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

Angela Leuck: A Haiku Sequence and A Tanka String

THREE HAIKU FOR MY SON

Inspired by Kazuhiko Ito’s

dear brother

don’t forget this—

birds

flying through the sky

have heavy entrails                   

Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka, 

Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden, trans., Cheng & Tsui, 2006

Dear son,

remember this:

birdsong after rain

isn’t music

to worms

the peace dove

shits on your head

just like any other bird

women

with sultry voices

don’t have to shout

FOUR TANKA

home from college

my older sister

sprawls on the sofa

brazenly reading

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

outside my window

the snow-covered

mountain

T.S. Eliot

climbed in his youth

dull gray day

I turn on the lights

at lunchtime--

how once I devoured

Koestler’s Darkness at Noon

to remind himself

how lucky he is

my husband

dips into

the Gulag Archipelago

Award winning haiku and tanka poet Angela Leuck has been published in journals and anthologies worldwide. Her poems were included in Haiku Journey, a video game by Hot Lava Games (2006). The author of Garden Meditations and a cicada in the cosmos (inkling press, 2010), haiku white and haiku noir (carve, 2007) and Flower Heart (Blue Ginkgo Press, 2006), she also has edited numerous anthologies. She is the founder and organizer of the Black Tea Haiku Group in Montreal, and in 2005, with Kozue Uzawa, she co-founded Tanka Canada and its biannual journal Gusts.

Truck June 2015: Three Poems by Gwyn McVay

The Grey-Streaked Hare

thumping hard against my fingers
your furry heart beats with my need
you sense it — do you not —

perhaps you are frightened
I hold the beastie to my breast
O, know you are safe —

you and your fast heart — within mine
such body heat — salty and constant


---


All You Have To Do

You can pose but you don't have to pose
You can play your instrument or just sit
by the river with me and listen to that
You can toast me with your fizzing soda
or sip it quietly and just smile
You can tell me a story or just lie
next to me, I'll guard your dreams
You can do cartwheels, you can just be
the musclebound pony I saw striding
smooth as beach rock under a load
of all you possess and all you need own

If I have an orange you have half an orange
If I draw breath you have all my heart


---


The Butterfly Effect

the roughest bastard,
born in a bear's den, will let
a butterfly sit

in the crook of his elbow,
watching its slightest beat


***

Gwyn McVay is the author of two chapbooks of poems and one full-length collection, Ordinary Beans (Pecan Grove Press). She has published poems and reviews in more than sixty periodicals and in three anthologies, most recently Letters to the World (Red Hen Press). She lives in southeastern Pennsylvania, where she teaches writing at Millersville University; three of her poems are in this year's volume of the university's literary magazine, George Street Carnival. 

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).