hosts: Firdaus Parvez, Kala Ramesh, Priti Aisola & Suraja Menon Roychowdhury
Introducing a new perspective to our Wednesday Feature!
February 21, 2024
poet of the month: David Rice
Bio note:
David Rice has been writing tanka for about thirty-five years and continues to write a tanka most days.
He was the editor of the Tanka Society of America's journal, Ribbons, from 2012-2019. His poems have appeared in many tanka journals and anthologies, and he has written seven tanka books, including three with other poets (Cheri Hunter Day, Autumn Noelle Hall, and Lynne Leach.) He is donating all the proceeds from his latest book, Sequelae (2023), tanka prose, to the Climate Emergency Fund.
TTH: Can you give any advice to someone wanting to write and publish tanka? As an editor what are you looking for in a tanka that makes it most likely to get published?
As the editor of Ribbons for eight years, I had the privilege of reading a lot of tanka. Advice? The usual: read, write, edit. I think many poets often don't edit their tanka enough. I also think it's really hard to write a good, meaningful tanka. As M. Kei famously wrote, “If you think writing tanka is easy, try it.” I have read a lot of tanka that, though technically adequate, haven't touched me. My own experience is that if I write one hundred tanka and then look back at them after they have simmered, I might find ten that shimmer. With respect to getting published, one editor's rejection may be another editor's acceptance, but that rejected tanka might, indeed, need more editing.
1.
Poem Medicine Helps
“Be here now”or, with more nuance, “you have to let go of the life you have to accept the life you're been given.” Yup. Got it. Then my fifty-three-year-old daughter died suddenly.
mid-summer heat
flowers and grasses
going to seed
next spring
sh'e'll still be gone
The phone call, the hospital, the “there's nothing we can do:” I hadn't understood at all.
if you need anything . . .
I need to wake up
by a river
with her asleep
in her tent . . .
Even empathy doesn't comfort for long.
she said she'd scatter
my ashes
at that mountain lake
now I'm going to hike there
with hers
2.
a barn swallow
hovers at eye level
we both say that's her
I wonder
when she'll visit next
The Tanka Society of America's Member Anthology, 2022
We are deeply grateful to David for sharing his beautiful work and thoughts with us.
Challenge for this week:
These two heart-rending pieces of poetry need no discussion...
Inspired by these extremely poignant pieces, please write tanka or tanka prose on the theme of absence, missing. This week and then next please try writing in the classical tanka format of SLSLL - but not 5-7-5-7-7 (unless you're really moved to).
Important: Since we're swamped with submissions, and our editors are only human, mistakes can happen. Please, please, remember to put your name, followed by your country, below each poem, even after revisions. It really helps our editors; they won't have to type it in, saving them from potential typos. Thanks a ton!
<><>
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.
An essay on how to write tanka: Tanka Flights here
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.
<> <>