This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in IMAGES for September 16, 2021, East Bernard Express, East Bernard, Texas.
My twin brother and I had a happy life, growing up in the small rural town of Dime Box, Texas, and we shared a love of camping in the woods, fishing in the creeks and our stock pond, working on our grandparents’ farm, taking care of farm animals, harvesting vegetables from our garden, etc. However, the one difference that has always stood out in my mind is that I loved to read and write poetry about these things we enjoyed doing, but he didn’t. He thought writing poetry was a waste of time, and reading it was pointless. Most of our friends agreed with him.
It was this remembering the joys of country living, along with the joy poetry gave me but not others, that triggered a lifetime attempt to write and promote poetry which spoke to my salt-of-the-earth friends and relatives, as well as to my heart. I was in good company, because American poets like Robert Frost with his earthy poems in rural settings, had done that to a large extent. Yet to me there seemed to be something missing for Texans like my brother and his friends.
When I discovered Japanese poetry forms and begin to create haiku and tanka poems, I thought I found the key I was looking for. It was William Shakespeare who wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” and I think that could have been just as enthusiastically said by a Texan. The haiku is a three-line, non-rhyming poem, and the tanka is a five-line, non-rhyming poem. Both are very simple, no punctuation unless absolutely necessary, no capital letters except for proper names, and minimum words that suggest more than they explicitly state. I prefer to write tanka, because, well, three lines even for a minimalist is too great a challenge. By means of the poet’s word choices, the word-sounds and the rhythms, the poem has music.
For those reasons, and because I love the music of tanka poems, I have just published my second book of poetry (though my third book), entitled Tanka Schoen (my computer doesn’t do umlauts, so I use the “e” to take the place of the omlaut). Using this German word for “beautiful” in the title creates a pun and reflects my Wendish-German ethnicity. Though the poems in this book are written in quasi-Japanese form, the poems are very “Texan.”
To emphasize the musical quality of tanka poems, I have used photographs (taken by my granddaughter Lauren Stolle) of the family violin (Texas fiddle) which has been in my wife’s family for several generations as the prevailing symbol of the book. There are a number of poems about the violin throughout the book and it ends with a poem about its music. The Unit Headings reflect the musical nature of poetry, — Fast and Frisky, Light and Breezy, Slow and Sad, Sacred and Joyful, and The Family Violin.
Quite a few of the poems in the book are kyoka, which are simply humorous tanka. My favorite kyoka in the book is this one:
Smarty Pants
Ma’s rooster fought anything
that crossed his path
one morning he attacked Ma
found himself in the soup pot
My daughter, Rae Ann, a book designer in New York, did a superb job of designing the book. With splendid photography by my granddaughter Lauren, designed by Rae Ann, and the book dedicated to my wonderfully supportive wife, it is now available on Amazon.com.
-o-
Ray Spitzenberger is a retired WCJC teacher, and a retired LCMS pastor, and the author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen