Category: Photography

Tanka #3: a brief guide to the 31-syllable poetic form

OldChristmasTree

once crowned with a star
it glittered in the firelight
last year’s Christmas tree
dumped forgotten and homeless
its chocolate coins melted

Anyone else out there with a seasonal tanka in them, bursting to get out, if only they understood a little more about this poetic form?

Here are the absolute basics: a tanka is a five-line poem of 31 syllables shared 5-7-5-7-7, so it’s just a longer version of a haiku, which is three lines of 17 syllables shared 5-7-5. Lines 1 and 2 of the tanka usually represent a moment or thought in concrete terms. Line 3 is the pivot. Lines 4 and 5 are your reflection upon that moment or thought.

Sometimes I punctuate my tanka, but the one above called for me to leave it as bare and unadorned as the dead and abandoned tree. There is no hard and fast rule about punctuation.

For more on writing tanka, have a look at http://www.tankaonline.com/Quick%20Start%20Guide.htm

There’s also a comprehensive history of tanka at http://www.tankaonline.com/About%20Tanka%20and%20Its%20History.htm 

Looking forward to seeing your compositions, and please do paste a link to them as a “comment” to this post.

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And now for something completely unrelated to this post — today I received this message from WordPress:

Happy Anniversary!

You registered on WordPress.com 1 years ago!

Thanks for flying with us. Keep up the good blogging!

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AND WHAT A YEAR IT HAS BEEN!

A GREAT BIG HUG AND THANK YOU TO ALL MY WONDERFUL BLOGGING FRIENDS 🙂

For the Love of Haiku

Playing desert tennis
causes thundering headaches
and clouded judgement.

Wednesday already? I’m late this week with my contribution to http://allaboutlemon.com/for-the-love-of-haiku/ We’ve had our first flurry of snow today in Southern England. My cacti are sheltering indoors, the tennis courts in the park are empty, and ice cream is the last thing on the menu.

Thank you, as usual, to adollyciousirony for hosting this event, and to everyone who contributed to the desert picture 🙂

For the Love of Haiku

Train packed with Chavettes.
Gollum has discovered bling
and bad time-keeping.

My contribution to this week’s haiku challenge — hosted as usual by the wonderful adollyciousirony at http://allaboutlemon.com/2012/11/24/for-the-love-of-haiku-12/  — possibly requires some explanation of its slang content, for the sake of the international blogging platform.

Chavette is the female version of a Chav, heralding from a town called Chatham in the county of Kent in the southeast of England. To read a full description of Chavettes, go to http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chavette  As you will gather from entry (2) on the page, they love cheap designer jewellery, otherwise known as bling and are probably the only adults on earth who’d be seen dead wearing hairbands with fake diamonds and rabbit ears.

For those few who haven’t read JRR Tolkien‘s The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, Gollum (the traindriver in the above picture) is obsessed with what he calls his “precious”, which is a gold ring http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Gollum

And, for a bit of added amusement, here is a picture of Gollum embracing the Chav culture:

PS: A small addition to my original post on Saturday — Dolly has just fixed the link to http://allaboutlemon.com/art-game/ag-w-23-sncf-tgv-duplex-speed-train/ so do check out the artgame players and their contributions to the train picture.