Write a poem...

... of 5 lines where the middle line acts as a pivot, i.e. it can be read in conjunction with the first two lines, or it can be read as the line that leads into the final two. Here are a couple of examples of mine:

What it might be called

Two women
are sharing a beach picnic
in January
I breathe in the cold sea-air
and what I want to call, love.

First published in Modern English Tanka 2007


How the story ends

In myths the lost girl
is saved by a prince or eaten
in the forest
I will cut off my hair
paint my nails red.

First published in Simply Haiku Fall 2007

I've been reading Jane Hirshfield who says in an essay about short poems:
Whole fields of saffron pollen can be held in a one-ounce glass vial, acres of lavender in a few drops of oil. The same distillations occur in certain poems’ words.

Good luck!
L x

May Prize Poem

Thanks to everyone for posting poems this month. The ‘tanka-like’ prompt was the most popular, and, I think, the most challenging. Finding an image that will inform the subsequent statement without exactly repeating the same idea takes a lot of thought.

There were two poems that stood out for me in this section: John Kenny’s ‘Lilac lifted’ and Charlotte Segaller’s ‘a roofless house’. Both use images that have strong emotional connections with the statement that follows: the sweet scent of spring flowers that causes sadness or grief in the heart of the narrator, and a half built house that prompts the narrator to consider her own safety.

And it’s Charlotte’s poem that I’ve chosen for the May Prize. The first three lines echo the unfinished nature of the house with the way the words knock into each other and across lines: half built, here above, inside and outside and the image of looking down on something unfinished, and having such a complete view of it (inside and outside at once), is so authentically echoed in the self-questioning. I also like the unusual line break after I’ll/ which, for me, adds an element of emotional hesitancy or trepidation to the poem

Many congratulations, Charlotte. If you email me your postal address (lynne@lynnerees.co.uk) I’ll put your small ‘prize’ in the post.

And here's Charlotte's poem again:


a roofless house half-built
viewed from here above
inside and outside at once
I wonder if I’ll
ever feel safe again

Charlotte Segaller

May Poetry Prompt 1 - Image and Statement

Some of you will know that I am the new haibun* editor at Simply Haiku, an online Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry, and in honour of the latest issue this prompt will ask you to work with a minimum amount of words, and a limited amount of poetic tools.

The following poem is a tanka by Dave Bacharach**:

empty flower pots
stacked upside down
inside each other
we wonder why
the kids don’t call

Tanka traditionally have five lines with some kind of ‘break’ in the poem, often around the middle. They don’t have titles, and adopt a similar approach in their construction to haiku, in that the economy of the form demands that every word counts.

What I admire about this tanka is how the image in the first three lines, sets us up for the statement in the last two. The relationship between empty flower pots and wondering ‘why the kids don’t call’ is not explicit, but the poem immediately feels right to me. When I go back and unpick the image to find out why, I note:

1. the flower pots that presumably once held flowers make me think of the home and the children who used to live there
2. 'upside down’ is not the way a flower pot is meant to function, so something isn’t quite right here, or maybe it’s not the season for flowers now
3. there’s both a sadness and an intimacy suggested by the pots being ‘empty’ and stacked ‘inside each other’

I’m sure there are other observations to be extracted from this short poem too, and feel free to post your responses in the comments box.

While I‘m not going to ask you to write a tanka, as there’s far more that needs to be said about the particularities and possibilities of the form, I am going to challenge you to write a five line poem, some of which might end up being tanka:

Write an untitled, five line poem with each line being no longer than 5 words:
The first three lines should contain an expanded image.
The last two lines should contain a statement.
And it goes without saying that each part needs to inform the other.

Bon courage… as people keep saying to us here when they see how much work we have to do on the house!


*Haibun is a form that combines prose and haiku, with each part being autonomous, yet informing each other at the same time.

**Dave Bacharach is editor of Ribbons, a quarterly journal and the official publication of the Tanka Society of America