Featured Writer: Gary LeBel

First-person reflections on the art of writing tanka prose

I once read somewhere that after W. H. Auden emigrated to the United States in 1939, he asked his new American colleagues why they wrote poetry. He was amazed to learn that not one had replied, “Why, for pleasure.” There’s a telling wisdom in that.

Many years ago—I don’t recall clearly the when and the where—I was rambling through a library’s International Studies section when I noticed a green hardcover volume by Earl Miner entitled Japanese Poetic Diaries; curious, I picked it up and began reading. It quickly asserted itself as one of those seminal reading experiences that alters your life’s–at least your creative life’s– course. I became especially enamored of Izumi Shikibu’s delicately sensual, evocative and intelligent tanka prose as well as, somewhat later, her individual poems as translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani in another landmark book, The Ink Dark Moon.

The How

It’s not my place here (or anywhere else) to lecture anyone on how to write tanka prose or what to avoid, nor to dictate dos and don’ts. If you read more than you write, you soon learn which writers and poets are masters and which are not, those from whom you can learn and those who can teach you nothing. I try earnestly to learn, through their prosody and verbal magic, how great writers elicit feelings in their readers. Some say limit your adjectives but I disagree: make your work as rich and mouthwatering as you need to without being—that nasty word—”florid.” I have a few simple guidelines I try to follow (though not always obediently):

           1. If writing in the first person, say in a narrative guise, I try to minimize, as much as I can, the over-use of the “I” word as it can become cloying, pushy or tiring. Readers also need a certain degree of detachment, a space wide enough to insert themselves, and large enough to look round and inhabit one’s written landscape through, as Emerson called it, their own “Transparent Eye.” (I envy the Greeks, among other tongues, whose verb forms imply the “I” without needing to voice the “egó” in every sentence.)

           2. Whether the work at hand calls for a prose style that’s “bare-boned” or telegraphic, terse, declarative, trenchant, boisterous, strident, athletic, raw or richly lyrical, the prose part of tanka prose should be every bit as poetic and expressive as its tanka, however differing in their structures and aims, the manner in which their rhythms are sewn together. One’s own yardstick of experience (and imagination) will measure each depth for each subject’s immersion. In the end, whatever yields power, depth of feeling, mystery, universality, vibrancy, surprise and energy is my target, if not a pound or two of controversy or outright provocation thrown in at times for good measure. Think of all the possibilities, the many experiences one lives through to nudge or catapult a first sentence into being!

           3. I sometimes employ different varieties of periodicity, something I learned from Faulkner (and others) where one weaves into one’s longer threads a bolder, shorter, brighter strand, often at the end of a paragraph that delivers a rap, a bang or an explosion. Phrases, ideas or images with which you initially began may reappear in different roles throughout the piece, some garnered perhaps with a pinch of irony. And commas, that is, breaths, are your hardworking companions. I don’t base their usage on textbooks, but by flow and beat. The repetition of words or phrases may also augment and heighten the machinery of song as well, for after all, poetry, in one form or another, is song.

           4. Using personae can often enlarge the scope and heighten one’s insight beyond the fortress of one’s comfort zone, gaining greater creative freedom; one of the liveliest devices in poetry, Browning and early Pound were both masters of it. Employing personae can also mean casting yourself in the third person to gain a bit of distance, clarity and objectivity, and perhaps even omniscience. Gnothi seauton!

           5. I opt for closing lines (and final tankas) that are “open-ended” such that readers, in a good way, might be left with more questions beyond the curiosity that led them to read you in the first place. You could call this “open-endedness” an epiphany if you like, with a bang or a whisper, concrete or nebulous, subtle or riveting. I prefer resonance to closure. I get that in my favorite short story writers, especially Raymond Carver.

           6. I have no hard and fast goals other than to engage in a continual search for the formal elegance needed to shape an impression, a sense or feeling, to answer a lingering question, to indulge an interest, to praise, to achieve in art what the Japanese call “shimizu,” the “waters of spring,” transparency, like sunlight glancing through clear water, as Dante described “the rays of spirit.” For me, the reward is all in the trying, to arrive at wherever you sense you’re going, however strange and unexpected the destination becomes.

           7. And passion, for words—how they sound, how they sing, their etymologies and linguistic intermarriages, the savor they leave on the tongue when spoken, their ironies, trickeries and sleights of hand, their chameleonic disguises, how they look in longhand, in sh?do or in print and, of course, the wonder that if not for the richness of their legacies we’d be as inarticulate as Denisovans.

           8. And there is another realm aside from intellect that the body knows and understands: I search for where they meet. Both mind and body walk in through the same door though they speak different languages. There are no windows in their house and so your prose must light the lamp, revealing both, and merging both.

The Why

The Why of writing tanka prose is, deceptively, a bit easier to cage.

           1. Occasional poetry, whereby certain events in life, in their occasions, catch you in their intriguing webs, is one of the strongest reasons to write and express a particular journey, whether it’s three steps long or three million, if only for one’s personal erudition. Most all events, even the slightest, contain potentially far more sustenance than they seem at first, if you are willing to explore. “The most insignificant thing can have its season,” wrote Murasaki Shikibu in her Diary¹. Thus you ask yourself, How deep can I go, How could this shed light on other aspects it might touch upon, What could History add, other arts and other literatures, memory, Where could diverging paths meet when drawn together by the gravity of our similarities and affections? Oftentimes, exploring these converging or diverging paths may fall to the tanka, those written within the body of the work, in sequence or in the final send-off. Michel de Montaigne strung on the strands of his essays all manner of ideas and diversions like parti-colored beads, which make them an experience and a delight to read, and in their intimate, convivial and gently self-effacing ways, you feel you’re right there with him in the tower he built as a place to write and entertain his friends. His “conversation” with the reader is just that, not simply a narration. Tanka prose can do that as well.

           2. Ultimately it’s for yourself that you write tanka prose or any other kind of literary work, for pleasure (as Auden commented), to challenge and question yourself, to find out what you believe about something (as Joan Didion remarked), to personally mine every last bit of ore out of the earth of your being, to probe the mysterious and ethereal, the hidden and unknown, the unanswered and unanswerable, love and heartbreak, grief and atonement, to ride life’s wild horses un-bridled, to add your own communiqué to the world’s for we’re all built and equipped relatively the same, hearts beating, blood coursing, feelings leaping, needing to speak and be heard, lest time and experience rush by in a blur that evades an examination of one’s own “Specimen Days”².

           3. But why choose tanka prose? Because it’s flexible, and in that ductility, it’s capable of taking a shape that might surprise you as you liberate yourself to explore a subject’s reaches. And as tanka are songs, they lend the prose a musicality that it doesn’t naturally possess, another instrument, a parting resonance.

When I sit down to write about something that’s nagging me or tugging at my sleeve to pay more attention, I have no idea where it will go, where it will take me or what its meaning will be . . . and I don’t want to know in advance, but discover a piece’s winding paths as I go along. Perhaps it would be more expedient to give a short example of what I mean. The following piece in three parts, hopefully, may illustrate something of what I have spoken of above.

WHEN THE LIGHT’S JUST RIGHT

1. Bite

We walked up out of the sea—two alabaster statues—salt-streams ran over our brows our lips and into our mouths, mingling with the sea inside—wind lashed our bodies chilling us with a cold delicious sting—everywhere the moon’s bright fingers were kneading shadows into gulls—huge black stones along the shore were mumbling in their sleep—we could hear their hearts thump as they beat in time with the breaking surf

and we knew it was large
this morsel of eternity
we’d bitten off,
but we went on searching and dreaming
just the same

2. Inlet

On the highest promontory of the inlet stands an old weather-beaten house, its sea-worn clapboards gray as granite. A widow lives there alone. Sometimes a fiery glow blazes from her windows when a deity visits. Tonight she goes to the large window that faces the inlet’s mouth, and with its old brass handle cranks it open, and the room fills with its salt-laden breath. To the visitor lounging in her most comfortable chair the widow says, “Listen. Do you hear it? The tide is turning.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” says the other. Then the widow, waving her arm in a circle before the window says, “Because all this is yours forever, I hold the deed.”

3. Loss

After many years an old friend calls—his voice is not the same—it’s full of cellos instead of flutes—each time the line grows silent I count the years we’ve been out of touch—they harden into crystal—with bits of string I hang them in the window while we talk—glinting off each other’s twirling facets shines a little of what I missed.

With the resounding ring
of a sledgehammer slammed on iron
an image comes,
a good tool for nailing
a dream to thin air

The great Nobel-prizewinning poet Saint-John Perse has arguably given us one of the most concise and cogent definitions of poetry: he called it “praising.” We praise what we love and what fascinates, and perhaps even more, what we once loved, or long to love again.

The following piece toys with a question:

A ROAD

From the interstate, through a bright clearing, comes the glimpse of a gravel road with a faintly yellowish hue: the Yellow Brick Road it isn’t

           but finer, real and drenched in a sparkling shower of afternoon light,

           its shoulders agleam with new leaves whose green fire spreads among the taller, older trees

           and my brief Arcadian blush goes with it. . . for there are times like today when the destination vies with an escape from that destination, and a voice calls out to you to abandon everything,

           to pull over, leave the keys in the ignition, vault over the guardrail and down the interstate’s slope, stricken with a terrible thirst for adventure you haven’t felt in years and, without looking back, take Lao Tzu’s first step of a thousand li

           . . . and of those who actually heeded that inner voice and obeyed its command, instantly I wonder how deliriously free they became. . . or how rootless, how lost, how lonely.

Looking out across the field she said,
“I never wanted to know
a lot about a little, no,
but a little
about a lot.”

Perhaps in the long run, Guilhelm IX, grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine and considered the first troubadour, has something to add:

I've made the poem;
I don't know what it's about;3

. . . and here I end these notes with a final piece.

CADENCE

The filly bolts after her mother up the grassy hill, a chestnut wind. Thin and lanky, she’s all legs from hoof to withers, their long fiery ribbons of mane licking the air in a flash that Delacroix longed to seize with brush and oils.

Seen only for a moment while driving by, their piercing image leaves a wound of beauty, and sounds the last note of a childhood song I sing to myself when I chance to remember what freedom looks like.

Of a light spring breeze
only limbs fully leafed
will feel it
yet how many days and nights do we waste
believing we are the branch that will not bud?

           [after Jalâluddin Rumi]

---

Notes

1. The quote by Lady Murasaki was translated by Richard Bowring in his The Diary of Lady Murasaki, Penguin Classics, 1996. Lady Murasaki was the author of Genji Monogatari, (The Tale of Genji), c. 1010 CE.
2. “Specimen Days” is a collection of prose reminiscences by Walt Whitman.
3. Translated by Martin Best, as taken from his CD, Songs of Chivalry, the “Song of Nothing” by Guilhelm IX (1071-1127 CE).

---

About the Author

Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.