The Renku Sessions: Tan-Renga Inviation

Hello, everyone. This is John Stevenson, with information about our immediate future plans.

Linda Papanicolaou will be leading our next full session, a Shisan renku beginning in July.

In the meantime, I will be leading some tan-renga practice and a very short renku.

Tan-renga is the original and briefest form of collaborative, linked poetry from Japan. Our English-language version of it consists of a three-line opening verse and a two-line capping verse by a second poet. Here is a link to the results of our most recent ran-renga session (on the theory that a picture is worth a thousand words)

https://thehaikufoundation.org/renkuarchive/2024_shadings.pdf

So, this week I am offering a set of three opening verses and asking you to submit two-line capping verses. You many submit three verses. They can be one for each opening verse, three for a single opening verse, or any other combination of three capping verses. Please link the opening verse with each of your capping verses. For example:

the opening verse
may have looked like this
on the page

John Stevenson

but the capping verse
has just two lines

Your Name

Submissions will be open until midnight on Monday, May 25 (eastern US time).

Here are your opening verses:

a dark cloud
something
behind it

first snow
the warmth
inside

multiple births
the creek ripples
with tadpoles

In addition to your submission of capping verses, you are invited to submit up to three new opening verses.

Next week, I will make selections from your capping verses, completing our first three tan-renga. And I will select three new opening verses from your submissions for another week of practice.

Let’s have some fun with this!

John

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