February 18, '26 Featuring poet: Neal Whitman

hosts: Firdaus Parvez, Kala Ramesh, Priti Aisola & Suraja Menon Roychowdhury

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

18th February, 2026

poet of the month: Neal Whitman

waiting on the dock

a woman holds a placard

with my name on it

I am put in her arms

my mother is singing to me

Eucalypt 15, 2013

Distinctive Scribbler chosen by Julie Thorndike

wishful thinking

that long ago I would find

my touchstone —

today crossing a bridge

it was right beneath me

red lights, June 2019

rainy morning

driving along the shoreline

I have to wait

for a pedestrian —

strutting crow

Ribbons, Spring-Summer, 2025

Neal, we thank you warmly for sharing your poems and your thoughtful responses to our questions.

More about the poet:

Neal Whitman was born in Boston, Massachsetts (1948) and attended the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (Class of 1969), where he acquired a love of the poetry of Emily Dickinson portrayed in later years as “The Belle of Amherst”. Neal then headed to graduate school at the University of Michigan to study Higher Education (1969 - 1971). He found his niche in medical education and in 1978 completed a doctor of education degree at Columbia University where he met his future wife Elaine. One focus of his medical school work was to add poetry, performing arts , and visual arts to supplement the science of medicine. Upon retirement from the University of Utah School of Medicine in 2008 as Professor Emeritus, Neal picked up the pace of writing general poetry which he had initiated in 2005 as a transition into life after medical education. In 2008 he added haiku to his repertoire and joined the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society where in 2023  he was designated a dojin. In 2011 he had resolved to read and write tanka which prompted him to join the Tanka Society of America and the International Tanka Socety. In the past, Neal served as Vice President of the United Haiku and Tanka Society. Neal and Elaine reside in Pacific Grove, California. Elaine  also is a haiku poet. Living close to Monterey Bay inspires their poetry.

5. 

TTH: Can you give any advice to someone wanting to write and publish tanka? As an editor what are you looking for in a tanka that makes it most likely to get published? 

There is one “rule” of the road I advise any aspirant to publishing poetry. Begin with your own “rules of the road”.   Be honest. Is poetry in any form, including tanka, a private  diary or are you motivated by a need to be read? The latter means that it is better to be read than dead. If so, carefully read what an editor already publishes and tilt your submission in his or her direction. That need not compromise your integrity. If and when asked to accept an editor’s revision, you can be bend - after all, it is JUST a poem, not a peace-treaty proffer to end a war. Still, if the edit undermines the ground on which you stand, go to another editor who might love what you wrote and ask for more. After all, no two people read the same poem. I have been a haiku feature editor, editor of two haiku anthologies and judge of the Little Iris Haiku Contest in Croatia. I have not yet been an editor of tanka, though I have judged the Tanka  Society of America contest and the British Haiku Society tanka contest in which I mostly favored a traditional syllable balance and look for a pivot in line 3. Always I read submissions out loud. It has to sound right to be right. 

Your Challenge This Week:

The range of feeling in these tanka is wide. The first one really tugged at my heart. Who was the child? Who was the mother? Who was the woman with a placard? Was the child adopted? Or were mother and child separated for some time? This is a perfect example of a poem with plenty of dreaming space. The second tanka is philosophical - the poet is searching for meaning and finds that it was within reach all along. Both these tanka have a feeling of arrival. And the third tanka exemplifies karumi- it is light, humorous and immediately relatable.

Write about arrival- to a place, a conclusion, an understanding. Keep it light or go heavy - you pick the emotion you want to share.

Give these ideas some thought and share your tanka and tanka-prose with us here. Keep your senses open, observe things that happen around you and write. You can post tanka and tanka-prose outside of these themes as well.

And remember – tanka, because of those two extra lines, lends itself most beautifully when revealing a story. And tanka prose is storytelling. Most importantly, have fun!

PLEASE NOTE

1. Post only one poem at a time, only one per day.

2. Only 2 tanka and two tanka-prose per poet per prompt.

Tanka art, of course, if you want to.

3. Share your best-polished pieces.

4. Please do not post something in a hurry or something you have just written. Let it simmer for a while.

5. Post your final edited version on top of your original verse.

6. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems.

We are delighted to open the comment thread for you to share your unpublished tanka and tanka-prose (within 250 words) to be considered for inclusion in the haikuKATHA monthly magazine.