TANKA TAKE HOME — 7 May 2025 Poet of the Month: Lafcadio

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

poet of the month: Lafcadio

Instead of using her real name, Lafcadio  adopted a pen name when she started writing on social media. She was a special education teacher but now works at home writing, editing, and proofreading medical textbooks and journal articles.

Lafcadio has written poetry for many years. In the last few years she discovered Japanese micropoetry.  So now she spends her time writing haiku, senryu, tanka and haibun.  Her work has been published in journals and anthologies. Some of her poetry has been nominated for Touchstone and Best of the Net awards. Lafcadio grew up in Florida and now enjoys the mountains and seasonal changes of Tennessee. She is an avid pluviophile.

1.

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

Lafcadio: I did not come from a literary background. Both my parents were from rural families that had little money. My mother didn't get to finish school because she needed to work to support their family. She did go back to an adult program when I was a child and earned her highschool diploma. My father was dyslexic and never learned to read.  When he was about 13 the school kicked him out because they did not work with students with disabilities when he was a child.  But my parents were determined that my sister and I would read and receive a well-rounded education.  I read all the classics when I was a child, such as Charlotte's Web by E. B. White, any Dr. Seuss book, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, Roald Dahl's books, and Madeleine L'Engle to name just a few. I was always reading. As I grew older I began reading a lot of poetry, biographies and nonfiction: Neruda, Bukowski, Collins, were some of my favorite poets. I used to write poems as a child. I remember when I was 10 my teacher framed one of my poems for our classroom. That, of course, kept me interested in writing poetry.

2.

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. 

Lafcadio: As an adolescent and young adult I wrote many long poems. I didn't show them to anyone outside my family.  When I joined Twitter (X) I discovered haiku. I was writing the traditional 5-7-5 but did not know anything about juxtaposition, cutting words, pivots or anything. I began studying and a friend online took me under her wing and taught me so much. I also wrote senryu and then finally tanka. I love tanka for those extra two lines that give a wider range of expressive possibilities. The flow of tanka is exciting to me.

the day 

swiftly turns to dusk 

the night 

waits in the 

wings of a crow

midnight

on the porch

a shooting star

enters the space

you left empty

credit: Moonbathing 25, Fall/Winter 2021

We thank you very warmly Lafcadio for sharing your lovely poems and thoughts with us, and look forward to enjoying your poems this month!

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. There is a sense of waiting in both tanka - waiting for the night, waiting for someone to enter the emptiness. However the palpable sense of darkness is one that's filled with movement. Notice how sparingly the poet has used her words and yet manages to bring her point across very effectively.

This week we invite you to write tanka about the night. As an extra challenge, do not mention the moon! We agree that it's almost blasphemous - the moon and Japanese poetry are almost inseparable, but we have full faith in your imagination and poetic abilities :)

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.