TANKA TAKE HOME — 30 April 2025 Poet of the Month: Susan Weaver

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

Introducing a new perspective to our Wednesday Feature!

poet of the month: Susan Weaver

you and I

thirty-four years this fall . . .

a scarlet maple leaf

drifts toward

its reflection

Ribbons, Fall 2021

red-roofed boat house

doubled in the lake's

still water

a girl fishes again

for memories of Papaw

red lights, January 2022

New Growth

Early October, a sunny afternoon – time to prune the winter honeysuckle that overhang my driveway and every year sprout three-foot shoots from their branches. It’s always a kind of therapy to set up a ladder and rein them in. And to let thoughts roam. This day, to my niece Julie in Nebraska, soon to have a baby.

Here – my head among the arching stems, their opposite leaves like green ears – I feel far away. I haven’t traveled in years. Yet I’m eager for her, and for my brother and his wife, whose lives as parents are on a different path. They’re driving from Kentucky for the birth. Lopping off shoots, sawing through woody branches, I think of all this as I open up the shrubs that bloom, creamy-white and fragrant, each January. Soon cuttings litter the driveway. As I climb down the ladder, something among the trimmings catches the sun.

silver ribbon

& cellophane entwine

an old bird nest . . .

unexpected shining moments

the patchwork of my life

(Unpublished tanka prose)

We thank you very warmly Susan for sharing your lovely poems and thoughts with us.

6 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?

Susan Weaver: For me, a writers' group is very helpful. Unless a deadline prevents it, I almost always have work critiqued before submitting it for publication. I've been in my current group for more than twenty years; we meet monthly. At present, all five members are published tanka poets, so, in addition to encouragement and support, I can trust the group to let me know where my writing needs more clarity. After all, suggesting an incident and an emotional response in a five-line poem is challenging. So it's not unusual for me to take a group of tanka to the meeting and be told that this or that tanka really needs to be tanka prose. I've written some of my most successful tanka prose after that sort of prompting – including the “Hospitality” piece included among my favorites.

Biography: Susan Weaver became editor of Ribbons (journal of the Tanka Society of America) in 2021, after serving three years as tanka prose editor. She is a former feature writer and editor with special interests in cycling and active travel. Her eight years of staff experience at Bicycling magazine, where she became managing editor, were bookended with periods of freelancing. Between assignments, she taught as a poet in the schools, worked weekends at a shelter for victims of domestic violence, and explored local back roads on her bicycle. She also enjoyed bike travel in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. and wrote about it for Adventure Cyclist and other magazines. Much later, she discovered tanka and tanka prose. She lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with her artist/writer husband and two cats.

Challenge for this week:

Both the tanka give the reader ample ‘dreaming room’, allowing them to create a story around the poem, based on what is glimpsed fleetingly even after several readings.

The second tanka begins with the striking image of a ‘red-roofed boat house’ reflected in the ‘still water’ of the lake. The poet uses the verb ‘doubled’ to evoke this image. As one reads the lower verse one sees a girl ‘fish[ing]’, not for a certain kind of fish, but ‘for memories of Papaw’. I assume ‘Papaw’ refers to her paternal grandfather. Once again, the poet uses the verb ‘fishes’ in a unique way to speak of a girl trying to revive memories of her grandfather with whom she may have spent many wonderful moments in the boat house, dreamily adrift on the lake, enjoying the sights and sounds around, listening to stories, and spending many a quiet hour fishing in the clear waters.... This tanka has very strong and unexpected L 5.

Enjoy Susan’s unpublished tanka prose!

We invite you to write tanka where you leave things unsaid, or subtly suggested, allowing the reader to wander around your poem and then imagine or create a story.

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.