Tanka--Mindful Poetry's Form-of-the-Month of June, 2010

June is a month for precise and pithy sayings.  You'll need to fill out--in more ways than one--graduation cards, wedding cards, anniversary cards, as well as usual birthday cards.  This time include something more than the requisite twenty bucks and your name.

Give the individual/couple a few words to change a life! Okay, that's too lofty, but using a tanka to say something meaningful will challenge you in the writing and the recipient in the reading.

A tanka is a Japanese form of poetry.  In context within its country of origin, it contained 31 sound-units without adherence to any number of lines.  This freedom of pen stroke was conformed to an American-version of 31 syllables arranged in five lines: 5-7-5-7-7 to denote the number of syllables per line.

Fundamentals aside, the essentiality of a tanka is to express your singular snapshot of emotion in a way that transcends the words themselves.  My first example might say it better than my instructional words:

             riding a bus
             through the Oklahoma heat
             an old woman
             tells everything that matters
             to someone else's son

                     ~ Marc Thompson, American Tanka Issue 4

Do you hear that crucial element of pain? Pain for the old woman's son that he is not privy to his mother's deepest thoughts? Pain for the old woman that she finds herself unable to confide in her own child the tender thoughts of her heart? Pain for the unnamed bus rider that he must now be an unwilling vessel to carry this old woman's thoughts?

This is your aim with a tanka.  No, not to evoke pain, but to give the reader an image, a diaphanous impression that suggests emotion or some other powerful experience. If you're counting, you'll note that the example above doesn't adhere strictly to the form.  But yours will, right?

Go to it!  Write a tanka.