Poetry: Tanka, Lune and Sijo

I've been trying (and mostly failing, lately) to write at least one and preferably three haiku a day. I happened to stumble across a Call for Cthulu Haiku, and I sent some to them, but they said they were also looking for other forms that were related to the haiku. Forms I'd never heard of, so I looked them up, and you get to reap the benefits!

Tanka is like an extended Haiku. A Haiku has lines set up with five syllables, seven syllables and another five, and the Tanka extends that by adding two more lines with seven syllables.

Something like:

The sun rises young

And ages as it crosses.

I'm one day older

But am I a day wiser?

And just how wise is one day?

The Lune is an attempt to make the Haiku more fair. See, Japanese has way more syllables than English for the same amount of meaning, so it's basically cheating to give an English writer that much space*, so a writer tried to make it more fair and closer to the space you'd get if you were writing in Japanese. So a Lune has three lines of five syllables, three syllables and another five.

For example:

The bird calls on high

I shoot it

Does that make me mean?

There's a variation on the Lune that was caused by misremembering while teaching it to children, so it's got five words, then three, then another five, and that makes it much easier.

You name the sky blue

Does everyone see

The same blue as you?

And then there's the Sijo. It's Korean, rather than Japanese, and it has three lines, too, but each line has thirteen to fifteen syllables, so each line has almost as much info as the whole of a Haiku. Just make sure the last line has a twist that changes the meaning of the first two.

Like so:

If the morning comes sooner than it did yesterday,

How will I know you are still the girl I knew then,

When the dawn came at precisely six o'clock each day?

...only with a better twist.

I'm really enjoying this. I need to see what else I can do about these forms, really study them and see if I can make something authentic and pure with them.

And there you go! New poetry forms to play with. Let's see what you've got.



*I know, you've never thought of seventeen syllables as a lot of space before!