Poetic Musings: Pigeons of Venice Tanka by Ruby Spriggs

a sudden loud noise
all the pigeons of Venice
at once fill  the sky
that is how it felt when your hand
accidentally touched mine

First Prize, 2001 North American Tanka Contest

Ruby Spriggs

Commentary: Spriggs’s poem shows how the basic structural features of Japanese tanka have been adapted. The pattern of short/long/short/long/long lines is intact, and the use of thirty-one syllables in five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 parallels the pattern of thirty-one sound units of Japanese tanka. This is one of the formal patterns tried by many poets for English-language tanka during the early days of experimentation and adaptation...The judge, Professor Jan Walls,... commented on how the poem “takes the familiar touristic image of startled pigeons simultaneously taking flight, and unexpectedly relates the cause/effect sequence to a personal romantic incident. The imagery is fresh and startling; the content is powerfully meaningful... at the personal level; and the craft is exquisite—it reads like a tanka, but will be immediately appreciated by any English reader who may know nothing about tanka...

-- excerpted from "Introduction to The Tanka Anthology" by Michael McClintock

Note: You can read the full text here, "To the Lighthouse: Introduction to The Tanka Anthology by Michael McClintock" )