TANKA TAKE HOME — 17th Sept. '25 Featuring poet: Tom Clausen

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

September 17th, 2025

poet of the month: Tom Clausen

quite by surprise 

my daughter asks me 

if I'd like to be a woman 

the gravity in the moment 

I took to answer 

Tanka Splendor 1998

bowed to the ground

the goldenrods 

too tall of themselves-

I couldn't tell her why

the sky is blue 

Tanka Splendor 1998

in attic light

I sit and read

old letters

what more can I do

with my past?

cloud gazing…

I thought about it

but wasn’t sure

what I’d do

with an empty mind 

gusts no.22   fall/winter 2015 

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

Q4:

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.

Tom: My favorite tanka poets would certainly begin with Ishikawa Takuboku, Ryokan, Yosana Akiko, Machi Tawara, Saigyo, and include literally several hundred others! Whenever I read a tanka that resonates, connects, shares something I wanted to know and/or was waiting to know or shares something personal yet universal at once, something that opens my heart and mind to the poet who wrote the tanka then that is my favorite tanka poet in that moment. To read an indelible tanka is a true ecstasy and a real gift. It is certainly a worthy effort to look for these tanka! They can and do appear in all the journals and all it takes is the time to search them out! I have seriously felt rewarded over and over by poet after poet in the tanka community who have written inspired, poignant powerful tanka that once read will remain as a touchstone of truth and poetry for as long as I can remember.

Maya Angelou once said: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” That is how I feel about hundreds of tanka poets who have positively enriched my life with one or many of their tanka and I will never forget how their tanka made me feel.

I began reading and trying to write haiku and senryu in the late 1980's and tanka in the early 90's and have enjoyed reading longer forms of poetry since the late 60's.

My favorite poet, since I first read one of her poems, has been Mary Oliver and I cannot recommend any book of poetry more than any one of her many great collections. I discovered Mary Oliver while in a local book store in the early 1980's and saw her book, American Primitive. I had never heard of her and randomly opened the book, read one poem and walked right to the check-out counter, bought it, went home and was magically captivated and magnetically happy in the embrace of each of her poems. I have been entranced and a devotee of her poetry ever since.

Some of my favorite tanka collections are:

Poems to Eat by Takuboku Ishikawa (translated by Carl Sesar) 

Tangled Hair by Yosano

Akiko Salad Anniversary by Machi Tawara 

At the Hut of the Small Mind and This Short Life and Four Decades on My Tanka Road by Sanford Goldstein 

The Windblown Clouds by Brian Tasker 

Gusts by Marianne Bluger 

Lip Prints and Elvis in Black Leather by Alexis Rotella 

First Light, First Shadows by George Swede 

The Rice Papers by Pat Shelley

hedgerows tanka pentaptychs, fieldgates and on the cusp encore by Joy McCall 

Where Deer Sleep by Brian Zimmer

this hunger, tissue thin by Larry Kimmel

The Trees Bleed Sweetness by Carol Purington

Now That the Night Ends: The Tanka of Gerard John Conforti

Slow Growing Ivy and Casting Shadows by David Terelinck 

A Thousand Reasons and A Solitary Woman by Pamela Babusci 

The Forest I Know by Kala Ramesh 

Talking in Tandem and twelve moons by Claire Everett 

Dancing Naked by Michael Ketchek

drops from her umbrella by laura maffei 

Always Filling Always Full by Margaret Chula 

More Light, Larger Vision by Geraldine Clinton Little

Cigarette Butts and Lilacs, tokens of a heritage by Andrew Riutta 

My Tanka Diary and The Maternal Line by Kawano Yuko (translated by Amelia Fielden) 

Early Indigo by Cherie Hunter Day

The Pleiades at Dawn by Jeanne Emrich

Baubles, Bangles & Beads and Still Swimming by Amelia Fielden

More about the poet:

Tom Clausen (Ithaca, NY) is a life-long Ithacan living in the same house he grew up in with his wife Berta. He became interested in haiku and related short forms of poetry in the late 1980's after reading an article about naturalist Ruth Yarrow, profiling her haiku. There was instant recognition that haiku was a form that might help with his tendency with wordiness, repetition, and overstatement. He has been reading and trying to write haiku, senryu, tanka and haibun since then. Tom is the curator of a daily haiku feature, online, at Mann Library, Cornell University where he worked for over 35 years before retiring in 2013.  

In 2003 Tom was invited to join the Route 9 Haiku group that formed in 2001. The group publishes twice a year a journal, Dim Sum, featuring selected work by members John Stevenson, Mary Stevens, Yu Chang, Susan Yavaniski, Shawn Blair Tom Clausen and a guest poet as well as two haiga and a haiku by Romanian artist and poet, Ion Codrescu. Tom enjoys walking, biking, photography and simply going about observing and documenting what is there to be found. He especially cares for cats and deer.

Website: tomclausen.com

Links to his books:

a worn chest by Joy McCall & Tom Clausen (tanka pairs 2022) here

Interchange haiku, prose & photos by Tom Clausen and Michael Dudley(2022) here

My Own Heart, 25 Years of Tanka by Tom Clausen ( 2021) here

Growing Late (tanka - 2007) here

One Day - Thirty Years of Little Poems (2023) (available at Amazon $6.00) 

Your Challenge this Week:

Tom's tanka hold questions, and some questions hold the answers within them. What questions do you ask yourself – what answers do you seek? That's your challenge this week. Do tell us your thoughts about Tom's tanka. We'd love to know. Tom has also given us an extensive list of some really good books. I'm excited to look into them. Thanks Tom. Looking forward to all your responses. Write. Read. 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.