A Word On Kyoka

I had never heard of kyoka before stumbling across the term on the Prune Juice website, where it states:

Kyoka is often regarded as being to tanka what senryu is to haiku. They are usually five lines in length and read like tanka. (read here in full)

I decided to follow the blog link given and found the writings of M. Kei on kyoka, including his article Kyoka vs. Tanka - Examples (2006) which makes for very good reading. I highly recommend that you go and take a look yourself.

Kyoka don't have to be tasteless or funny. They don't have to be satire. The great virtue of kyoka is that they give voice to what cannot be voiced in tanka as it currently stands in the English language. I hope kyoka amuse you. I hope they shock you. I hope they hurt you. I hope they open your tanka so that you too will be able to express yourself with all the aching joy of being human.

So, I wonder if this is a kyoka?

he told me

a mouse was atop

the fridge

& I replied, well -

there's no food up there!

Probably yes: all be it a not very good one...

Submitting to Prune Juice: Journal of Senryu and Kyoka

Prune Juice is an online publication appearing twice annually and edited by Liam Wilkinson. Submissions for Issue 6 are open now: deadline June 1st 2011. You can find all the submission guidelines here. Issue 6 will be published in July 2011.

My goal of submitting to a poetry journal or publication every week this year is making me seek out new avenues for publication and I'm really enjoying myself. Submitting to Prune Juice was my poetry submission for week 18 of 2011 (that's last week) and it was my first time submitting here. I was very pleased to have two senryu accepted for publication!

One of the great things about Prune Juice is that it doesn't consider poems that have appeared on social networking sites or blogs to be in the "previously published" category. This from their Submissions page:

* NOTE ON THE TERM ‘PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED’: Here at Prune Juice, we believe ‘previously published’ poems are those that have been previously selected for publication by another editor. Therefore, any work that you yourself have submitted to social networking sites, blogs and microblogs are still considered here at Prune Juice. In short, if your poem has only appeared publicly in your Twitter stream or on your personal blog, we will still consider it as we believe this is not considered as a previously published piece.

You can check out previous issues here, which are a lot of fun to read. The most recent issue has work from New Zealand's own Andre Surridge and Patricia Prime.

Prune Juice Issue 5 Winter 2011
Edited by Liam Wilkinson