365 Tanka (Waka)
Note: This project was completed in November of 2013. To see commentary about the project, visit the post "Casual Brevities"which outlines results of the cyclical writing session.
For the unfolding season, I have begun the process of generating daily tanka (waka), picking up from the satisfaction of the 365 Daily Haiku exercise.
During the tanka-project however, a stumbling period occurred at one point: a number of days were lost in the beginning— the habitual rhythm which appears for a haiku did not exist as readily for a tanka. My style halted in its pace for some reason; the phrasings could not shift to a new pattern immediately— but more on that subject in a few days. A short essay can be generated from that experience.
After reaching my yearly quota for haiku last season, important points come to mind. Foremost, I did not expect the results of the project to be as favorable as they developed. Only once or twice did I feel the writing to exist as a chore, an expectation— more often than not, the scheduled poems became as an instinctual recording of the day’s events, or as a casual creative passing-thought. The phrasings seemed almost instinctual: a five second scene from general experience easily translated into something larger, through memory and emphasis of personality. An empty glass on a counter-top motions into a heavy metaphor without much effort— any mundane act for that matter can become an aspect of poetic thought. It remains up to the writer to offer a sense of emphasis for an everyday act, for the casual experience of living. Turning the last page of a book, combing out your hair, or listening to your partner snore beside you, all of these add up to explain our humanity. And can become a portion of the core of identity.
Over the next series of weeks, months, I’ll post the results, exploring the various creative outbursts as that develop. Already I plan to begin to use expressionistic, non-traditional approaches with these verses. Ideally I want a less rigid control to be displayed in the new series of poems. My reading during this summer ventured into more avant-garde poetry, into realms of emotive, reactionary discourse rather than logical, traditional rhetoric. What resulted, a slight new emphasis appearing in my own words, even on a casual basis.
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Two Quick Examples from 2011
08.15.11
Left unattended,
the crack in the window grows,
splits out a new path,
creates a hole large enough
for the full moon to slip through—
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08.16.11
The bones of the house
settle down in the middle
of this persistent
drought— the lingering dry winds
callout ghosts from all corners.
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