What to Submit?
1 original, poem on the theme of Lament / Lamentation .............ONE TANKA OLD or NEW
Form -Tanka
lamentation~
mournful chanting song
of only your flowered grace
lone, I reminisce
at the edge of old green pond
sorrow flows on each ripple...
Poet ~ Rick Parise
elegy-
ancient river cry
below the pencil sketched hills
where once dreams consumed
for now, twilight dying fast
writing in tears I lament...
Poet- Rick Parise
About Tanka and Its History
by Amelia Fielden
Tanka, meaning ‘short song’, is the modern name for waka, ‘Japanese song’, the traditional form of lyric poetry which has been composed in Japan for over 1300 years.
Originally intended to be chanted aloud to musical accompaniment, waka are believed to have existed already in the oral literature of the seventh century. The earliest Japanese anthology is the mid eighth century Man’yōshū (Collection of Myriad Leaves), compiled of some 4,496 individual poems on subjects such as the beauty and evanescence of the natural world, human love, laments for the dead, and the affairs of ordinary people. Of them 4,173 are written in waka form.
The waka or tanka is an unrhymed verse form of thirty-one syllables or sound units1 most often written in one continuous unpunctuated line. Nearly all Japanese syllables consist of a single vowel, or consonant plus vowel. As the language has only five vowels, rhyming is too simple to be interesting, hence Japanese poetry does not depend on rhyme. There are no poetic stress accents, so metre based on stress is not possible, either. Instead, traditional Japanese poetry is given rhythm by writing to a pattern of 5/7/5/7/7 sub-units or sound sets, with varying breath pauses being made when read aloud. Japanese is an agglutinative language which strings together shorter elements to create long, sometimes complex, word and phrase formations. Rhythmically and semantically, 5/7/5 combines unevenness with alternation, thus providing a natural balance to offset its inherent fluidity.
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Preparing Your Entry
Submit one copy of your poem online. Format your poem. Please make your entry easy to read — no illustrations or fancy fonts.
English Language
Poems should be in English. Poems translated from other languages are not eligible, unless you wrote both the original poem and the translation.
A Note to Poetry Contestants
You are welcome to enter this contest, whether or not you won a prize in one of my previous contests.