February 4, '26 Featuring poet: Neal Whitman

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

4th February, 2026

poet of the month: Neal Whitman

in winter

nightfall is much like

the dropping

of a theatre curtain

the show is over, go home

Eucalypt 33, 2022

Distinguished Scribbler chosen by Amelia Fielden

despots fear poets

who welcome readers to have

the last word —

a rule of dictatorship

is to control the narrative

red lights, June 2024

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.

1.

TTH: Do you come from a literary background? What writers did you enjoy reading as a child? Did you write as a child? 

Alas, I did not arrive in a literary home. But, my father’s father dared in the Russian Empire to escape the Czarist draft, which in 1898, offered poor prospects for a Jewish young man or a fellow of any faith, including the state religion of Eastern Orthodoxy. His surname? Whitman! According to ancient Romans, Nomen est omen (Name is destiny)! Was it my fate some day to make poetry my profession, albeit my second one and not intended to put food on the table?

As a boy, I much loved the set of five novels by James Fenimore Cooper, to become known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring woodsman Natty Bumpo. In time, I soon turned to Henry David Thoreau who pioneered search for the human soul rather than the Western frontier. I was a prolific reader, but not yet a writer.

2.

TTH: How did you get started as a poet? What was it about tanka that inspired you to embrace this ancient form of poetry? In short, why do you keep writing tanka. 

Serendipity! In 2005, at poet Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House on California’s Carmel Bay, where I was a tour docent,  the winner of their annual poetry contest was Molly Fisk. Knowing she would be invited the next year to give a recital there, I searched her on the Internet and discovered that she taught an online workshop, “Poetry Boot Camp”. On a lark, I signed up, never having written a poem, and, to my surprise, discovered that I could write poems that Molly and other bootcampers liked. Out of the gate, early poems submitted to journals were accepted which encouraged me to keep at it. 

In 2008, again, on a lark, I took a haiku workshop in San Jose, California, where a participant, Mimi Ahern, recruited me to join the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society which, by luck, holds its annual conference at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, a mile down the street from our now retirement home. The early success I had beginning in 2005 with general poetry was now replicated in haiku with published work and two honorable mentions at my first YTHS Asilomar meeting in 2009 in their annual contest open to members and non-members … not mentioned here to brag, but to explain my boldness to take up the other form of Japanese poetry that draws Western poets to expand their boundaries, tanka. In 2011, I made a New Year’s resolution to read and write tanka, with the resolve that good poems make good teachers. So, I spent 2011 reading tanka journals and paying close attention to contest winners and the comments of judges. I keep at it as an antidote for external stress and turmoil not of my own making.

Your Challenge This Week:

Both of Neal's tanka have elements of darkness. The first one is literally about the darkness of winter. The second one is about dark times. The Northern hemisphere is shrouded in winter dark. Using these two fine tanka as inspiration, write about darkness. Any kind of darkness- weather, climate, mood...

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.