TANKA TAKE HOME: 5th June 2024 - Sue Colpitts - poet of the month

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

Introducing a new perspective to our Wednesday Feature!

June 5th, 2024

poet of the month: Sue Colpitts

Biography: Sue came late to writing poetry.  While surfing the web, she read some haiku poetry, dabbled in it and became hooked.  Later she discovered tanka on the All Poetry site (allpoetry.com) and took its tanka courses online.  The instructors and fellow poets continue to offer helpful feedback and guidance. She finds inspiration in the poetry from Inuit songs to the Hyakunin Isshu to the poems by contemporary Canadian poets, and from nature.  Her favourite tanka poets include Ono No Komachi and Michael Mclintock.  After reading a great poem like one written by an’ya, she tries different themes and ways to write a tanka.  She feels that experimenting with the form keeps her writing fresh and challenging, and needs to be emotionally inspired to write poetry.  

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 ? 

SC: I came late to writing poetry.  During retirement while surfing the web, I read some haiku poetry.  I dabbled in it and became hooked. I discovered tanka on the All Poetry site.  The lyrical, song-like beauty and courtly style of the ancient Japanese tanka captivated me. Tanka provides an outlet for me to write about emotions and relationships that I can’t always fully express in haiku.

after

the closing of wings

silence

I cannot speak of it

how you fell before me

-ephemerae

sky and water 

merging with the cry 

of an osprey 

and if not from here… 

where will my joy come 

- Cattails

We are deeply grateful to Sue Colpitts for sharing her beautiful poems with us.

Some thoughts on Sue's tanka:

Both these tanka are steeped in nature, filled with an empathy and joy for all beings. When I read the first tanka the top three lines reminded me of Issa. The poet appears speaking of the death of a being with wings- perhaps a bird, perhaps an insect. And then the sudden turn and pathos in those last 2 lines -

I cannot speak of it

how you fell before me

Who is she referring to? The first 3 lines now take on a new significance. There is so much dreaming space within this tanka for the reader to fill in...

The second tanka, on the contrary, is filled with joy- the joy that is waiting for to be experienced everywhere in nature.

Prompt for this week: Write of an instance where nature inspired or affected you.

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!

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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.

Please check out the LEARNING Archives.

New essays are up! https://www.trivenihaikai.in/post/learning-archive

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