Tanka Contest Judged - Rick Parise's Blog

Perfecting The Beat............

If you didn't place No Hard Feeling....Please
For each one of us has His or Her own Flower of Attraction.

     
As might be expected in the early stages of adaptation, English-language tanka poets first imitated the Japanese models and strictly adhered to a 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic structure and pattern of short/long/short/long/long lines deduced from them. Generally, this resulted in poems that were too long in comparison to Japanese tanka or that were padded or chopped to meet the fixed number of syllables. Over time, most tanka poets set aside the 5-7-5-7-7 requirement and explored a more resilient free-verse approach, grappling along the way with the issues of using or not using rhyme, titles, and alternate lineation schemes. The work of the leading translators was assiduously studied. Most of these, such as Makoto Ueda, Stephen D. Carter, Sanford Goldstein, and Laurel Rasplica Rodd rendered their translations in five lines. There were other approaches, however. H. H. Honda advocated the use of the quatrain for tanka; Kenneth Rexroth occasionally used a four-line structure in his renderings of Japanese tanka. Hiroaki Sato continues to favor the one-line format for his translations.

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Such tanka combine the objective imagery of a haiku with a subjective response or personal reflection in the poem’s concluding lines; the order can also be reversed. It is the subjective element in a tanka that chiefly distinguishes it from most haiku, in addition to its greater length. Here, the concluding two-line component is a simple, personal reflection or response to the initial image, placing the silent aircraft in the context of a starry sky.  The twist in sense here—that the aircraft is the more remote, alien object—gives a postmodern slant to the traditional tanka theme of loneliness.  

Consider the movement Geraldine Clinton Little’s poem:

                    ah, summer, summer,
                     how quickly you fade. I cut
                             rusted zinnias,
                     place them on a glassed table-
                       top, as if time could double.

Is Tanka Poetry Complex

 Also a poem of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, this tanka is more complicated, having three parts and given momentum by the use of enjambment: “ah summer, summer / how quickly you fade” functions as the strophe, “I cut / rusted zinnias, / place them on a table- / top,” is the antistrophe, and the poem’s sliding to a rest on “as if time could double” functions as a kind of epode. The enjambed strophes and abrupt shifts generate tension and underscore the poet’s wistful contemplation of time’s evanescence. The reflected double-image of the zinnias on the glass tabletop is an especially powerful image, again showing the use of an objective correlative to convey both idea and emotion while preserving aesthetic distance.

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The tanka is sometimes separated by the three “upper lines” (kami no ku) and the two “lower ones” (shimo no ku). The upper unit is the origin of the haiku. The brevity of the poem and the turn from the upper to the lower lines, which often signals a shift or expansion of subject matter, is one of the reasons the tanka has been compared to the sonnet. There is a range of words, or engo (verbal associations), that traditionally associate or bridge the sections

In many ways, the tanka resembles the sonnet, certainly in terms of treatment of subject. Like the sonnet, the tanka employs a turn, known as a pivotal image, which marks the transition from the examination of an image to the examination of the personal response. This turn is located within the third line, connecting the kami-no-ku, or upper poem, with the shimo-no-ku, or lower poem.

Loosely Judged This Round, as we all continue to learn.

Info Taken From Michael McCintock ( Tanka Online)  and Poets.org  and Me............