Buhayin ang Tanaga!

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Must Say 1: On Haiku Requests

Some details that need to be said:

1. This is tanaga site not a haiku site.

While I do not despite other artforms, please understand that this site is devoted to the tanaga and not the haiku. There are already too many haiku sites in the internet, I need not add another one. This is why I could not entertain reader requests for haikus.

However, I can provide information on how similar the tanaga and the haiku are from the perspective of the writer: Both are short poetic forms and therefore demand what I call the two primary Cs = Comprehensiveness in Concise delivery. In fact there is a third C which is clarity, something which most poets still struggle with owing to the difficulty of jargon and culture.

The art in both is in contained not just in the work itself, but in the writing process. The choice of words is difficult task, which not easily done by the uninterested. Hence, the tanaga, like the haiku, is a fourth C = a Craft. What seperates the tanaga from the haiku is auditory -the possibilities for rhyme, the power of the tone in the meter, and recently through modernizing of the form, all of which can have profound effects which add to the flexibility of the poem when invoking OR violating these rules.

A sestina always comes from a a basic set of words, but a set of words do not always end up as a sestina. In the same way, should your attempts on a tanaga fail, the open form maybe a good route to take.
posted by Jardine Davies @ 7:06 PM

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