TANKA TAKE HOME — 13th August '25 Featuring poet: Michael Dylan Welch

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

August 13th, 2025

poet of the month: Michael Dylan Welch

puddles

in the gutter . . .

a man sleeps

in the darkened doorway

of the pet shelter

American Tanka #5, Fall 1998

shiny pens and a stapler—

no one tells

the new hire

his desk is where

the suicide sat

Gusts #17, Spring/Summer 2013

scraping toast

over the kitchen sink . . .

the thought that

one day robots

will run the world

Gusts #29, Spring/Summer 2019

a wisteria arbor

in late autumn—

I sit until

I am the only sitter

and I too disappear

Tangled Hair #5, May 2006

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.

Michael: Having written regularly as a child and young adult, it was natural for me to eventually try publishing my work, staring with haiku, though it took me till graduate school to start doing this. I remember the first dollar bill I got from Robert Spiess in response to my very first submission to Modern Haiku, in the summer of 1988. The poem was “my window opens / a hundred frogs / sing to the moon.” And I had a longer poem, “The Clarinet,” also published in 1988 (see https://www.graceguts.com/poems/the-clarinet). These were my first publications outside of school journals.

Starting around this time, my connection to the haiku community through the Haiku Society of America and the Haiku Poets of Northern California (I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in late 1988) proved to be rich and welcoming. I soon became involved, starting with my coediting HPNC’s Woodnotes haiku journal (extensively documented on my website at https://www.graceguts.com/woodnotes). I don’t remember when I wrote my first tanka, but it was probably around 1990. In the early 1990s I remember writing in one of my notebooks that there ought to be a Tanka Society of America. In 1994 I published what I believed to be the first tanka anthology in English, Footsteps in the Fog (it preceded Jane and Werner Reichhold’s Wind Five Folded anthology by several months), although I’ve since learned that there was apparently another somewhat obscure anthology of English-language tanka around 1974, I think. Whatever the case, Footsteps in the Fog was an outgrowth of my growing interest in tanka.

I wrote in my notebook again, at least once or twice more in later years, that there ought to be a tanka society. And in late 1999 I thought well, no one is doing this, so why don’t I start such a society myself? I remember corresponding with Sanford Goldstein about my idea, and he was supportive and enthusiastic. I was going to have an inaugural meeting in San Francisco and arranged for my nearby haiku neighbour (and fellow tanka writer) Paul O. Williams to be vice president. I figured a society would need a newsletter, so I wrote to Pamela Miller Ness in New York City to ask if she would be the editor. At the time, Randy Brooks was organizing the Global Haiku Festival at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, and it occurred to me that that might be a better place to have a first meeting, engaging people from across the country instead of just California. Randy provided a meeting room, and I organized that first meeting on April 14, 2000. I proposed the Tanka Society of America name and was elected as first president. For me, tanka was an outgrowth of haiku, something similar yet broader, able to employ a greater variety of Western poetic techniques, more overtly emotional or subjective. Basically, tanka was another arrow in my poetry quiver.

I remember reading books like Jane Hirshfield’s Ink Dark Moon and having periods of following its translations as models, writing heightened love poems. And I remember reading Sanford Goldstein’s translations of Takuboku and others, seeing a more raw or visceral approach to tanka, and I tried writing that way too. I welcomed all possibilities. And while I continue to write more haiku than tanka, even decades later, tanka still fill a hole that haiku and other poetry cannot fill. Tanka has a bit more elbow room. It’s hard to describe what that difference is, but it’s akin to moving from chord to melody, and turning a notch more lyrical than haiku—and yet in a more concise way than longer poetry.

3. TTH: How do you develop a tanka? Please guide us through the stages of a poem.

Michael: I tend to work out poems in my head extensively, especially haiku and tanka, before I write them down. I say them to myself in my head—equivalent, perhaps, to what Bashō meant when he said of haiku revision, “a thousand times on the tongue.” Rhythm and sound has always mattered to me as much as meaning. I have learned to trust some amount of intuition married with experience that helps make decent poems happen. But because I work them out in my head, I don’t have records of repeated revisions the way some people might. I’m more likely, though, to abandon a poem than to revise it to death, perhaps being more interested in writing new poems instead of revising existing ones on the page.

My process, once I work out a poem in my head, is to write it down in one of my notebooks (I have dozens now). And then, although perhaps not immediately, I nearly always leave it alone, even forgetting it. Once I fill up a notebook, which could take more than a year, I eventually go back through the poems and decide which ones I might want to publish. By waiting all this time, I can see all the poems with fresh eyes, with greater objectivity. If the poem is still radiating energy and clarity to me, that’s a signal that the poem might be worth publishing. Then I write it out on an index card (sometimes revising as I go), and then I track the poem’s submission and publication history using the card. I’ll occasionally revise a poem once it’s on a card—I’m always open to any improvement—but many poems never have further revisions. Once a poem has been published, I add that index card to alphabetized boxes of cards for all my tanka (I keep haiku separately and track longer poems using a spreadsheet). It’s handy to have all these records, so I can quickly and easily look up publication credits for any poem, whenever I need that. The more you write, the more you need a system to manage your poems!

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

More about the poet:

Michael Dylan Welch writes haiku, tanka, longer poetry, essays, reviews, and other content, and documents his writing life on his website, www.graceguts.com. This site includes a section on tanka at https://www.graceguts.com/tanka, featuring numerous poems and sequences, and essays on tanka. Michael founded the Tanka Society of America in 2000, and has organized all six of the society’s conferences, with a seventh one scheduled for San Francisco in September of 2025. With Emiko Miyashita, he translated the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a thirteenth-century collection of waka poems (later known as tanka). In 2012, one of their translations from this book was featured on the back of 150 million U.S. postage stamps. Michael also cofounded the Haiku North America conference in 1991 and the American Haiku Archives in 1996, and founded the Seabeck Haiku Getaway in 2008 and National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com) in 2010. He also served two terms as poet laureate for Redmond, Washington, where he is president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword and curator (since 2006) of the monthly SoulFood Poetry Night reading series. Michael is originally from England and grew up there and in Ghana, Australia, and Canada, and has lived in Sammamish, Washington (near Seattle) since 2003. In 2023, he and his Japanese wife became U.S. citizens.

Your Challenge this Week: Once again: Pay close attention to the upper and lower verses. And this week bring a twist  — the unexpected in the lower verse. Surprise us like Michael does in the last lines of his tanka. Do tell us how you felt reading his tanka. We'd love to know. Looking forward to reading your poems. Enjoy!

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

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 these themes, too.

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.