Writing the Days, One Ronka at a Time

I wrote a guest post for Adele Kenny's poetry blog, The Music In It, about my daily writing practice this year and the ronka poems I have been writing and posting online.

It is a good exercise to get "meta" about your writing once in awhile and think about what you write and why. Treat yourself as an assignment from that poetry class and look at the themes that run through your poems, the language etc. (I didn't realize how many birds were flying into my daily poems.)

Here is what I wrote for Adele.

This year I wanted to take on a daily writing practice with my poetry.  It's not an original New Year's resolution. William Stafford is the poet who inspired me the most. he wrote every day of his life from 1950 to 1993. Not everything he wrote was a poem. His 20,000 pages of daily writings include early morning meditations, poems, dream records, aphorisms, and other �visits to the unconscious.�

I do write every day, but not always poetry, so the resolution was to do a daily poem. Stafford did go through a period when that was also his goal. When he was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning, he replied, �I lower my standards.� I like that answer, but, while the phrase has a negative connotation, Stafford meant that he allowed himself some bad poems knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day and I thought using a short form might make the project more likely to succeed. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I ended up creating my own form for this project.

Finding a photo of her

from that summer when we were fifteen
that hot day behind the beach house
her bare shoulders, back, arms and legs -
when I suddenly realized she�s a woman
and it startled me.  It startled me.

I call my form the ronka � obviously a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

The term waka originally encompassed a number of differing forms including the tanka (�short poem�) and choka (�long poem�), sedoka (�memorized poem�?) and katauta (�poem fragment�). Of those, only the tanka has really survived.

If you look at those forms, you notice that the numbers 5 and 7 are the heart of all of them.  The katauta is  5-7-7  and the choka counts out  at 5-7-5-7-5-7�5-7-7 and the sedoka at 5-7-7-5-7-7 is composed of two sets of 5-7-7.

The tanka form consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. Even in that short form, the tanka has two parts. The 5-7-5 is called the kami-no-ku (�upper phrase�) and the 7-7 is called the shimo-no-ku (�lower phrase�).

For my invented form, a ronka contains 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Westerners consider haiku to be 5, 7, and 5 lines counted by syallables, but, since Chinese and Japanese have no syllables, that has always been a Western convention.

Letters Loved

Old letters from lovers, not love letters,
but timelines of relationships like plot diagrams -
conflicts, turning points, resolutions, conclusions, mostly tragedies.
Why do I save them? No sequels.
Dangerous tinder to have around. Best burned.

As with traditional tanka, I decided to have no rhyme. (Even accidental rhymes were considered faults in a tanka.). I also decided to use the haiku principle of show rather than tell. For example, to indicate spring by mentioning cherry blossoms rather than stating the season. I started the year trying not to include myself or people as frequently as we do in Western poetry, those have crept into the poems.

I have even added a few footnotes and links to poems.

Fathers and Sons

Sons grow up and leave their fathers
to become fathers and perhaps have sons.
Child is the father of the man,
said another poet, his heart leaping up.
Five days of rain, then, a rainbow.

We are just past mid-year and I have maintained by daily poem practice without great difficulty. I post them online at Writing the Day and each observation of the day is categorized as being from the outside world or inside the world of dwellings or the mind.

I write at all times of the day, but most poems seem to come at the end of the day. (I also set a daily 10 pm reminder on my phone about posting a poem.)

A non-poet might think that writing 35 words a day is not much of a challenge, but poets will understand that I frequently don't write much faster than a word-per-minute. I also post an image (my own or borrowed) with each poem.

Some poems are ars poetica or poems about poetry or writing.

Firefly Revision

Basho considered a Kikaku haiku as cruel:
A red firefly / tear off its wings -
a pepper.  A pepper / give it wings �
a red firefly, was Basho�s simple change.
Revision as a Buddhist act of kindness.

Carving

No, writing poetry is more like carving
wood and taking away, finding the heart
hidden inside, paring, using point and blade.
The danger comes from the dull knife.
The soft inside will be thrown away.

Some are observations on a particular day, such as this one from the Friday the 13th in June:

A thirteenth day that is a Friday.

A Full Moon to complete a triad

of  strange correlation without any real causation.

We look carefully for signs and connections -

find clockwork regularity; serendipity in the moments.

The blog I post to has a "tag cloud" feature and I tag each ronka with a few keywords that describe the poem. It is interesting to me to see what words occur most frequently: birds, time, the Moon and tea have all been things that I seem to return to this year.

Titles have become another way of adding a line to the poem, though I still limit myself to seven words there too.

I�m Not An Actor in Hollywood But

I want a body and stunt double.

I want better lighting. No high definition.

More scenes and lines, 20 against 20,

gross points on profits, hand and footprints,

a star on the Walk of Fame.

There are lots of books and websites to find poetic inspiration through writing prompts. I have been doing a monthly one at Poets Online since 1998.  Adele has provided almost 200 well-defined prompts here already. My fellow New Jersey poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Diane Lockward have excellent craft books with prompts - Writing Poetry To Save Your Life and The Crafty Poet, respectively. William Stafford and Stephen Dunning's Getting the Knack is a book I bought when I started teaching and I still dip into for inspiration.

Daily practices have a long history as paths of transformation spiritually, physically and for learning a craft. Perhaps, meditation and prayer will be your spiritual practice. Perhaps, yoga, tai chi or running is your physical practice. You might even combine them - kinhin is walking meditation. Consider a daily writing practice, whether it be poetry, a field guide from nature, a garden journal, one page of that long-intended novel. Disciplines of the mind are a good way to a healthy brain!

Adele is a poet and offers regular writing prompts online that are very well explained and illustrated. She is a fine poet herself - check out her collection What Matters - and she has written many books on a variety of topics.

A former professor of creative writing in the College of New Rochelle's Graduate School, Adele Kenny is founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series (NJ), which is where I first met her. She is one of those many people across the country whose local efforts keep poetry alive. The readings have featured New Jersey poets and nationally-known poets, including Mark Doty, Jim Haba, Stephen Dunn, BJ Ward, Renee Ashley, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Laura Boss, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Diane Lockward, Alicia Ostriker and Patricia Smith.

Adele is also the poetry editor of Tiferet Journal. She has read in the US, England, Ireland, and France, and has been a featured reader at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Writing the Day

Writing the Day was the name I chose for a new daily practice I started for 2014. It wasn't a New Year Resolution, and it wasn't totally original.  I want to write a poem each day.

William Stafford is the poet who inspired this daily practice the for me. Stafford wrote every day of his life from 1950 to 1993. He left us 20,000 pages of daily writings that include early morning meditations, dream records, aphorisms, and other �visits to the unconscious.�

It�s not that I don�t already write every day. I teach and writing is part of the job. I do social media as a job and for myself. I work on my poetry. I have other blogs. But none of them is a daily practice or devoted to writing poems.

When Stafford was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning and what he did when it didn�t meet his standards, he replied, �I lower my standards.�

I like that answer, but I know that phrase �lowering standards� has a real negative connotation. I think Stafford meant that he allows himself some bad poems and some non-poems, knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I decided to create my own form for this project.

I call the form ronka � a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

And that will be our short prompt for this short month.

These poems are meant to be one observation on the day. It might come upon waking. It might come during an afternoon walk, or when you are alone in the night.The poems should come come from paying close attention to the outside world from earth to sky or from inside � inside a building or inside you.

People know haiku as three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. But that�s an English version, since Japanese doesn�t have syllables.

The tanka form consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when Romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7.

For my invented ronka form, there are 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Like traditional tanka and haiku, my form has no rhyme. You want to show rather than tell. You want to use seasonal words - cherry blossoms, rather than �spring.�

It's hard for Western writers to stay out of their poems - lots of "I" - but ronka have fewer people walking about in the poem.

The poems are just 5 lines, but you can certainly write several on a single theme and chain them together renga style.

For examples, there are some on our main site and all my ronka poems so far are on the Writing the Day website. I look forward to you outdoing me at my own form.

Submission deadline: February 28, 2014

Figurative Language

These days, many people associate formal poetry with "old poetry."  Forms, like sonnets, and rhyme schemes are often seen as those things we had to study in school.

When many readers see lines like

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?

their eyes get cloudy - and they stop reading.

Diane Lockward is the author of three poetry books, most recently, Temptation by Water.  Her free monthly poetry newsletter (subscribe here) has reviews, writing tips and a poetry prompt. She is collecting some of those prompts and model poems in a new book, The Crafty Poet, due out later this year.

In one issue, I was struck by Diane's suggestion that literal language is not always enough for a poem.

The just-right use of the figurative�moving beyond the dictionary meaning of words�can open a poem to both broader interpretation and greater exactness. Metaphor and simile are what we first think of when we consider figurative language, but there are enough other rhetorical figures to boggle the mind. 

Five of the figurative tools that she suggests (beyond the familiar metaphor and simile) are apostrophe, personification, hyperbole, metonymy, and synecdoche. They are all good tools that poets should know and use.

To use apostrophe, as John Donne does, for example, in his sonnet �Death, be not proud,� is to bring to the subject an immediacy not otherwise possible. Direct address achieves this feeling of being up-close and personal.

Personification creates a similar effect of immediacy. It can enliven a poem and heighten its emotion, as Philip Levine does in �Animals Are Passing from Our Lives,� a poem in which the pig speaking is given human qualities: It's wonderful how I jog / on four honed-down ivory toes. Personification can be tricky; the key is knowing when to use it and how much is enough in a poem.

Frost, in �After Apple-Picking,� finds a surprisingly convincing way to get across the idea �I have had too much / Of apple picking� with the hyperbole �There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch.�

Metonymy, with its substitution of an associated word for the intended one, shortwires the way we think of the substituted term and thereby offers an efficiency of language. In �How She Described Her Ex-Husband When the Police Called,� poet Martha Clarkson ends with, "He�s the joker pinned in bicycle spokes / vanishing down the street." Because it�s common knowledge that a joker is a playing card, the substitution works.

Synecdoche, with its substitution of a part for the whole, is a type of metonymy, providing that same efficiency. T. S. Eliot uses synecdoche in �The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock� in the lines "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."  In doing so, he gives us claws as an intentional disembodiment.

Prompt: Five

I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold
by Charles Demuth, 1928.
Image: metmuseum.org

Although I am going to write first here about five-line stanza forms, this prompt is really about the number five.

The cinquain (AKA quintain or quintet and pronounced sing-keyn) is both a poem or a stanza form that is composed of five lines. Cinq is French for five and examples of cinquain poems are found in many European languages, but the origin of the form is in medieval French poetry.

This form can be very formal or more loosely followed, and there are several variations that have developed over the centuries.

In very formal English poetry, cinquains follow a rhyme scheme of ababb, abaab or abccb.

Going back to the 16th and 17th century poets, such as Sir Philip Sidney, George Herbert, Edmund Waller, and John Donne, you find this form used.  Here is the first stanza of  "The World" by George Herbert:

Love built a stately house, where Fortune came,
And spinning fancies, she was heard to say
That her fine cobwebs did support the frame,
Whereas they were supported by the same;
But Wisdom quickly swept them all away.

An American example is "To Helen" by Edgar Allen Poe, whose first stanza is:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

The Sicilian quintain rhyme scheme is used in "Home is so Sad� by Philip Larkin:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

When Poets Online looked at cinquains earlier, we used as our model Adelaide Crapsey. She was an early twentieth-century poet who used a cinquain form of 22 syllables distributed among the five lines in a 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2 pattern.

She was influenced by the Japanese tanka, another five-line form that we have tried on Poets Online. Her poems also focused on imagery and the natural world.

Adelaide Crapsey's poetry was published after her death in 1915 as Verseand the completed portion of her work on prosody is in (the very dry volume) A Study in English Metrics. What her form does that the Japanese form consciously avoids doing is to include the very Western closing, climax or message.

Here are two of her poems

Amaze

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.

Niagara
Seen on a Night in November

How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.

Not all of her poetry was in the cinquain form. Take a look at her "To The Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window", a poem written as her death from tuberculosis approached, and one she said was �Written in a Moment of Exasperation.�

---

Five, the number, appears in many forms. It is the third prime number. A Fermat prime. 5 sided polygons are pentagons. Pentagrams are 5-sided stars with many symbolic meanings. I like that it is the fifth Fibonacci number.

And five has many symbolic meanings in cultures from the Greeks through the Maya, Celtic and others, and allusions in the Bible and literature.

A quick search online turns up many poems using five, such as "To a Farmer Who Hung Five Hawks on His Barbed Wire" by David Wagoner, "It Was Going on Five in the Morning" by Andr� Breton and "Five Easy Prayers for Pagans" by Philip Appleman.

Our new prompt has two parts (I guess it should have had 5 parts.) and an additional option.

1. Write a poem that uses some aspect of five as an element of its content and meaning.
2.  Use 5-line stanza(s). You can write a short single cinquain or you can write multiple stanzas (5X5?).
* Optional Challenge: Use one of the formal cinquain/quintain/quintet rhyme schemes as illustrated above by Crapsey and Larkin.

I chose as a model poem on the website this month a poem that uses the quintain and is well known to poetry fans: �The Road Not Taken� by Robert Frost. I could not find a poem that uses the five-line form and also has a theme of five. I'm sure one exists. If you find it, post a comment here.

Frost ends his poem with:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
�I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Rhyme nor Reason and The Faerie Queene

Prince Arthur and the Faerie Queen - F�ssli, Johann Heinrich, 1788

I posted yesterday on another blog of mine about the origin of the phrase "rhyme or reason." I have always had a fascination for the origins of words, phrases, and the names we attach to people and things. (see Why Name It That? for more)

The poet Edmund Spenser gets credit for "rhyme or reason" and the story tells us something about the life of the poet back in Elizabethan times and his Spenserian stanza.

In 1589, Edmund Spenser was an admired poet by the rich and famous - which was the audience that mattered. His book of pastoral poems The Shepheardes Calender published in 1579 was a great success at court. But poets did not make a living selling books, but by having rich patrons. Running short on money, Spenser took on a position as a secretary to Lord Grey, the new Deputy to Ireland.


At 28-year, Edmund went to Ireland, where Grey crushed an Irish rebellion against the English, seized lands and gave Spenser about 3,000 acres, with hills, streams, and a castle to live on. Sweet deal.

Spenser worked for Grey for ten years and worked on his new epic poem.

Fellow poet and well known adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh, lived nearby on his own 12,000-acre estate. In 1589, Raleigh visited Spenser, who showed him the first three parts of his new epic, The Faerie Queene.

It was a very ambitious writing project. In a letter written by Spenser to Raleigh in 1590, he describes the goal as an allegorical presentation of virtues through Arthurian knights in the mythical "Faerieland". This letter is often presented as a preface to the epic in most published editions. It oulines plans for 24 books: 12 based each on a different knight who exemplified one of 12 "private virtues", and a possible 12 more centered on King Arthur displaying 12 "public virtues".

Spenser never completed all the books and actually diverged from the plan in the earliest books.

Raleigh thought that Spenser should present the first book personally to Queen Elizabeth. They traveled to England together that fall, and Spenser registered the poem for publication with a dedications to "the most mightie and magnificent empress Elizabeth."

Elizabeth heard him read his poem aloud and she did love it. He was hot in the circles of society again and hoped to receive enough patronage to stay in England.

Elizabeth suggested that Spenser be paid �100 but her chief advisor, Lord Burghley, who wasn't high on poetry or Spenser, objected. The story is that Elizabeth told him to pay the poet "what is reason."

Burghley didn't pay him at all.

After a few months, Spenser sent Elizabeth this short verse:

I was promised on a time
To have a reason for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season,
I received nor rhyme nor reason.

Spenser got his payment, and we got the phrase "rhyme nor reason." Today "rhyme or reason" means "without purpose, order, or reason" as in "The statistics were so disorganized, that the conclusions were without rhyme or reason."

Copley's Red Cross Knight and Ladies

The epic was written in Spenserian stanza, which was created specifically for The Faerie Queene. In this style, there are nine iambic lines � the first eight of them five footed and the ninth a hexameter � which form interlocking quatrains and a final couplet. The rhyme pattern is ABABBCBCC.

Suggestions for its construction were taken from three Italian metres: the Ottava Rima, the Terza Rima, the Sonnet and the Ballade stanza.

This would probably not make a popular poetry writing prompt. Each book of The Faerie Queene contains a proem and twelve cantos. Each cantos has forty eight stanzas. This means that each book as a whole has over 18,000 lines. Over 2000 stanzas were written for the 1590 Faerie Queene.

The poem begins:

Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
    As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,
    Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske,
    For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
    And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
    Whose prayses hauing slept in silence long,
    Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
    To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song.

There are several "modern English versions of Spenser's Middle English language (see link 5 below). One version paraphrases the opening this way:

Lo I the man, whose Muse while did mask,
As time her taught, in lowly Shepherds weeds,
Am now enforced a far less fit task,
For trumpets stern to change mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
Whose prayers having slept in silence long,
Me, all too mean, the sacred Muse agreed
To blazon broad amongst her learned throng:
Fierce wars and faithful loves shall moralize my song.

1. Spenser, Fairie Queene (free audiobook), Librivox.
2. The Faerie Queene (free online edition), Luminarium.
3. Edmund Spenser: A Life
4. Edmund Spenser: The Complete Poetical Works (for the Kindle)
5. You can download several versions of the poem (Kindle, epub etc.) free  from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15272