Thursday 29 April 2010

NaPoWriMo Day 7

Had to go back and finish this one!

Today's quote: "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." ~Leonard Cohen

Today's prompt: Write and capture humorous incidents related to love in a 5-line love poem called a tanka. (You may even decide to create your own tanka journal for love poems!)

Here’s how to write one:
Describe in concrete terms one or two simple images (two or three lines) from your humorous love encounter, not just what you saw but also what you tasted, touched, smelled or heard.

What were you were thinking at the time this love encounter happened? Write that down, too, as two or three lines, so you have five lines in total for the poem.
Think about making the third line of your poem into a pivot line, so that it links to both the previous two lines and to the final two lines.

Test the tanka by dividing it into two parts so the third line acts both as the last line of the first part and as the first line of the second part. Does each section make sense separately, and then together?

Think about reducing — and even avoiding — capitalization and punctuation because a tanka needn’t be like a sentence or merely a flat statement.

Today's poem:

Early Love

In a London pub, we got to know each other -
Drinking, eating, singing along to the juke-box,
Deciding to play a joke, I knew we were meant to be,
Realising we shared a sense of humour, a geeky edge,
Thinking alike as we shared a laugh.

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