TANKA TAKE HOME — 6th August '25 Featuring poet: Michael Dylan Welch

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

August 6th, 2025

poet of the month: Michael Dylan Welch

all my books collect dust

except the one of love poems

you gave me that day

when the spring rains

kept us indoors

Tanka Splendor 1992, AHA Books, 1992

one by one

the ants take my dreams

with the crumbs

they carry

from the picnic you forgot

Gusts #17, Spring/Summer 2013

shopping bags

from the grocery store

stacked on the kitchen table—

the weight of your call

saying you’re not coming

Red Lights 10:1, January 2014

plum rain

keeps on falling—

the umbrella’s ribs

are closer to me now

than your ribs will ever be

Gusts #35, Spring/Summer 2022

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

Michael: A small bit of literary connection in my childhood came from being named after the poet Dylan Thomas, because my mother said she liked the name Dylan—although my parents gave that to me as a middle name, not my primary name. And thus, any literary connection snuck in through a back door. I used to dislike the name “Dylan” as a child, because the name was rare (and odd?) when we moved to Canada from England, but I grew to appreciate it as a young adult. I’ve written about my name in an essay on my website. See “What’s in a Name? Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Poetry” here

We had books in our house when I was a child, but not a lot, and they were mostly nonfiction. My mother never liked reading novels (always true stories for her), and my dad read an occasional book about World War II, if any (I read some of them too, such as about dambusters and Colditz). Both of my parents had been evacuated during the war, as children in England (I’m a British citizen too). So, although we had books, I don’t remember a single book of poetry, and the books we had filled just a couple of small bookcases. But I loved writing and reading, and my mother took us kids to the library regularly. I especially remember devouring the adventure stories of Enid Blyton, one of the world’s most popular authors that most Americans (at least) have never heard of. She has sold more than 600 million books and is one of the world’s most translated authors ever. I later read a lot of Hardy Boys mysteries, which were similar to the Blyton books I read. Fun adventures!

I did write as a child, too. I remember entering a school-wide poetry contest one year, maybe when I was in elementary school, at which I won all three honourable mentions, and all three of the top prizes. This was surely a validation to me as a fledgling writer, and the top poem (about not wanting to get my hair cut) was printed in the school yearbook. That was almost certainly my first “publication.” I also wrote a lot of poems as a kid, and I remember my mother sometimes helping me get the scansion right if I was trying to write a metered poem. That was validation, too. My mother had zero creative writing inclinations, but she had learned enough in her own school days to help me with the basics. In school, too, whenever we had essay assignments, I always wrote more than was required and tried extra hard to make the typing look beautiful, sometimes with pictures. I remember having to write a short research paper about the Panama Canal. I ended up writing a long story, in fiction, including Spanish phrases that I researched, about a canal pilot guiding a ship from one end of the canal to the other, working in all the factual details I could find (the encyclopaedia was my friend). I still have that paper in a box, though I’ve lost most others. As a teenager, too, I kept long diaries recording the details of family trips (my dad was a professor and we had long summers off, and I documented two-month trips to Scandinavia, to Yugoslavia and Greece, to Western Canada and the Western United States, sometimes including poems with my prose descriptions and facts about the trips—along with maps and postcards and tourist brochures. I still have all these books—and I guess they were indeed my first “books.”

And I remember Mrs. Foster, an old lady next door to us (I used to cut her grass). When she heard that I wrote poetry, she invited me numerous times into her living room to read my poems for her. She would give me her encouragement and advice—but never share any of her own poetry, though I did recall seeing a book she had published, perhaps self-published. I like to think my visits brightened her day. I wish I still had some of those early poems I shared, whatever they were.

I suppose these experiences show me to have been on the path to poetry early on, don’t you think? I was always writing—poems, stories, and I enjoyed English class assignments. My teacher, Mr. Goodburn, said he wanted to keep two of my assignments to use as examples to show other students how to do them well. One was an exercise on employing emphasis in writing, techniques I still use today, and another on parts of speech and literary devices, in which I had colour-coded all the parts of several paragraphs I wrote to demonstrate each of the techniques. I was given 20 out of 10 points on one assignment. That’s a validation! I remember him writing on one of my high school assignments, “You will make a fine essay writer someday.” Maybe he was right.

In tenth grade, I remember Mr. Goodburn teaching us about haiku (merely as a syllable-counting exercise). I latched onto it. Actually, it was nothing special to me (yet) but became one of the many types of poems I wrote regularly. All my haiku from this time, from 1976 to 1987 or so, were strictly 5-7-5 syllables, all had titles, often rhymed, and had no understanding of haiku as a literary art whatsoever. I was able to collect 46 of these early “haiku” on my website (all written by 1984, by which time I was 22 years old) at https://www.graceguts.com/haiku-and-senryu/godawful-early-haiku. In the summer of 1987, though, I purchased my first book of haiku, Bashō translations by Lucien Stryk, which I remember getting at a Kinokuniya Bookstore near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. These were highly minimalist translations, but for some reason it never struck me that they weren’t 5-7-5. Other translations I read weren’t 5-7-5 either, but I never quite noticed. Later that fall, in November of 1987, at a mall bookstore in Costa Mesa, California, I bought the second edition of Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology, and that book changed my life. Something like 88 percent of the poems (yes, I counted) were not 5-7-5, and on reading that book and beginning to understand why these poems were not 5-7-5, I shifted my understanding of haiku from form to content. This was monumental. My haiku immediately improved, and dramatically so. I discovered that there was a lot more to haiku than I thought.

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

More about the poet:

Michael Dylan Welch writes haiku, tanka, longer poetry, essays, reviews, and other content, and documents his writing life on his website, www.graceguts.com. This site includes a section on tanka at https://www.graceguts.com/tanka, featuring numerous poems and sequences, and essays on tanka. Michael founded the Tanka Society of America in 2000, and has organized all six of the society’s conferences, with a seventh one scheduled for San Francisco in September of 2025. With Emiko Miyashita, he translated the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a thirteenth-century collection of waka poems (later known as tanka). In 2012, one of their translations from this book was featured on the back of 150 million U.S. postage stamps. Michael also cofounded the Haiku North America conference in 1991 and the American Haiku Archives in 1996, and founded the Seabeck Haiku Getaway in 2008 and National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com) in 2010. He also served two terms as poet laureate for Redmond, Washington, where he is president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword and curator (since 2006) of the monthly SoulFood Poetry Night reading series. Michael is originally from England and grew up there and in Ghana, Australia, and Canada, and has lived in Sammamish, Washington (near Seattle) since 2003. In 2023, he and his Japanese wife became U.S. citizens.

Your Challenge this Week: Like Kala says: Pay close attention to the upper and lower verses. I'd also add, bring in some form of water. Two of Michael's tanka mention rain, but you don't need to write about it, choose any form or water. And do tell us how you felt reading his tanka. We'd love to know. Looking forward to reading your poems. 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.