TANKA TAKE HOME — 14 May 2025 Poet of the Month: Lafcadio

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

poet of the month: Lafcadio

Instead of using her real name, Lafcadio  adopted a pen name when she started writing on social media. She was a special education teacher but now works at home writing, editing, and proofreading medical textbooks and journal articles.

Lafcadio has written poetry for many years. In the last few years she discovered Japanese micropoetry.  So now she spends her time writing haiku, senryu, tanka and haibun.  Her work has been published in journals and anthologies. Some of her poetry has been nominated for Touchstone and Best of the Net awards. Lafcadio grew up in Florida and now enjoys the mountains and seasonal changes of Tennessee. She is an avid pluviophile.

3.

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

 I have two ways that I try to use to write a tanka. I do not count syllables (5-7-5-7-7) but do attempt to use the S-L-S-L-L (short-long-short-long-long) form.  When I have a subject or a prompt word I write L1 and L2 (upper verse). Then, the tricky part is writing L3 that completes the upper verse but also serves as the pivot for the last two lines (lower verse).  I'll give an example by Michael McClintock:

leading my horse

to the river at midnight

scattered stars

in such impossible numbers

we don't mind drinking a few

Another way I write tanka is using another line as the pivot line instead of L3. Sometimes after L1 the rest of the tanka is a stream of consciousness type of sentence for the remaining four lines. Here is an example that I wrote:

borrowed time...

a waltz in the

blackberry field

under the purple light

of an almost-dusk sky

There are so many articles that explain other ways to write tanka: minimalist, one-line, three-lines, four-lines, five end-stopped lines, etc. I've just begun to investigate and experiment with other forms for writing tanka.

tonight

I am stardust

who knows

what I will be

tomorrow

Editor's Choice, Moonbathing 28, Spring/Summer 2023

gloomy day

I don't feel like myself

I wonder

who I am and if I can get

along better with this one

Ribbons: Spring/Summer 2024 Vol. 20 Number 1

We thank you very warmly Lafcadio for sharing your lovely poems. Your specific examples in tanka writing will be very helpful to our readers! We are enjoying your poems this month!

Challenge for this week:

Both the tanka give the reader ample ‘dreaming room’, allowing them to create a story around the poem, based on what is glimpsed fleetingly even after several readings. We all indulge in introspection, and there is, sometimes, a sense of incompleteness. Is this the best version of myself? I don't really like myself now - or maybe I really do like myself now. These themes are explored in both the tanka that Lafcadio has shared with us.

This week we invite you to write tanka on who you wish you might have been. Regrets, joys, sorrows, strengths, weaknesses - go ahead and dig deep. Get some inspiration from nature as well.

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.