Mike Montreuil and Maxianne Berger: Five Co-Written Tanka

Some years back, over the course of a few months, Mike Montreuil and I co-wrote some tanka. We traded prompts -- two-to-three very brief lines that were not cast in stone, but served, rather, as malleable ideas. For the five below, I’ve provided the prompt alongside the poem for those who might be interested.   mb

fading ink
all about the trenches
the smell of mud
reading between the lines
love kept grandpa warm

to read in between
the lines

sugared almonds
my mother's cookbook
opening up
that sweet crunchiness
yesterday so long ago

recipe book open -
my hands travel
to a time in the past

lace swirls
over deepest blue
our Earth
lying under the sun
one never looks sick

one never looks sick
lying under the sun

yesterday
my firstborn daughter
was wed
in the morning light
the hills seem far away

the hills seem far away
in the morning light

look out, world
'cause here I come
a woman
walking with a smile
and a springtime urge

spring time urge
the woman walking
with a smile

Montreal poet Maxianne Berger and Ottawa poet Mike Montreuil co-edit the on-line periodical Cirrus : tankas de nos jours.

For more about Cirrus

Truck June 2015: Eight Tanka by Maxianne Berger

summer string

broken sign
amid the garden debris
Forget-M
as if I’d become
some wizened elder

under the sunhat
unruly silver curls 
remarry! I’d 
want some old man
farting in my bed?

---

simply friends
walking through the woods
discover
in this green canopy
filtered light is intimate

binoculars
passed back and forth
observation hut
watching gannets court 
amidst lovers' graffiti

jut of rocks
overlooking the river
we feel it
the thrill of that
very first whale

too hot
to climb a mountain
slippery moss
along the scenic trail
the back of his shoes

---

is this enough?
I watch him stand
in a tidepool
watching a heron
watching for fish

vows exchanged
under a tall spruce
so many years
in the boreal forest
a private altar

***
Maxianne Berger, poet and literary translator, is active in both the French and the English haiku and tanka communities in Montreal and beyond.  Her writing meanders between the minimalism of Japanese forms and the unpremeditated outcomes of OuLiPo-style constraints. She is among those featured in Language Matters: Interviews with 22 Quebec Poets (Souaid & Farkas, eds; Signature, 2013). She has co-edited three anthologies -- one of haiku, in English, and two of tanka, in French, and now co-edits Cirrus: tankas de nos jours. After two books of lyric poetry, her most recent book is a dual-language tanka collection, un renard roux / a red fox (petits nuages, 2014). 

The Vague _She_ of All the Volumes of Verse (Maxianne Berger)

"Kiss" by Graela

The Vague She of All the Volumes of Verse

   All these things reappearing before her

   seemed to widen out her life; it was like some

   sentimental immensity to which she returned.

                        Flaubert, Madame Bovary

At this point she knows she isn’t the same

she as the she’s who inhabit those other

poems. But possibly the nurses assume

she is. It’s even conceivable they suspect her

name to be Emma—“Emma” the homonym

in French of  “she loved.” Though she’s sure,

well, she’s fairly sure she did love him.

Briefly. Those evenings they spent together.

Tangled in bed sheets, lights dimmed.

Or the sunny days they floated, arm in arm,

through the rippling, purple fields of Drôme,

heady with the fragrance of lavender. 

Once it’s uncapped, memory’s perfume

will cloy or repel. Now she’s in her eighties, either

can serve to relieve the daily tedium.

Not that she’s bored with habitual fare.

It’s simply a truism that anything unaccustomed

will spice the day with its flavour.

In retrospect, she is the synergistic sum

of all the she’s she ever was, and quite aware

these she’s are distinct within her life’s continuum.

But in her forties she didn’t consider

she might, in fact, no longer be the same

she as when she was a girl.

Occasionally, the passage of time

will mock middle age with perverse humour

by allowing vanity to cloud wisdom.

...

He was eighteen years her junior, the flirt!

She protested eagerly and succumbed

eagerly to this dashing, long-lashed flatterer!

They met in Grignan, at the Clair de la plume,

twenty minutes of wagon-rutted roads away by car.

(Her husband, it happens, was conveniently in Rome.)

He kissed the angle of her neck and shoulder,

led her to the oak four-poster that filled his room.

Shy at first (or was it coy?) she shivered.

But when she unbuttoned her dress for him,

let it fall, she was the blue lagoon of summer.

He slipped in, swam in her warmth.

Because he was her first amorous adventure,

she couldn’t simply revel in eroticism

without construing some affair of the heart.

But just a few months later, alone at a museum,

it dawned on her: she keened from medieval armour

that the tarnished, empty shell he’d become,

he’d always been. A mere flutter of sighs. He’d never

been substantial. All along, it was her own dream—

damsel and knight and forever after.

Forever after. Hmpff! Forever be damned!

That initial, long-ago tryst is just a blur

posted along memory’s grey-scale album.

Like a death notice in the morning paper.

From a coronary, it says. And he was handsome, 

still, in his sixties, the photograph confirms.

Strange: though he was her first, he’d seldom

crossed her mind since that dalliance, years before.

The fantasized re-imaginings, now, are welcome.

Yes, quite heartening for a dowager,

these visions and revisions of herself as a vamp—

visions even cataracts can’t obscure!

...
 

She knows she’s seen in this nursing home

as a sweet old thing with fine white hair

dozing and sleeping in a clutter of heirlooms.

She’s lived with a benevolent calendar,

is satisfied with her life’s outcome,

and doesn’t mind that she isn’t young any more.

Because she has a past. Because after the prim

sheltered girl of inhibited desire, came a year

of volupté and the passionate Madame.

---

—Maxianne Berger