While Scott was diligent in writing his villanelle, I think the rest of us might have been intimidated by the complicated form. Over this Christmas break, I'd like to introduce a different, simpler form of poetry: the tanka.
Like haiku, tanka originated in Japan. Tanka have five lines, with a syllable pattern of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables in the respective lines. Tanka usually convey emotion through a focus on concrete images. A tanka usually breaks into two units, the first three lines forming one unit and the last two lines forming another. (Sometimes the first two are one unit and the last three the other). The middle line can be a "pivot" (kind of like the last two lines of a sonnet). Traditional tanka focus on images in nature and often express love, but your tanka can say be of anything--sleeping by the Christmas tree, a scene of vicious shoppers at the mall, or something completely unrelated to Christmas.
Feel free to post as many tanka as you'd like over this Christmas break!
~Cassie
Below is an example of a tanka:
like clouds
vanishing from a puddle
that morning
my father
silently disappeared
~Mariko Kitakubo
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