TANKA TAKE HOME — 14th January '26 Featuring poet: Cherie Hunter Day

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

14th January, 2026

poet of the month: Cherie Hunter Day

clear night, owl night

through the tissue of darkness

an exchange

their grip of honed surfaces

my sinew and bone

Tangled Hair 3 (2001) This is an example of a 1/2/2 shift.

a songbird’s nest

held all winter to the sky

now the greening ash

fills in between its branches

something in me still reaching

Japan Tanka Poets’ Society 2003 Contest – First Place

This is an example of a 2-2-1 shift.

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

More about the poet:

Cherie Hunter Day poet, editor, illustrator, graphic artist, and collagist. She began writing tanka in 1993 and her first tanka chapbook, Sun, Moon, Mother, Father was published in 1997. Her work has appeared in tanka anthologies such as Wind Five-Folded (1994), In a Ship’s Wake (2001), The Tanka Anthology (2003), Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 4 (2009 – 2012), Tanka 2020 (2020), and journals including: Five Lines Down, Tangled Hair, red lights, American Tanka, Ribbons, Skylark, Presence, and hedgerow. In 1999 her collection, Early Indigo won the Snapshot Press Tanka Collection Award and was published in 2000. A book of responsive tanka with David Rice, Kindle of Green, followed in 2008. In 2012 she won the Snapshot Press eChapbook Award for A Color for Leaving, which was released in 2017. Her most recent collection, A House Meant Only for Summer (2023), contains haibun and tanka prose. She lives in Auburn, New Hampshire with her husband and son.

3.

TTH: How do you develop a tanka? Please guide us through the stages of a poem. Tanka seems to bubble to the surface. It may be an everyday scene that tugs at the heart, and I want to capture that connection. Tanka requires a different frame of mind than haiku. It usually takes a period of reflection to follow the trail that gave rise to the emotion. I focus on the different parts of tanka and where to introduce the shift. Will the line structure be traditional 3-2, 2-3, more complex 1-2-2, 2-2-1, or something else? I like the line to wrap and use the terminal pause at the end of each line. I’m not a fan of enjambed lines. I follow the short/long/short/long/long line length structure but not too closely. I usually fill a couple sheets of scrap paper with different line layouts and word choices. It’s like every other form of poetry; I play around until it works.

4.

TTH: Who are your favourite tanka poets? In addition to tanka what other genres of poetry do you write or read? Tell us about some of the books you've enjoyed. 

The four tanka books that were pivotal for me were: Modern Japanese Tanka by Makoto Ueda (Columbia University Press, 1996); Salad Anniversary by Machi Tawara with Juliet Winters Carpenter, translator (Kodansha, 1990); The Ink Dark Moon by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani (Vintage Books/Random House, 1990); and a long rainy season: contemporary Japanese women’s poetry, Vol. 1 by Leza Lowitz, Miyuki Aoyama, and Akemi Tomioka (Stone Bridge Press, 1994).

Two books about poetry and the writing life that I still find inspirational are: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, essays by Jane Hirshfield (HarperCollins, 1997) and My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing by Carl Phillips (Yale University Press, 2022)

I write/publish prose poetry, micro fiction, and lineated poetry in addition to tanka, haiku, tan renga, rengay, haibun and tanka prose.

Your Challenge this Week!

You guessed it! Write tanka with a 1-2-2 or 2-1-1 structure. See if you can incorporate both structures within a tanka prose.

Have fun!

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 of these themes as well.

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.