TANKA TAKE HOME — 1st October '25 Featuring poet: Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

October 1st, 2025

poet of the month: Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton

beneath

my pen's point

wisteria wakes 

& remembers

blooming

International Tanka No.15 2024

allowing 

myself to be seen

by a doe and her fawn

the space between us 

becomes a poem

Tanka Society of America

Members' Anthology 2019 

Lesson Plans

Several years ago, I was invited to work with inner city students for a few days. I made the lesson plans simple and included a bit of poetry. And I found that the 40 some students crammed together in a classroom were generally eager to learn, and eager to succeed. Later, I wrote this poem for them:

poetry

is the house

I live in

it teaches me

how to be strong

Ribbons, Winter 2014

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

Q1.

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

Marilyn: I was born into a working class family. While books were not available in the household, a dictionary was. Also, I loved learning to read and discovering the magic and definitions of words. 

Q2.

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?

Marilyn: I enlisted in the US Air Force 2 years out of High School and was posted to Thailand during The War in Southeast Asia. During that time, as an Officer, I gathered information on bombing raids over North Vietnam. Writing poetry eased the anxiety I felt doing that work.  

On returning to the US, I joined a writing group. At one of the gatherings a member of the group read several tanka. It occurred to me that he was describing moments of time. That caught my interest. In the years since I have found that writing and reading tanka gives me creative energy for other parts of my life. 

More about the poet:

Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton is a poet and essayist. Living in diverse parts of the United States as well as Thailand, Hong Kong, Spain and France has sharpened her sense of the need for poetry in this world. As a teaching artist, she approaches poetry as a path for empathy, understanding, and awareness. As a veteran of the War in Southeast Asia, survivor of an abusive first marriage, and a bereaved parent, she believes that creative acts can lift us from despair. 

Currently, Marilyn lives and works in Allentown, Pennsylvania with her husband of fifty years and two cats. Until recently, she was the editor and publisher of red lights, an international tanka journal. Her writing has appeared in Haiku, moonbathing, Skylark, Bright Stars, Take Five (volumes 2,3 4), The Sacred in Contemporary Haiku, Beyond the Grave, The Tanka Journal and tinywords. 

Your Challenge this Week:

Marilyn's tanka are about poetry, and how it brings things to life, how it's a haven – a space for beauty and healing. That first tanka is just gorgeous. We'd love to know your thoughts on her beautiful poems. This week write about what poetry means to you. Interpret the challenge as you like. 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.