1. Write a brief summary of the main events of Peace Like a River. Entry Task- Final Prep

2. Background Renga, meaning "linked poem," began over seven hundred years ago in Japan to encourage the collaborative composition of poems. Linked together, renga were often hundreds of lines long, though the favored length was a 36-line form called a kasen. Several centuries after its inception, the opening stanza of renga gave rise to the much shorter haiku

3. Language The language is often pastoral, incorporating words and images associated with seasons, nature, and love. In order for the poem to achieve its trajectory, each poet writes a new stanza that leaps from only the stanza preceding it. This leap advances both the thematic movement as well as maintaining the linking component.

4. Structure The opening verse of a renga is called the hokku. It takes the same form as haiku -three short lines, preferably with some reference to the season of composition. It communicates feeling through the use of concrete images, and generally avoids abstraction and conceptualization. Followed by a couplet, which is 2 lines- 7 syllables each. The couplet connects to the previous stanza creating a tanka.

5. Hokku/haiku Form a seventeen-syllable poem traditionally depicting a fleeting moment of a given season 5-7-5 syllable count. Example People united To secure their liberty Out of many, one. From the long hallways voices of the people rise in the morning haze - Oshima Ryota

6. Tanka Form 5-7-5-7-7 (A haiku followed by couplet). Examples Apple trees blossom. Crows thaw on telephone wires in sunlight showers. Ideas of order consume the backyard awakening.

7. Topic A renga opens with some reference to the season of composition and moves - not necessarily in orderly sequence - through all four seasons, generally ending with a spring verse. Seasonal themes are generally sustained for at least a couple of verses, and the passage from one season to the next is often broken by one or more non-seasonal verses.

8. Result The result is a constantly changing mosaic which discourages development of a logical, sequential narrative. The pleasures derived from continual surprise, striking imagery and delightfully sudden (and often witty) insights can be captivating. That is one of the chief delights of renga.

9. In your table groups… Each of you needs a sheet of paper. Each of you writes the first Haiku, and then passes it to the next person, who writes the couplet, then passes it to the 3 rd person who writes the next Haiku, which then goes to the 4 th person… Keep going in a circle until I tell you to stop. Make sure you address all 4 seasons in every poem.