Create a Poem for Change
Your Very Own Tanka
By creating your own tanka poem for change, you may discover that change is within your reach.
Creating change requires more than reading an article about how others changed their lives. It requires a willingness to seeing how things can be different. This page offers you that possibility with a special flair. It was created by Alysa Cummings, a talented women you can contact at ACUMMING@bcc.edu.
Good luck and best wishes.
— ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT
Risk the unlived life
Tapes run in my head; judge me
Turn them off; tune in
New songs, new stations — risk it
Radio Grow: top ten hit
— Alysa Cummings
If you wonder what a "tanka" might be, you can read some wonderful examples of this ancient style of poetry that "speaks to the modern soul" on the website of the journal American Tanka. As the homepage notes:
Tanka is the modern name of a form of Japanese verse that dates back over twelve centuries. Older than haiku, tanka differs from haiku in both its form (31 syllables) and its style of expression. In Japan, tanka has long been considered the most important form of Japanese poetry.
In recent decades, not only have western readers begun to discover Japanese-language tanka through originals and translations, but western poets have begun to explore the power of the tanka form in their own languages.
It is probably not an exaggeration to say that when many people first discover tanka, they experience a revelation about the power of poetry in their lives, as if they at last understand the transformative emotional significance both of reading others' words and of writing one's own poetry. Around the world, tanka poetry is making poets out of people who never would have thought of writing a poem before. |
