Listen to Write

Since the beginning of January, I have been allowing my one little word, listen, to guide my learning life. It is surprising how many twists and turns my OLW has taken me on in such a short time. Because I am still designing the Gallery of Winter Whisperings filled with different perspectives of winter, my thoughts have been centered around the positives of the winter season. I have been listening to the sounds of nature to crystalize thoughts into poetic pieces. With this in mind, I decided to challenge myself with a new writing format, the tanka. 

Tanka poems are short, five-line poems that originated almost 1200 years ago in the Japanese culture. The translation of the word tanka is short song. The word listen popped to mind when I read this. Then, I remembered that my blogger/writer friend, Michelle H. Barnes sent out a ditty challenge to write a tanka poem this month. I coupled Michelle's challenge with Heidi Mordhorst's MarCH Poetry challenge of the day on the word sketch. After many attempts to write a tanka, I have an offering. Since I like to reflect, I engaged in a mental checklist to see which parts of the tanka format I achieved. 

✓ five-line poem

✓ kept to the line pattern of short-long-short-long-long 

✓ centered the poem on nature and a season 

?  attempted to create a change in perception from examining an image to examining a               personal response to the scene

I added an image as my personal brand to capture the stillness of the scene both in words and image. A quote from Margarita Engle on Michelle's blog affirmed my desire to capture winter poetically. 

Seek the resonance that enters a poem only when it is touched by the stillness of nature.

To enhance Heidi's challenge, I altered an original photo to give it the feel of an artist's well-developed sketch, using PicMonkey.

Listen to Yuki, a traditional children's song in Japan that tells a story of snowfall.

To round off today's challenges, I am including this post in Day 10 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge at Two Writing Teachers. Stroll over there to read other slices of the day.