TANKA TAKE HOME — 24th 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 24th, 2025

poet of the month: Tom Clausen

full of rain

the river races along 

past everything here-

I can't shake this sense 

I'm living on borrowed time

Hermitage v.2 no. 1-2 Spring-Autumn 2005

pushed by the wind

at the far end of the sky

a few clouds...

I can see that what I want

keeps changing too 

Ribbons Fall 2005

how many people

can you connect to

and lose in a life,

without feeling

quite lost

Hummingbird 2000

it occurs to me

to retreat

from this world-

as if another world

might exist

Heron Quarterly January 1999

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

Q5:

TTH: Can you give any advice to someone wanting to write and publish tanka?

Tom: My advice is to read widely tanka by as many poets from the distant past all the way to the present looking for those that resonate and that you feel a connection to. Make a notebook of those you like most and study those for what it is that drew you to them. At this time there are many online resources to find examples of great tanka. I would encourage those interested in knowing more to follow this Triveni Tanka Take Home feature. You can and will appreciate the way different poets' approach tanka and how varied this 5 line poem can be. I would add that in writing your own tanka be true to your heart and intuition. Make your tanka your own voice and not a copy of other poets. Write what you feel most in tune with or what you feel is "unsolved in your heart" as Rilke advised in his Letters to a Young Poet.

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Always carry a little pocket notebook to record experiences, feelings and emotions that speak to you in a way suggesting they might be suitable notes to write a little poem.

When submitting your tanka anyplace be sure to thoroughly read the journal or place you are sending to so you know what kinds of tanka they publish. Follow their submission instructions carefully and most importantly, do not be discouraged by rejection! Not having tanka published is disappointing but the key to getting published is a determined practice and keeping at your writing and reading. Editors have a nearly impossible job winnowing through massive numbers of poems and some they reject not because the poem is undeserving of publication but they simply have too many that may have had similar content or subject. 

Q6:

TTH: Do you show your work in progress to anyone, or is it a solitary art that you keep close to your chest before letting it go for publishing?

Tom: I write tanka as a solitary practice and have not sought feedback very often in the past few years. I used to show my tanka to my wife and a few friends but have not done that for many years and should probably revisit this solitary practice! It is one of many things in my life that I enjoy being solitary about but another person(s) feedback I imagine would be invaluable in improving my attempts at tanka.

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:

September has taken us on a lovely journey with Tom's tanka and we're very grateful to him. This week's tanka are an introspection on life and the beyond. All touched me deeply. I hope you're inspired! So the challenge for the week is to think of the "beyond" in whichever way you want to interpret it. 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.