Saturday, August 30, 2014

[suspended . . .]

suspended 
on unseen silk
a spider
touches the Tao Te Ching
mother of ten thousand things


~A Hundred Gourds 3:3, June 2014

Saturday, August 23, 2014

potter's wheel



scraps of sky
in a muddy ditch—
the sleeve
of heaven
turns inside out

~A Hundred Gourds 3:3, June 2014


the birthplace
of life 
in a slip of clay—
this potter’s wheel
of stars


~A Hundred Gourds 3: 2, March 2014

Friday, August 15, 2014

Clearing the Spring: Poet & Tanka Essay

The following is an essay I wrote 
for the "Poet & Tanka" feature in Ribbons,
 the journal of the Tanka Society of America.  
It appeared in Ribbons 10:2, spring/summer 2014.



Dont say, dont say there is no water 
to solace the dryness at our hearts
~Denise Levertov, “The Fountain”


I climb the hill with my mother to clear oak leaves from the spring.  A frog leaps in. The water in the cold stone box rises out of the earth and flows down to our house through a copper pipe. Clearing the springthat is tanka, but I will not discover it for half a century.

I grew up immersed in the worlds of nature and of books. Stones and streams and sky were my childhood companions.  I listened to my mother recite Alfred Noyes "The Highwayman" and read aloud from Edna St. Vincent Millay, and in time I discovered Yeats and Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson and e.e. cummings.  My own first composition is penciled on brown paper in my brothers hand because I was too young to print the letters myself.    

       
          at age five
          my first poem, an ode
          to lampshades
          trying ever since to grasp
          the nuances of light
              
               ~A Hundred Gourds 3:2, March 2014


I continued to write throughout high school and college, but while I pursued marriage, further education, two successive careers, and raised two childrenone with significant, multiple disabilitiesit often came as a relief to ignore the naggings of the muse. For long periods she fell silent, though she never left me.  I wrote factual educational materials about biology, but the poetry in that had to stay deeply hidden. I taught nonverbal children how to communicate, but their means of expression were more often pictures than words. I struggled to understand my younger sons disordered communication, and sometimes I found poetry there.


          you write the wind
          a poem on fluttering paper:
          sky moving
          blow windy just Earth
          thunderstorms rain strong
             
                ~from Sky Moving, a tanka sequence, 
                   Lynx 28:1, Feb. 2013


My life expanded when my disabled son, now grown, at last found a safe, caring home away from home, and it expanded again a few years later when I retired. During this period I began writing more than I had in decades.  I published a fistful of poems, and won a couple of awards from my state poetry society. I wrote mostly free verse, but I entertained the niggling suspicion thatas Robert Frost put itwriting free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. I experimented with formsestina, sonnet, villanelle, ghazaland even tried my hand at a few haiku.  Although I intuitively understood the benefits of having a flexible form to push against, I did not discover my form until I stumbled upon tanka.

For that I thank Jane Reichhold.  I had never heard of tanka until I read her little book, Writing and Enjoying Haiku: AHands-on Guide.  Immediately I thought I could do that and began experimenting.   Curiously, my first published tanka comprised an entire sequence, The Rosewood Bird, which, to my amazement, was one of three winning sequences in the twentieth (and final) Tanka Splendor Contest sponsored by AHA Books.  Writing that sequence about my father showed me the uncanny power of tanka to give voice even to a complex grief muffled for forty years.


          still folded
          in a trunk
          the sweater I wore
          the day I learned
          what you had done
             
                 ~from The Rosewood Bird, a tanka sequence,
                  Twenty Years Tanka Splendor, AHA Books, 2009


Over the next several years I made a gradual transition to writing tanka pretty much exclusively.  In 2012, I joined the AHAPoetry Forum (more thanks to Jane Reichhold), which has provided invaluable companionship and help on my journey.  The chance to read and comment on other poets works-in-progress sharpens the eye and ear; and my own tanka receive just the friendly drubbing they often need. 


          the story
          of my life as a changeling
          this poem
          a silk purse stitched
          from a sows left ear
              ~from a sows ear, a tanka sequence, 
                  kernels 1:1, April 2013


More recently, I have taken on the role of Reviews and Features Editor for Claire Everetts Skylark:A Tanka Journal, and in that capacity I look forward to reading and sharing some of the many fine tanka collections currently being published.  Although I have not yet put together a collection of my own, I hope to do so eventually, and in the meanwhile I maintain this blog as a repository for my poems.

But why tanka?  Friends, family, and even mainstream poets are often mystified by my enchantment with the form. 

Tanka clears the spring. The need for compression forces the writer to select only the most telling detailsthere can be no muddying the water with abstract maundering. Simple, concrete images laid side-by-side transmogrify into metaphor as if by magic, like an image coming clear in the rippled surface of a pool.


          small stones
          skip across the water
          trailing glints of light
          our footprints
          on the riverbank
               
              ~A Hundred Gourds 2:1, December 2012


William Stafford, in Writing the Australian Crawl, says that "A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them."  For me, tanka is that process.  Often, I go to sleep frustrated by the elusive whisper of a thought, by a compelling image whose significance I cannot grasp, by a strong but inarticulate feeling.  And often I wake to a flow of words forming themselves into tanka, arising from some mysterious inner wellspring.


          a smattering
          of rain on the roof
          before dawn
          the curtain between worlds
          shimmers and lifts
               
                  ~unpublished


In five lines, tanka affords the writer just enough space to explore the subterranean passageways that connect subjective and objective realms, psyche and Gaia.

        
          the self
          I’ve clung to
          all these years
          moonlight
          on water
               
                ~Skylark 1:1, summer 2013


For me, the most potent source of images for that exploration lies in the natural world--from which we are never separate, despite our post-modern dreams and nightmares.


          ripples
          passing through
          each other
          in an ink-dark pool
          our mirrored faces
                
              ~Skylark 1:2, winter 2013


But while tanka may have a bit more room than haiku for the lyrical expression of the writers emotions and imagination, it is still a vessel small enough to catch and hold the elusive stream of nows that flow through our lives like mist on the wind.


          the gold flash
          of a flicker’s wing
          in gray rain
          I glimpse another world
          inside this one
                 
                ~redlights 9:1, Jan. 2013


And tankas brevity allows me to compose and revise whole poems in my head, so an undercurrent of poetry flows through nearly everything I doan enriching way to live. I hope to keep following that current back toward its source.


         poetry—
         a river to the sea
         cleansed
         of the heart’s darkness
         in marshes where the reeds sing
                 
                  ~Skylark 2:1, summer 2014


      



Sunday, August 10, 2014

rag & bone shop / TSA Award

on pilgrimage
to Yeats’ rag & bone shop—
I hammer
steely scraps of song,
build a monument to loss


~2nd place winner in Tanka Society of America's 2014 International Tanka Contest 

Saturday, August 2, 2014

lost birds


coming home 
from the rally 
for justice and peace—
a shimmer of stars,
the smell of baking bread

     ~GUSTS 19: spring/summer 2014


the twin beams
of the Tribute in Light
go dark. . . 
10, 000 lost birds
find their way home

    ~Atlas Poetica 17: March 2014