The Renku Sessions: Tan-Renga Week 3

This week we will complete our brief round of tan-renga practice and identify the hokku for our very brief renku.

Here are some of the verses I found temping as caps to:

no shoes
no shirt no service
a beggar’s cup

the hollow sound of
thoughts and prayers

Richard Straw

without a pot
to piss in

Michael Henry Lee

“I am he”
in Ancient Greek

Victor Ortiz

forcing one to look away
or engage

Denise Showalter

communion wafer
melts on my tongue

Anne Fox

My final choice:

no shoes
no shirt no service
a beggar’s cup             Anne Fox

no eyes to see
no heart to care           Pauline O’Carolan

Here is my short list for capping:

bluejays
buzz
the cherry tree

oligarchs robbing
others’ nest eggs

Richard Straw

red squirrels stealing
from the feeder

Biswajit Mishra

a windowsill
of cooling pies

Anne Fox

George Washington
never mentioned it

Scott Anderson

Trump
drops the axe

Diana Ming Jeong

My final choice:

bluejays
buzz
the cherry tree              Valerie Green

angled ladder
newly painted white    Orense Nicod

Short list for capping:

pine cones
the forest creeps
across a meadow

the bunnies
are pregnant again

Belinda Behne

a quick look back
at the shadowy places

Debbie Feller

an ancient trail
of winding ants

Madeleine kavanagh

here comes
the urban sprawl

Ben Wendell

My final choice:

pine cones
the forest creeps
across a meadow     scott anderson

posy picking
in the median strip  Anne  Fox

Thank you, everyone!

I won’t offer a short list of hokku candidates because these are, essentially, haiku and I wouldn’t want to spoil their chances of being published somewhere else. Many publications (including The Heron’s Nest) would consider their appearance here to be “prior publication.”

So, here is the hokku for our very short renku:

ultimate frisbee
the scent of
sunscreen

Victor Ortiz

I was nearly certain that I knew what “ultimate frisbee” was but I looked it up, to be sure. What I learned made it seem a perfect image for renku. According to Wikipedia, “Ultimate frisbee (officially simply called ultimate) is a non-contact team sport played with a disc flung by hand… It relies on the sportsmanship of players and invokes the ‘spirit of the game. to maintain fair play.”

I did take some liberties with Victor’s original offer, which was:

ultimate frisbee
the scent
of a wild rose

That’s a very good verse. However, our fifth (out of a total of six) will be a spring blossom verse and there is no room in such a short renku for two blossoms. So, I picked a different summer scent.

Here, as a reminder, is the plan for this very short renku:

1 (hokku) three lines, summer

2 (wakiku) two lines, autumn moon

3 (daisan) three lines, autumn love

4 two lines, winter love

5 three lines, spring blossom

6 (ageku) spring

This week you are invited to submit up to three verse 2 (wakiku) offers. They mist be written in two lines and contain an image of the moon or moonlight in autumn. Note that the mention of the moon or moonlight, in itself, is considered an indication of autumn. So, no other autumn image is required. Just be careful not to include a seasonal image relating to another season.

A word about linking and shifting between the hokku and wakiku. This is the closest link in a renku, often set in a single location. But the second verse also must shift away from the hokku. One way of doing this is to image you are present in the setting of the hokku and then to look around (or listen) for something also present but completely other than what has been noted in the hokku. The hokku for the current renku has made this extremely easy for you because “sunscreen” links, by contrast with moon or moonlight. So, as long as you have the required moon or moonlight in your verse two offers, no further linkage is necessary.

The deadline for submission of your verse two (wakiku) offers is midnight (eastern US time) on Monday, June 8.

Surprise me!

John

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