I’m happy to introduce you to this week’s guest blogger, Ken Ronkowitz, and to a form of poem called the ronka that
he invented. I recently read with Ken at a group reading for The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop,
and his poem, based on a prompt that called for a poem to be composed of
clichés, really blew me away because it was so much more than just
clichés—there were meaning and purpose and a strong sense of craftsmanship that made the clichés feel strangely right.
In addition to being a poet with publications in a wide range of
journals and anthologies, Ken has worked a social media coordinator for the
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), has been an instructor at
Montclair State University, and an instructor in humanities and professional
and technical communications at New Jersey Institute of Technology. His
interests range from teaching, instructional design, and curriculum development
to web design, blogging, and media design and management.
From Ken:
This year I wanted to take on a daily writing practice with my poetry.
It’s not an original New Year’s resolution. William Stafford is the poet who
inspired me the most. He wrote every day of his life from 1950 to 1993. Not
everything he wrote was a poem. His 20,000 pages of daily writings include
early morning meditations, poems, dream records, aphorisms, and other “visits to the unconscious.”
I do write every day, but not always poetry, so the resolution was to do
a daily poem. Stafford did go through a period when that was also his goal.
When he was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning, he replied, “I
lower my standards.” I like that answer, but, while the phrase has a negative
connotation, Stafford meant that he allowed himself some bad poems knowing that
with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work. I wanted to
impose some form on myself each day and I thought using a short form might make
the project more likely to succeed. I love haiku,
tanka, and other short forms, but I
ended up creating my own form for this project.
Finding a photo of her
from that summer when
we were fifteen
that hot day behind the beach house
her bare shoulders, back,
arms and legs—
when I suddenly realized she’s a woman
and it startled
me. It startled me.
For my invented form, a ronka contains 5 lines, each having 7
words without concern for syllables. It’s important to know that many Westerners
consider haiku to be 5, 7, and 5
lines counted by syllables, but, the Japanese language has no syllables, and
applying syllables to Japanese forms of poetry has always been a Western
convention. So … no syllable counts for the ronka.
Letters
Loved
Old letters from lovers, not love letters,
but timelines of relationships like plot
diagrams—
conflicts, turning points, resolutions,
conclusions, mostly tragedies.
Why do I save them? No sequels.
Dangerous tinder to have around. Best
burned.
As with traditional tanka, I
decided to have no rhyme. (Even accidental rhymes were considered faults in a tanka.) I also decided to use the haiku
principle of show rather than tell. For example, to indicate spring by
mentioning cherry blossoms rather than stating the season. I started the year
trying not to include myself or people as frequently as we do in Western
poetry, those have crept into the poems. I have even added a few footnotes and
links to poems.
Fathers
and Sons
Sons grow up and leave their fathers
to become fathers and perhaps have sons.
Child is the father of the man,
Five days of rain, then, a rainbow.
We are just past mid-year and I have maintained by daily poem practice
without great difficulty. I post them online at Writing the Day and each
observation of the day is categorized as being from the outside world or inside
the world of dwellings or the mind. I
write at all times of the day, but most poems seem to come at the end of the
day. (I also set a daily 10 pm reminder on my phone about posting a poem.) A
non-poet might think that writing 35 words a day is not much of a challenge,
but poets will understand that I frequently don’t write much faster than a
word-per-minute. I also post an image (my own or borrowed) with each poem. Some
poems are ars poetica or poems about poetry or writing.
Firefly Revision
Basho considered a Kikaku haiku as cruel:
A red firefly / tear off its wings –
a pepper. A pepper / give it wings –
a red firefly, was Basho’s
simple change.
Revision as a Buddhist act of
kindness.
Carving
No, writing
poetry is more like carving
wood and taking away, finding the heart
hidden inside, paring, using point and
blade.
The danger comes from the dull knife.
The soft inside will be thrown away.
Some are observations on a particular day, such as
this one from the Friday the 13th in June:
The
Thirteenth
A thirteenth day that is a Friday.
A full moon to complete a triad
of strange correlation without any
real causation.
We look carefully for signs and connections—
find clockwork regularity; serendipity in
the moments.
The blog I post to has a “tag cloud” feature, and I tag each ronka
with a few keywords that describe the poem. It is interesting to me to see what
words occur most frequently: birds, time, the moon and tea have all been
things that I seem to return to this year. Titles have become another way of
adding a line to the poem, though I still limit myself to seven words there
too.
I’m Not an Actor in Hollywood
But I want a body and stunt double.
I want better lighting. No high definition.
More scenes and lines, 20 against 20,
gross points on profits, hand and
footprints,
a star on the Walk of Fame.
There are lots of books and websites to find
poetic inspiration through writing prompts. I have been doing a monthly one at Poets Online since 1998. Adele has provided almost 200 well-defined prompts here already. My fellow New
Jersey poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Diane Lockward have excellent craft
books with prompts—Writing
Poetry To Save Your Life and The
Crafty Poet, respectively. William Stafford and Stephen Dunning’s Getting the Knack is a book I bought when I started teaching and I still dip into for
inspiration. Daily practices have a long history as paths of transformation
spiritually, physically and for learning a craft. Perhaps, meditation and
prayer will be your spiritual practice. Perhaps, yoga, tai chi or
running is your physical practice. You might even combine them—kinhin is walking
meditation. Consider a daily writing practice, whether it be poetry, a field
guide from nature, a garden journal, one page of that long-intended novel.
Disciplines of the mind are a good way to a healthy brain!
___________________________________________________
Thanks so much for
sharing with us, Ken!
Ken’s advice to write something every day is
a suggestion I share (although I don’t always manage to write every day). For
those of you who would like to try writing a ronka, some guidelines and tips follow.
1. Decide on a subject for your ronka.
2. Compose your poem in five
lines—each line must contain 7 words (no more, no less).
3. Don’t be concerned with syllables,
only the number of words in each of your five lines.
4. Avoid rhyming (although
alliteration, assonance, and anaphora are okay to create a sense of music in
your poem).
5. Instead of just telling about
your subject, include things that suggest, for example, the season or time of
year.
6. Work through imagery to create
meaning and an emotional center.
7. Think of a title (maybe drawn
from a line or phrase in your ronka)—the title may or may not be severn words long.
8. Make room for some silences in
your ronka (caesuras), and remember
that sometimes the most important part of a poem is what’s left unsaid.
9. Remember that meaning should never be subordinate to form, and compose carefully with your focus on what you mean (what you want to say).
10. Resist the urge to finish a poem by tying it up in a neat little package. Your dismount should bring the poem to closure in a meaningful and memorable way.
