I have been seriously slacking on my poetry game. Besides the fact that I haven't really written in a month, I feel like my style has gotten more than a little stale. This month, I'm going to challenge myself by trying a few different poetic techniques. First haiku, then tankas :) Haven't written these since elementary school, at least, so I decided to google "haiku's for dummies"...and look what I found!!
From Dummies.com
Traditional Forms of Poetry: Tankas and Haiku
The Japanese tanka is a verse form from classical Japanese poetry. Even older than its better-known poetic cousin the haiku, the tanka is a quiet, meditative form that focuses on the natural world and the poet's emotions. A tanka is essentially a haiku (three lines consisting of 5, 7, and 5 syllables each), except it has two additional lines of 7 syllables each.
Traditionally, the tanka begins with an observation of a natural scene:
Invisible hands
caress my face; have I walked
through a spider's web
woven this morning to catch
flies writhing with my surprise
Many poets find that the tanka falls naturally into a haiku followed by a couplet. The haiku tends to focus more on observation, the couplet on reflection. But you don't have to observe this movement in your own writing. The tanka is a syllabic form, so just follow these simple rules:
•Avoid end-rhyming the lines.
•Vary the rhythms from line to line.
•Use enjambment to keep sentences and clauses twisting around the ends of the lines.
•Avoid ending too many lines in a row with a one-syllable word.
