RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Tuesday, August 9

Wrestling Tanka - Explanation

The Japanese poetry style of haiku is really only the first 5-7-5 syllable set of a larger group-composed poem. Traditionally, one person would write that stanza, then a second person would write a two-line 7-7 syllable stanze behind it. This two-part poem is called tanka, whereas the first part is haiku. Ideally, you'd continue this by sending the second part to a third person, who would write a 5-7-5 third-part, without seeing the first one, and then that third piece would get sent to a fourth person who would write a 7-7 piece to attach to that, and eventually you'd have 100 people taking part and the entire collection would be something or another, for better or worse.
Being me and Rev. Axl Future have written wrestling haiku back and forth to each other over the years, we decided to give it a shot at doing some tankas, where one of us writes the first 5-7-5 piece, and the other follows up with the 7-7 part. They'll be posted here, as we get them done, through regular people's mail, on postcards, because regular mail and postcards are wonderful blessings on shitty rainy days. There's nothing special about electronic mails. It may take us a while between putting sets up, but we are out there, doing this, somewhere or another.

No comments: