Prompt:
Today, Alan Summers wants us to write poems about “humor in love,” and he has a specific form in mind!
Write and capture humorous incidents related to love in a 5-line love poem called a tanka. (You may even decide to create your own tanka journal for love poems!) Here’s how to write one:
1. Describe in concrete terms one or two simple images (two or three lines) from your humorous love encounter, not just what you saw but also what you tasted, touched, smelled or heard.
2. What were you were thinking at the time this love encounter happened? Write that down, too, as two or three lines, so you have five lines in total for the poem.
3. Think about making the third line of your poem into a pivot line, so that it links to both the previous two lines and to the final two lines.
4. Test the tanka by dividing it into two parts so the third line acts both as the last line of the first part and as the first line of the second part. Does each section make sense separately, and then together?
5. Think about reducing — and even avoiding — capitalization and punctuation because a tanka needn’t be like a sentence or merely a flat statement.
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House Party
Three’s a crowd in this musical chair game.
Outside the room, the music was muffled like
A party held underwater or below a train.
Is this really going to happen? Only if the other
leaves to let us be and relive.
Today, Alan Summers wants us to write poems about “humor in love,” and he has a specific form in mind!
Write and capture humorous incidents related to love in a 5-line love poem called a tanka. (You may even decide to create your own tanka journal for love poems!) Here’s how to write one:
1. Describe in concrete terms one or two simple images (two or three lines) from your humorous love encounter, not just what you saw but also what you tasted, touched, smelled or heard.
2. What were you were thinking at the time this love encounter happened? Write that down, too, as two or three lines, so you have five lines in total for the poem.
3. Think about making the third line of your poem into a pivot line, so that it links to both the previous two lines and to the final two lines.
4. Test the tanka by dividing it into two parts so the third line acts both as the last line of the first part and as the first line of the second part. Does each section make sense separately, and then together?
5. Think about reducing — and even avoiding — capitalization and punctuation because a tanka needn’t be like a sentence or merely a flat statement.
---
House Party
Three’s a crowd in this musical chair game.
Outside the room, the music was muffled like
A party held underwater or below a train.
Is this really going to happen? Only if the other
leaves to let us be and relive.
Oh I know this situation...some people are very insensitive or just downright bloody minded!
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