Here we go! Thirty poems in thirty days. Today’s poem is the first.
Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own tanka – or multi-tanka poem. Theme and tone are up to you, but try to maintain the five-line stanza and syllable count.
her collar still hangs on the post at the stairs’ base, I can’t move the thing, tags still make their small sound when anyone goes up and down last walk, she went slow, stopped at the same spots she loved, the ones with the smells— I stood there and let her sniff as long as she wanted to the vet said, gently— I don’t remember the words, just her paw in mine, the weight of it, the whole space going somewhere without her black fur on my coat, I still find it, months later, under the table— I leave it where it landed, what else would I do with it
The tanka is an ancient Japanese poetic form. In contemporary English versions, it often takes the shape of a five-line poem with a 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7 syllable-count – kind of like a haiku that decided to keep going.
Some recent examples include L. Lamar Wilson’s “Aubade Tanka,” Tarik Dobbs’s “Commuter Tanka,” and Antoinette Brim-Bell’s “Insomniac Tankas.” And here’s a sort of parody tanka by Paul Violi, which starts out with the kind of cliché image that you might find in a thousand imitations of classic Japanese poetry, and ends up somewhere very different.
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