It’s February! The second month of the year. I managed to procrastinate making this post for so long that handegg is now over and the real sports can begin. That’s right, pitchers and catchers report soon!
[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
A. Bartlett Giamatti
I used to hate baseball, can you imagine?
Why am I talking about baseball so much on my blog about writing? I don’t know. Maybe it’s so I don’t have to talk about what happens later this week because it’s silly. The point of this post is to talk about this month’s project, and we won’t talk about how it’s almost halfway through the month now and this might be the only post you get about the project.
This month, I’m looking at a short form of poetry called the tanka. I chose February as the month for this format completely at random, but it turns out my random choice was perhaps guided by higher beings. The tanka, which originated in Japan in the 7th century, was often used in courtship. Yeah, these were kissing poems.
The tanka consists of 31 syllables, usually a single line or thought, divided over 5 lines, forming a 5/7/5/7/7 syllabic pattern. Obviously, I don’t write Japanese (yet…?) but I’ll do what I can to stick to this format in English. The hardest part for me thus far has been the turn in the middle. It’s also what I struggled with in sonnets. I struggle with formats, in generally. I am a free verse poet, first and foremost.
This is my favorite tanka I’ve discovered so far. Dreamy.
Person of the Playful Star:
Tanka [I listen to songs]
Tada Chimako
I listen to songs
of someone handsome
at the apex of night
the Milky Way overflows
the stars boil over and fall
From The Forest of Eyes by Tada Chimako, translated by Jeffrey Angles. Copyright © 2010
Tanka #1
off the rails / snow outside
rhonda j merrill
tethered between two --
lights pink and green to red ice
snow compacted in
my fist becomes my torment;
you humming far inside me
loose threads 
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