Opening the Doors to Poetry

are you the one
who turns her head
when your name is called
or does a silent someone
lurk in your soul

Even before I began writing tanka my short poems contained no capital letter except for proper nouns. The only punctuation I ever use are a random comma to suggest a slight pause, or a small dash to carry the reader along into the next thought. It is simply a style I have always liked. But today I came upon a hidden and profound reason for eliminating these artifices in poetry.

I am reading "The Way of Tanka" by Naomi Beth Wakan, which is one of the best books I've read about the writing of this Japanese form of poetry. In her book she described the lack of a capital letter at the start of the poem as a way of keeping open in the reader's mind, all that has gone before.

So many find poetry to be inaccessible and I strive to make my poems easy to read and understand. There is no obtuseness about them, nor does the reader need to consult dictionaries or ancient stories or texts. There is little to interpret as I hope all I have to express is right there in the lines and words. I like this idea of lower case letters beginning the first lines of my poems. It seems to visually suggest an open doorway into my soul and into the poem. I want all my guests to enter without having to insert a key into a lock.

The fact that my poems are short also suggest easy entry and simple understanding.

The lack of punctuation also makes for an easy flow in reading. There are no harsh starts or stops so the reader glides from thought to thought. Leaving the end line with no period allows the reader to extend his poetic experience and perhaps engage his own thoughts about what I have expressed. And the poems are short and so more accessible in terms of time and thought.

I am focusing now on writing tanka as a daily discipline. Though most of my poems are short, not all of them fit into the guidelines for writing tanka and so I will work at revising old poems into the form as well as paying more attention to tanka "rules" as I create new ones.

the lost soul
opens to possibility~~
unimaginable
to those who believe
they have been found