Sign-In
Cart
Love Is a Tanka
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781421836980
Publisher: 1St World Lib Inc
Published: May 14 2021
Pages: 110
Weight: 0.38
Height: 0.26 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In 2020 Jeanne Lupton writes in the midst/ of writing tanka/ in a café/ I already want/ this happiness again. It's a grand example of Lupton's tanka, illustrating a particular syncopation that is perfect for telling her stories, revealing intimacies, launching memories. Lupton takes ownership of the tanka form to entertain with wit, careful observation, and tenderness. She reveals a life lived over time and with challenges. The tanka come fast and amass a litany of human foibles, stumbles, generous connections, and difficulties. Lupton's Love is Tanka chronicles a fierce human spirit, that's sustained by love, as she learns to endure.
- Sally Elesby, poet and painter
Some of these bring instant tears, others a touch of the poignant soul. All are suffused with the divine light of the ordinary. What is most hidden and deepest is the most obvious, only to see it you must look with the eye that these tanka sharpen. I'm reminded, too, of the Buddhist saying that the most enlightened being appears to be most ordinary. These poems are a treasure.
- Clive Matson, author of Hello, Paradise. Paradise, Goodbye
Love is a Tanka.... As the title shows, this tanka collection is full of love. Love for people, love for nature, love for tanka, love for writing... After reading this book, I'm sure you'll feel good. Jeanne Lupton makes you happy by presenting her happy tanka in this book.
a rainy noon
I run across the square
to the café
to eat tomato bisque
feeling like a poet
- Kozue Uzawa, editor of GUSTS
Jeanne Lupton's condensed language of tanka takes the reader on an unforgettable journey into what it is to be human.
- Chantal Guillemin, author of Truchas and Mi Tierra Adentro
About the Author
Jeanne Lupton, a poet since she learned to read, moved to the San Francisco East Bay from Northern Virginia in 2002 and has been active since then in the poetry community here and in the tanka community worldwide through tanka journals. Her collection, but then you danced, which appeared in 2006, and several booklets published since then are included here. This collection represents the first 25 years of her tanka. Jeanne hosted the Second Saturday Poetry and Prose Reading Series at Frank Bette Center for the Arts in Alameda, California, for 13 years. She has given several short solo performances at the Marsh Theater in Berkeley.
Jeanne leads a memoir writing group for seniors on Zoom, is a member of Fresh Ink Poetry Collective and Bay Area Poets Coalition, and writes with Clive Matson's Too Busy to Write group every Tuesday night. She lives at Strawberry Creek Lodge in Berkeley with 150 other elders and her cat BB.
Tanka are two lines longer than haiku and invite the expression of feeling. Traditionally a love poem, tanka is over 1400 years old. Haiku originated when the first three lines of tanka broke off to become their own poetic form. Young people in Japan today text tanka to each other on their cell phones.
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Alighieri, Dante
Pitavy, Francois
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover