f/k/a archives . . . real opinions & real haiku

       This time last Saturday, I came into possession of a lovely haiga bookmark painted by Susan Frame, with a haiku by Pamela Miller Ness.  I want to share it with you, just as Pamela shared it with those attending the Haiku Society of America Metting. Click here to see it in color, full-sized.

 

 

muddy puddle

a plump robin

a plump robin

from Reeds 3

There never seems to be enough new haiku and senryu from Pamela.  One very good reason is her work over the past few years with the tanka genre of poetry, including editing The Tanka Anthology (Red Moon Press, 2003) with Michael McClintock and Jim Kacian. I haven’t presented tanka yet, at this website.  But I hope to whet your interest in the 5-line poems by sharing two of Pamela’s, which appeared last year, along with several others, in Simply Haiku 2:3 (2004):

We feed the ducks
you & I
and
the laughing little boy you
have begun to become.

 

…………………………….. American Tanka #7 (Fall 1999)

Packing
Mother’s library
I tuck
the ribbon I gave her
into a new book

…. unrolling the awning, (Grand Central Station Tanka Cafe, 2003

…… by Pamela Miller Ness

 

If you’d like to learn more about tanka poetry, see Michael McClintock’s Introduction to Tanka at Simply Haiku, and the Tanka Definition page of the Tanka Society of America.  McClintock notes: “While poets continue to experiment, the contemporary tanka in English may be described as typically an untitled free-verse short poem having anywhere from about twelve to thirty-one syllables arranged in words and phrases over five lines, crafted to stand alone as a unitary, aesthetic whole—a complete poem.”   In Footsteps in the Fog (Foster City, California: Press Here, 1994), Pat Shelley gives a more literary perspective:

“Tanka in English is a small lyrical poem that belongs to everyone. Still written in thirty-one or fewer syllables in five rhythmic lines, as it was over 1,200 years ago, it can embrace all of human experience in its brief space with emotions of love, pity, suffering, loneliness, or death, expressed in the simplest language. It may sometimes seem fragmentary or lacking in unity because it is more intuitive than analytical, using imagery rather than abstractions . . . . One of the more challenging (and charming) of its elements is the subtle turn at the center of the poem, something unexpected perhaps, usually occurring after the second or third line as two seemingly unrelated events, images, or ideas are brought together, something less than narrative, an elliptical space that adds pleasure to our listening. Tanka is about our everyday lives in the smallest happenings, a little song of celebration.”

 

potluck 

   

From the plump to the political:  I can’t let the week pass without noting

Hillary Clinton’s tryout as Compander-in-Chief.  As a New York Times

editorial noted, “Senator Clinton, in Pander Mode” (Dec. 7, 2005),  Hillary

Clinton is co-sponsoring a bill to criminalize the burning of the American

flag, and “It’s hard to see this as anything but pandering.”  As they explain:  

Mrs. Clinton says her current position grew out of conversations

with veterans groups in New York, and there’s no question that

many veterans – and, indeed, most Americans – feel deeply

offended by the sight of protesters burning the flag. (These days,

that sight mainly comes from videos of the Vietnam War era; the

senator’s staff did not have any immediate examples of actual New

York flag-burnings in the recent past.) But the whole point of the

First Amendment is to protect expressions of political opinion that

a majority of Americans find disturbing or unacceptable. As a lawyer,

the senator presumably already knows that.

Maureen Dowd noted: “As Condi [Rice] used weasel words on torture, Hillary

took a weaselly position on flag-burning. Trying to convince the conservatives

that she’s still got a bit of that Goldwater Girl in her, the woman who would be

the first woman president is co-sponsoring a Republican bill making it illegal to

desecrate the American flag. The red staters backing this measure are generally

the ones who already can’t stand Hillary, so they won’t be fooled. . . The senator

doing Clintonian triangulating is just as transparent as the secretary doing

Clintonian parsing.”  If Ms. Clinton keeps this up, my liberal friends will start to

understand, perhaps, why I just don’t trust the woman.