Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,
We are going further on our path to explore the beauty of tanka, the love poem of ancient Japan. This month its all about tanka and I hope to improve my own tanka writing skills through the Ten Tanka Writing Techniques by Teika.
Today we have the sixth Tanka Writing Technique, visual description, and the "prompt" is waterfall. Here is the Sixth Tanka Writing Technique by Teika:
Visual description
This is a rather bland style emphasizing visual description and imagery and often containing no subjective or emotive statements. Some of the descendants of Teika, such as his son Tameie, used this style or technique to counteract the strong subjective vein of the "Fujiwara style". In the Teika Jittei are 12 examples of this style among which is this poem by Minamoto Tsunenobu (1016-1097) written on the subject of "young rice shoots" as published in Shikokinshū, #3:225:
sanae toru / yamado no kakehi / morinikeri / hiku shimenawa ne / tsuyu zo koboruru
the water pipe
leading into mountain fields
must be leaking
moisture drips down sacred ropes
around the beds of rice
It seems Shiki's shasei style of "sketching" in haiku would be a carry-over from this tanka technique.
This is a rather bland style emphasizing visual description and imagery and often containing no subjective or emotive statements. Some of the descendants of Teika, such as his son Tameie, used this style or technique to counteract the strong subjective vein of the "Fujiwara style". In the Teika Jittei are 12 examples of this style among which is this poem by Minamoto Tsunenobu (1016-1097) written on the subject of "young rice shoots" as published in Shikokinshū, #3:225:
sanae toru / yamado no kakehi / morinikeri / hiku shimenawa ne / tsuyu zo koboruru
the water pipe
leading into mountain fields
must be leaking
moisture drips down sacred ropes
around the beds of rice
It seems Shiki's shasei style of "sketching" in haiku would be a carry-over from this tanka technique.
 |
| Sacred ropes |
I hope this Tanka Writing Technique will be helpful ...
This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until November 20th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our next episode, loneliness, later on.
This technique is a real example of how complex simplicity can be!
ReplyDelete