“Elemental” by Bruce Schauble
It is always great to find out that someone is reading your work online, but recently I discovered a reader and fellow writer who tried the ronka form. I “met” Bruce Schauble online a bunch of years ago. We were both teaching, blogging and writing creatively. It turned out we were also both doing art, but he was doing it on a much higher level.
Bruce recently retired as the Director of Instruction at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii. I am a bit envious of that location – especially this weekend as we expect snow to blast us in the northeastern U.S. I’m sure Bruce can identify, since he taught for a few decades in Massachusetts before escaping to paradise.
Here’s some of what he recently posted on his blog at throughlines.blogspot.com about what he calls “sonneteering.”
“For the last maybe six months I’ve been concentrating on writing, poetry mostly. There are always essentially three questions to be worked out in the writing of a poem: where to start, how far to go, and where to end. Ken Ronkowitz, a teacher and writer I admire who lives in New Jersey, maintains a whole bunch of web sites that have to do with writing and education and life. I’ve had fun with a form he invented, based loosely on the Japanese form of the tanka, which he calls the ronka. The formal rules are simple: five lines, seven words per line. It’s an interesting form to play with, because once you write your first line you only have three lines before whoops, it’s over.”
Here are two ronkas that he posted:
There’s a logic to all this, first
the leap into space, then the
attempt to see something quickly enough
that the last line (coming up fast)
doesn’t cut you off before you’re done.
Another April opens up, hummingbirds and bees
flitting in the branches of the cherry
trees, a restless breeze stirring the air.
The worst of the winter is behind
us, the sidewalks flanked with new flowers.
Then he turned to the sonnet form and found that “luxuriously roomy.” I can identify with that. With the 7 by 5 ronka form you will either love the compression, or feel a bit trapped.
As Bruce says, the sonnet is actually more flexible than the ronka. You can do the octave and sestet, or three quatrains and a couplet, or seven and seven. And you can do the rhyming or not.
NOTE: I have also experimented with the double ronka (two 5 line stanzas) and there is nothing stopping you from stringing together a series of ronkas renga-style.
As I commented on Bruce’s post, I was working on a sonnet last year, and discovered the quatorzain. The quatorzain (from Italian quattordici or French quatorze, fourteen) is a poem of fourteen lines. Though people sometimes use the term interchangeably with the sonnet, it is usually used to distinguish fourteen line poems that do not follow the various rules that describe the sonnet.
Here is one of Bruce’s sonnets:
Questions about Art
Painting is still the material form of desire. – William Logan
Supposing this to be true, what kind of desire
might we be talking about? Sublimation? The yellows
and reds and blues inviting, as flowers do, bees,
the oblique mechanics of pollination and sex?
Is it a desire for self-transcendence, the urge to make
something to stand in for us when we are gone, to speak
for us once we can no longer speak for ourselves?
Or to evoke the viewer’s desire to possess this work,
the pride of owning objects we have coveted, and won?
Or perhaps simply the desire to have, for as long as
we hold the brush in our hand, a focus, a reason to hope
that at the end of the day’s work there will be something
real, something created, something visible to justify
the hours of our life given over to the making of it?
I recommend that you take a look at Bruce’s reflections on teaching, reading, and writing and art
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