TANKA TAKE HOME — 9th July 2025 Featuring poet Sanford Goldstein from SIMPLY HAIKU

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

Tanka of Sanford Goldstein Published in Simply Haiku: A Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry December 2003, Volume 1, Number 6

Who is this man, Sanford Goldstein?

Sanford Goldstein on Sanford Goldstein

For fifty years I have been connected to Japan, and for forty years or so I have been connected to tanka. Unable to get a job after earning my Ph.D. in English Literature from Purdue in l953, I was offered the possibility of a job at Niigata University in Japan. My wife was an anthropologist and was eager to go. I was hesitant--the war and all that. But how fortunate that my wife won out.

When I was in the army and went through the lines at my place of induction in Indiana, I was asked if I wanted to study Japanese. Having studied French and done well in it, I thought I might try the Japanese language. Unfortunately I was never called, but from l953 on, I studied it, mostly on my own, written and spoken Japanese. I don't feel I succeeded in either, for all my translations of Japanese literature into English were done with Japanese collaborators, and my spoken Japanese sometimes leaves my listeners thinking my English is quite strange.

At first I knew no Japanese, though my wife and I studied spoken Japanese in an army language book aboard the dumpy freighter we took to Japan in l953. The first two years my wife and I studied Japanese conversation with a tutor (we stayed in Japan only two years, for my wife wanted to go to Stanford for a master's degree, and I wanted to go there to join the Stanford writing program and also to study Japanese--we were at Stanford a year before I found my permanent job at Purdue University, where I taught for thirty-six years with two-year sabbaticals to Japan).

I know my wife spoke better Japanese than I did. But during my first year in Japan, I saw a remarkable Japanese film on a novel by the famous Japanese novelist Ogai Mori. Since my predecessor at Niigata University had encouraged me to translate Japanese literature, I asked the head of the English Department if he would translate The Wild Geese with me. I knew no printed Japanese then (only my first two translated books were done in collaboration without my knowing any of the language, these novels begun during l953 and l955). Later the Ogai Mori novel was published in l959 by Charles E. Tuttle Company. Another colleague during those early years asked me to improve his English on a translation--a short novel--and I agreed. My job was to turn these two efforts into much better English. I remember that an editor at Tuttle's had said the few chapters I submitted for The Wild Geese title read like bad Henry James. Five years later that same editor accepted the Ogai Mori translation. The other brief novel became The Hunting Gun by Yasushi Inoue. I have co-translated and published several other Japanese novels.

Having come across some translated tanka of Takuboku Ishikawa in the early l960's, I found tanka was the form I had been waiting for. And that began a period of thirty years or so of translating tanka with Professor Seishi Shinoda, my precious colleague at Niigata University. These tanka translations included Akiko Yosano's Tangled Hair, Takuboku Ishikawa's Sad Toys , Mokichi Saito's Red Lights , and Shiki Masaoka's Songs from a Bamboo Village.

Having retired from Purdue in l992 (there was no retirement date at Purdue, but I had been asked a few years earlier to help a small Christian college get established in Shibata, Japan, so I retired for that reason), I became aware of the tanka poems of Ryokan, the Zen Buddhist priest, and Yaichi Aizu, a famous Niigata poet and scholar. Two books followed with my collaborator Professor Fujisato Kitajima: Ryokan's tanka/haiku and Ryokan's Calligraphy, a book written in Japanese by a Niigata University professor.

I had taken creative writing in college several times (for several summers in the late 80's and early 90's, I went to various colleges to write plays), but throughout my college life I was writing mostly stories and poems. Once I stumbled across tanka, I started writing them in the early sixties. I would send out my tanka and would get rejections. It seemed almost impossible for the tanka to gain a foothold. Haiku was the rage. Eventually, small magazines, some at Purdue in the 70's, began publishing my tanka. In the 70's a small group of Purdue poets asked me to join them. I was hesitant since I had had no real success with my tanka, but a member of the group read several pages of my tanka and insisted I join. The group decided to publish its own members and chose my book first. Thus my first tanka collection appeared in l977, This Tanka World.

My second collection, Gaijin Aesthetics , came out in l983. In l989, I was asked to go to Shikoku Island and interview a famous Zen farmer, but no real interview evolved (this was during my sixth trip to Japan, each trip two years, the last five being at Niigata University on sabbaticals for two years each from Purdue). The Zen farmer insisted the response to my first question would take years to answer, so that was that. Each day I would write twenty or thirty or fifty tanka. I was left isolated and was asked to correct an English manuscript of the Zen farmer. All in all, this was a major experience of my life, the closest I've come to a kind of Zen life. (A Zen master lived in my house in West Lafayette, Indiana, at two times, each trip one year--it was the most difficult Zen training I ever had.) The book that came out of the Shikoku Island experience was At the Hut of the Small Mind, published in 1992. I lost the Snapshot Press competition in tanka a few years ago, but my entry was eventually published by Linda Ward's Clinging Vine Press in 2001, my collection called This Tanka Whirl.

Long ago, I wrote in a tanka that I hoped tanka would walk me to the end of the road. That remains my wish.

-- Sanford Goldstein Professor Emeritus, Purdue UniversityProfessor Emeritus, Keiwa College

Link to this introduction: https://simplyhaiku.thehaikufoundation.org/SHv1n6/Sanford_Goldstein.html

*****

Sanford Goldstein Interview

by Pamela Babusci

READ IT HERE:

https://simplyhaiku.thehaikufoundation.org/SHv1n6/Sanford_Goldstein_int.html

*****

And NOW, for some tanka from Sanford: Sanford Goldstein: Published Tanka

Sanford Goldstein: Published Tanka

From: This Tanka World (1977)

I remain

in this about world

afraid to suck

the core

of now

this life

a cutting of paper forms

pasted

in scraps

and bits

Tamura out into the sea

Mishima with a sword

and others I could name with pills--

tonight

I count these ways of dying

From: Gaijin Aesthetics (1983)

the afternoon loneliness

grabs me

and I boil water

and break open

the delight

tonight's

Van Gogh

shoes

damp through

by the kitchen door

From: At The Hut Of The Small Mind (1992)

at least

Mother Teresa

smiles at me

from the mud wall

in my Hut of the Small Mind

my body

unmasks

in candleglow

the rain

down down

From: This Tanka Whirl (200l)

Ann Frank,

how you scribbled,

endured,

and now I tramp up these stairs

they hurried you down

I never carried

a mirror placed Toulouse-like

in my battered cap--

and still from my tanka brush

this cascade of me! and my! and mine!

only a one-sentence

rebuke

to my kid

and all day

the lousy aftertaste

 The LINK: https://simplyhaiku.thehaikufoundation.org/SHv1n6/Sanford_Goldstein_tp.html

One more inerview from Tanka Society of America: https://www.tankasocietyofamerica.org/essays/spilling-tanka-an-interview-with-sanford-goldstein From this interview: Following are two examples of Sanford’s tanka, the first taken from This Tanka World (1977) and the second from the Tanka Society of America International Tanka Contest, 2003, where it won first place:

again

this catalogue

of past griefs

and I keep washing

the same dish

from my hospital window

I see across a bare field

in the morning rain

a yellow silk umbrella

on its solitary way

*****

Your Challenge this Week! Taking Pamela's question and Sanford's answer: Q) Pamela Babusci: How many tanka do you write on a daily basis?

A) In those early years, perhaps forty years ago, I was writing ten tanka a day. I believe I kept that up for twenty-five years or more. Then because my life was less in turmoil, I wrote fewer. When I lived in Japan, I would write tanka on my walk along the sea; then I would transfer the good ones to my tanka notebook. I don't remember when I started my tanka notebooks, but perhaps in the 70's. I used to write tanka on cafeteria napkins (in the States) at any time of the day or evening or night. During times of crisis I would write more. When my wife was having brain surgery in New York (we were travelling with our three children at the time and heading for Maine), I wrote sometimes 200 tanka in a day. Sometimes 70 or 80 or more. It was a time of intense crisis for me. Nowadays I write only once a week, though sometimes I might jot down some tanka in my notebook while I'm at home--something that comes to me, from a program or movie. But last Saturday, I wrote 30 tanka. Usually I write between 24 and 30 every Saturday evening at my favorite coffee shop during these last ten years in Japan. But for about six of those years I also wrote tanka on Sunday evening at a favorite neighborhood Chinese restaurant. But simply because I spill these tanka does not mean they are good. Perhaps one or two will be in a spill, perhaps none. In one year I usually have written about 3000 tanka. When the New Year begins, I asterisk the "good" ones in the year's tanka notebook. Then I type a list all the good ones. Then I go over the list and select ones I will consider sending to a journal. Every so often I revise a tanka I am sending out, but often I do not. At any rate, a great deal of work goes into a process that boils down to sending out about 25 to 35 tanka a year. Out of these a few are published. But the five poems I send twice a year to Japan's famous The Tanka Journal are automatically accepted. So that's l0 right there!

Your Challenge for this week will be - SPILLING TANKA

Can you write around 20 tanka a day ... every day of this week, and choose the best from this and share it with your friends on this forum?

Just two! Try. You lose nothing but have everything to gain!

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. No tanka sequences.

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.