Poetic Musings: Fall Universe Tanka by Sanford Goldstein

cramming 

a fall universe 

into five lines down, 

pen in hand, 

the seaside bench hard 

This Shot Life: Minimalist Tanka, 2014

Sanford Goldstein 

Commentary: To cram a universe into five lines, to push to the very edge of what the form can do, the poet must be willing to spill thousands of tanka. Those of us among his readers who also attempt to write— those of us who tend to think “Oh, I already wrote about that,” and then stop— we might learn something from Goldstein’s willingness to return to the same themes, the same images, even the same words, in multiple poems...

-- excerpted from A Poet's Roving Thoughts: Review of This Short Life by Jenny Ward Angyal

FYI: Confronting uncertainty through and beyond the crisis of Covid-19, I attempted to quarantine this world of masked faces into five lines:

One Hundred Sixty-Seventh Entry, Coronavirus Poetry Diary

quarantining

this world of masked faces

into five lines ...

I throw a stone of words

across the river of no return

NeverEnding Story, January 3 2021