told that 13 syllables is probably about right. We aren’t supposed to include ourselves or poetic devices in haiku and they are supposed to have a season word, talk of nature and a cutting word to differentiate the two parts of the haiku. They like to have two parts – one being what you saw and the other (usually the last line), something that acts as as a contrast. If they talk of human nature, they are senryu, but for haibun purposes they are much the same. They also have simplicity and various sad, wistful feelings attached to them. As I say, short poem, a lot of rules.

Strangely, a lot of the “rules” started off as guidelines and, in the minds of various editors, become rules.

My Orange Parker Pen

Then you get the prose. It should be terse and haiku-like, because it then mirrors the haiku. Or if you read another well-respected poet, it should be different in style from a haiku, as the same style will make it boring.

The haiku should be different from the subject matter, and should “link and shift”. Or, according to another well-known haibun writer, that’s not correct. and is based on a misunderstanding. No, I can’t explain “link and shift” properly. And considering the experience of all the poets and their different views, I can’t tell you exactly what a haibun is either,

Tanka prose is slightly easier to understand. It’s a tanka (five line poem) and prose. There are fewer rules and less discussion about tanka prose, so it’s easier to write. You can concentrate on the writing instead of worrying about hitting the targets imposed by various, contradictory, rules.

Finally, the poem and prose can be placed in different ways. This can be poem and prose or prose and poem. It can also be prose, poem, prose or poem, prose, poem. Or other ways. As usual, there are Japanese words for all these things. And, as usual, I can’t remember them.

That’s a vey short, simple and not exactly neutral explanation. I’ll post a few poems and links over the next few days.

Orange Parker Pen

Day 35

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I had an email today, and I’m happy. For the next month I am going to be on the front page of contemporary haibun online. It feels a bit like being famous, as I’ve actually heard of the other two who are on there. However, to drift back from dreams of fame and success for a moment, if you are reading this in March, you will ned to use this link as I fade back into obscurity and gradually become part of the clutter at the back of the internet.

I’ve just realised that I’m back in drifting sands haibun. I had been rejected for the last two issues but manged to pull something out of the bag for this one. It was mainly written before I became ill in the autumn and I managed to get it polished just in time. Same with the cho submission. Now I just need to get back in my stride for the spring.

I’ve developed some bad habits while I’ve been taking a rest from writing – spending too much time on eBay for instance, and thinking about the problems of the world. I need to get back to poetry and away from real life.

Last night Julia kept twitching in bed, and every time she did so, the covers acted like bellows, drawing cold air across my shoulders and waking me up. It wasn’t all bad, because as I lay awake I invented a new way of keeping warm at night.

Unfortunately, in the cold light of dawn, I realised that the Reheating Hot Water Bottle  wasn’t going to be a goer. It would have been OK in the 1920s when it would have been fine to link a container of water to the mains electricity, using that braided brown flex favoured by our grandparents. But Julia doesn’t think they would allow it now. She also points out that electric blankets are easier and safer and if I feel cold in bed maybe I should buy one and stop waking her at 6am to discuss my ideas for new inventions. I’m afraid she isn’t always open to new ideas, like the one I had about her adding “the famous poet” after every mention of my name. I mentioned that after showing her the cho page. She’s not keen . . .

The top picture is one of Simon Wilson, the famous poet.It’s the unedited version of the one in cho and you can clearly see that my “office” includes a microwave, a kettle and a coin cabinet.

 

 

 

Comments on Rejection

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I had a rejection email a couple of days ago, which was quite good as it had several notes with it. In general it gives me plenty of information about what the editor is thinking, though actual “improvements” are not quite so plentiful. I will act on the suggestions, as they took time and effort to produce, but like several other of my published pieces, I will also write the one i want to write and try again. Poems are, after all, only words and, as I have said before, I have plenty of words to write another one. It’s not like every poem published depletes the stock of words for the rest of us.

The three main points are that I should show, not tell. Last time I sent something to that magazine the comment was that I should have shown the house being built. There was, in the entire poem, no mention of a house being built, and in real life no house was built. The editor imagined it as a result of the poem. This is both good and bad, and after reading up I found that telling is sometimes necessary. It’s one of those things you find when you have contact with editors – inconsistency, grey areas and matters of opinion. Usually, I tell too much and gradually edit it out as I condense the poem. However, this can take months and I wrote the poem in question in three days. The problem wasn’t so much telling not showing – it was rushing things and  not editing properly. I’ll hold my hand up to that one.

Then there was the question of certain phrases and whether they were “poetic” or necessary. One of them was a metaphor that linked with other things in the poem, but that wasn’t noted. I’m obviously too subtle. Another was a phrase that most of you would have recognise a my speaking voice. I tend to write as I speak and I don’t always sound like Shelly or Frost. This irks me slightly a it’s like I’m being edited out of my own poems. It’s happened with others too, so this isn’t unusual.

Finally, the suggestions seem to have reduced the poem to a short paragraph with a tanka at each side. Whether this is by accident or not, I’m not clear. Over the years haibun have become shorter. I presume the same is true for tanka prose, though I admit I didn’t pay much attention to them until I started to write them. It seems to be a particularly American thing – a few lines of prose and a quick poem, usually with a tangential connection to the prose, referred to as “link and shift“. What they don’t tell you is that there are other ways of connecting the two elements.

I will stop there, lest I go on to explore other areas where editors may have blind spots dictated by fashion. I’m very close to 500 words now, which is a long post on a subject that is mainly of interest only to me.

My Orange Parker Pen

Crepuscular rays at Rufford Park

Time to Try Tanka

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Breakfast was baked eggs. I put chopped spring onions, mushrooms. ham, tomatoes and grated cheese in an oiled dish, broke on three eggs and seasoned with black pepper. It’s a substantial brunch designed to last until this evening (with possibly a scone to keep us going) so I think three eggs is OK.

In the oven for twelve minutes (it wasn’t fully heated when I put them in) and Julia said hers was a little too firm for her tastes. She will get ten minutes next time because she is a barbarian who eats eggs before they are decently hard. I was happy with my 15 minutes as I like mine hard, and don’t mind them rubbery.

It’s a simple recipe, but one I seem to have forgotten over the years. Do you have recipes like that?

There are no photos as I ate it well before thinking of them. Maybe next time…

I managed to get three submissions off last night and this afternoon I had an acceptance from the batch sent out on the 18th. I sent ten haiku and eight tanka off to two different editors at the same magazine (they often have different editors for different things and allow you to submit to both) and have now had one accepted by each editor. I’m counting it as two submissions and two acceptances. If it had been one editor at the magazine I’d have only counted it as one. This is one way I’m upping my submission numbers. The other is trying new magazines. I’ve just submitted to one that holds the record for my speediest rejection. I thought I’d give it another go. The editor has changed and the so has the system – if they like it they accept within 14 days. If they don’t like it you can submit it elsewhere after 14 days. It’s a little imprecise, but simple enough as a system, and at least they aren’t going to set any new records.

Julia is making something complicated with chicken and marinades and stuff (she takes more trouble over the food that I do). It smells good, and she has just taken it out of the oven. Time, I think, to load this and eat.

I’m also sending two tanka prose off (the inelegantly named tanka equivalent of haibun) – one of them features crepuscular rays, hence the photo.