TANKA, VOL. I

Deep gratitude to poet-visual artist Sacha Archer for asking, and then creating a gorgeously elegant object that is my chap, TANKA, VOL. I. It just came out from Simulacrum Press in Ontario. 

The chapbook includes my first tanka in the traditional form but, within 34 tankas, applies what my publisher calls "increasingly stylized experiments" for a "reconfiguration" of this ancient, classical form.

This is the first tanka I ever wrote:

#1

Last night my white cat

Approached with whiskers drooping

Signs are increasing

The world around me ages

I shiver in its cold wake

When you compare that traditional tanka with the sample tanka on my publisher’s bookpage, I hope you’ll be interested in how I radically reconfigured the form within 34 tankas with the help of the MDR Poetry Generator and Heidegger’s philosophical strategy, “sous rapture.”

I hope some of you check it out (and, in the process, support an independent publisher).