landmark status woman E-Book

Kati Mohr

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 20

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Six tanka sequences that explore spaces of (dis)connectedness: family, partnership, friendship, the self. "What keeps attracting me, what keeps haunting me, is that we humans exist in fields of tension, we are simultaneously connected and disconnected, for better or for worse. I can only continue to observe and learn, from my perspective, which is that of a woman, a human in this complex world. We carry misconceptions and statues and wish they would dissolve into dust. We carry ourselves, the ones before us, the future and the ideas of what it means to be a human as we simply try to live in the here and now - fallible and wondrous." - Kati Mohr

Leseprobe

To all my homes

contents

a few words, and then some more

in fact, quite the reverse should be true

triangle constructions

life [sic]

a house of making in a state of grace

landmark status woman

never diving, but my feet on the railing

about the author

a few words, and then some more

Tanka are often written or translated in five lines in Western languages (but not solely), which gives a rough appearance of short, long, short, long, long. I don't always stick to this.

In my understanding of poetry (and art), a form does not only live by adhering to its number of lines, its rhythm, its line lengths and so on. There are other core components that are important and relevant to whether a poem can actually be called tanka, a poetic form that has existed in Japan for over a thousand years (including its predecessor waka). One of these, it seems to me, is the linking of observation, realisation and feeling within a concise poem. At a certain point in/between the lines, the brain switches to the heart. Others are the musicality and the use of great imagery.

I set out to read and explore a wider variety of tanka that are not exclusively written in five lines or/and have an amazing freshness and modernity, such as the tanka of Jun Fujita, Minosuke Noguchi, Kisaburo Konoshima, Machi Tawara,, Akitsu Ei, and Matsukaze.

Their powerful and moving tanka inspired me to push my writing further and use it to record my life, to preserve the emotions, but also to reflect them back to myself. Sometimes I can only recognise when I jot them down and reread.

What makes tanka so special? It is a very robust poem and at the same time open, otherwise it would not have been able to survive for so many years. It says: It's okay, come to me and tell me where it hurts. Tell me why you're happy. Tell me your whole humanity, I will help you understand it.

A multi-layered beauty, that's tanka for me.

This book combines traditional and modern themes, colloquial and literary language. Some tanka are concrete, vertical, written in one, two, three, four and five lines. They are arranged in sequences that aim to let each stanza shine in the company of its neighbours.