Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Poetic Musings: Voodoo Fingers Tanka by John Daleiden

Haitian woman, 
spawn of powerful genes --
work your spell 
use your voodoo fingers 
to enliven this old man

Fire Pearls: Short Masterpieces of the Human Heart, 2006 

John Daleiden 

Commentary: It is hard to imagine a subject that deviates from the tanka norm as much as voodoo. In fact, if anyone had suggested that there might be something compatible between tanka and voodoo before reading this poem, the reader could be forgiven for being skeptical. Daleiden uses the melody of tanka, and he applies tanka aesthetics: compaction, evocative detail, suggestion, allusion, subjectivity, and eroticism. Words like “Haitian,” “spawn,” “spell,” and “voodoo” are heavily freighted with associations that amplify the poem beyond what is written on the page...

-- excerpted from To the Lighthouse: The Problem of Tanka : Definition and Differentiation by M. Kei

1 comment:

  1. My tanka below is the second tanka about Voodoo:

    Two Hundred and Eighty-Fifth Entry, Coronavirus Poetry Diary

    singing and dancing
    around a covid gravesite ...
    a circle of women
    with their faces covered
    in white powder

    NeverEnding Story, November 6 2021

    FYI: For decades voodoo has been portrayed in Western films as a black magic cult; however, it is an official and widely practiced religion in Haiti. For more, see Part I, Haiti & the Dominican Republic: An Island Divided of PBS's four-part series on the influence of African descent on Latin America, produced and hosted by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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