sponsored by AHA Books

Judge:
Geraldine C. Little

Series Editor:
Jane Reichhold

THE REMARKABLE TANKA
by Geraldine C. Little

Entries for this tanka anthology arrived during the Christmas season. On every side getting and spending raged madly. How wonderful, I thought, that in the midst of all this, I have the privilege of reading 788 poems, a marvelous antidote to the forces of materiality. they brought me back to what really matters, to the delights of the word and spirit. My strongest regret is that I was limited to choosing only thirty-one poems!

The entries given to me were anonymous. It was delightful, then, when I was given the names of those chosen, to see that some poems came from the Netherlands, from England, India, Canada, as well as all over the United States. This short form is indeed becoming one which is practiced internationally.

The poems were wide-ranging, embracing (or raging against) the vicissitudes of the human condition. There was much loneliness, some fine humor, the problems of coping with aging, facets of love in all its myriad forms. Some poems were obviously written by accomplished poets, some by beginners. What became most apparent as I read and reread entries, is that the tanka form in the English language is in a state of evolution. What it is, or should be, is by ;no means clear, judging by the poems I read. Words written in five lines do not, without other factors, necessarily make a tanka, though they may make a strong statement of self-expression. Metaphor and simile were sometimes used. While one cannot state a hard-and-fast rule about these techniques, one would say that the less both are used in tanka, the better. One would like to have seen abstractions made manifest by imagery. The old rule, "Show, don't tell," is still apt. The tanka form is not for moralizing; that's a different genre of poetry. One of the delights of both haiku and tanka is the opportunity for subtlety.

What one strongly felt is that poets, (myself included!) would be rewarded by reading and re-reading all one can find on the subject of tanka. Read Sanford Goldstein, Hiro Sato, Jane Reichhold's Introduction to Wind Five Folded, Jane Hirshfield's fine work. Tanka traditionally embodied the delights and tragedies of love. As evidenced by these 788 poems, the subject matter now embraced is much wider than that. Whether that is a good thing or otherwise, is open to question, or so it seems to me. Whether the wider subject matter weakens or enhances the "form" is worth debating.

Tanka in the English language has been written for about ten minutes or less in time's long view. It is good to remember that tanka dominated Japanese poetry for a thousand years. In other words, we are all still stumbling in the genre, beautifully, strongly, urgently and passionately stumbling, and that is splendid. Will anything we now write be extant in a thousand years? Should one even think about that as one writes? Who can say. But is the effort worth it? Of course. Poems will live in the world when much else is dross.

Hooray for these 788 poems and the writers who so bravely set down portions of themselves, of their very bones, their vulnerable hearts. I do not say it facilely: these poems were a Christmas gift to me personally. I wish all could have been printed in an anthology, as a valuable lesson in what works, and what, sometimes, does not, but more, as a lesson in the striving of humans for something beyond themselves and their (our) little fleeting lives.

Judge's tanka:

January
new moon hooking dreams
on its pure light
I think of loves past and to come
as the Liebestod soars and sears

Geraldine C. Little

Suezan Aikins
Prospect, Nova Scotia
Canada

taking in
the last and frostbit rose
to wilt
as I search everywhere
for the note you didn't leave

~*~

Marianne Bluger
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada

one big sweep
and my own hook
sends my straw hat
spinning
off down the river

~*~

Marianne Bluger
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada

badlands
empty
of the marks of man
such beauty sculpted
only by the wind

~*~

Margaret Chula
Portland, Oregon

anniversary
of last summer's fire
I bless this new house
with a wand of burning sage
-- bucket of water nearby

~*~

Piet Dietze
Oosterhout, Netherlands

Four black mournful men
she never knew or met
carry her away.

In the dreary street, fading
the sounds In Paradisum . . .

~*~

Marje A. Dyck
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Canada

A piece of the moon
is missing tonight
how empty the sound
my key turning
in the lock

~*~

Glenn Gustafson
Dedham, Massachusetts

An autumn ant
skitters up your headstone's face,
grandfather,
dead eleven years before my birth -
chiseled years, chiseled shadows.

~*~

Mujeeb Yar Jung
Hyderabad, India

My wife comes in with
a black garment gracing her
body, not giving
a thought to my quip that a
moon comes hidden in clouds

~*~

Robert Kusch
New Brunswick, New Jersey

For a moment
at the field's full length -
mid-morning shadows
creeping back to
their trees

~*~

Kenneth C. Leibman
Archer, Florida

lines stretch away
from canyonland powerplants
to the far city
do you remember when
we could see across this valley?

~*~

Kenneth C. Leibman
Archer, Florida

at Raleigh Station
the striding girl's nipples
through her sweater . . .
years ago in Stockholm
that summer of no brassieres!

~*~

Lea Lifshitz
Pomona, New York

turning away
from a mountain of color
the old woman finds
one leaf in her shadow

. . . takes it home

~*~

Rita Z. Mazur
Richland, Washington

after his stroke
he shows me morning dew
caught in cobwebs
places a yellow rose
on my pillow

~*~

Dorothy McLaughlin
Somerset, New Jersey

celebrating
our fortieth high school reunion
and dreams that came true

moments of silence
for those that didn't

~*~

Dorothy McLaughlin
Somerset, New Jersey

a rainbow
of silk anemones
in a blue vase

I remember the fragrance
of last August's nasturtiums

~*~

Michael McNierney
Boulder, Colorado

(The poem has been removed as it was found to be copyrighted by another author)

~*~

Lenard D. Moore
Raleigh, North Carolina

glowing moon
shadow comes and goes
through the doorway
she raises her legs
around my neck

~*~

Joanne Morcom
Calgary Alberta
Canada

crash bang boom

goes the midnight thunder
i snuggle closer to you
and then remember
you don't live here anymore

~*~

Joanne Morcom
Calgary Alberta
Canada

feeling cranky
the palm reader
tells him
she's never seen a life line
as short as his

~*~

Robert Henry Poulin
Coral Springs, Florida

walking out in snow
and back in snow
to farthest lights
showing each flake
even in the storm

~*~

Ronan
Eugene, Oregon

the old couple slowly
down the long corridor
no breath for talking
moving their walkers
in slow syncopation

~*~

Alexis Rotella
Los Gatos, California

An exquisite headache
with long fingers
she reaches up
to still
the garden chimes

~*~

Helen Shaffer
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania

filing through
the cathedral's crypt
with our young guide . . .

when his back is turned
we finger the names

~*~

Helen Shaffer
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania

face down
on the brush pile lies
a scarecrow
I look away as
he starts to burn

~*~

Brian Tasker
Frome, Somerset
England

across the field
the freshness of hay
blown on a warm wind
moving on
the far voices of friends

~*~

Brian Tasker
Frome, Somerset
England

the rain on the window
and in the garden
through the maple's bareness
flowering
the winter jasmine

~*~

Michael Dylan Welch
Foster City, California

can you see the rain
where you live?
does it fall
blown at as sharp an angle
as my tears?

~*~

Helen Wolthers
Eindhoven, Netherlands

The wide ample view
of polders and sea-dikes
can't hide anything:
not the smokestacks far away
nor their yellow, poisoned clouds.

~*~

Helen Wolthers
Eindhoven, Netherlands

It's only one step
down to the precipice, but
one glance can reach
to far, snow-covered mountains

many miles away from here.

~*~

AFTER WORDS
Jane Reichhold

For five years now, Mirrors International Tanka Awards has served as a gathering point for examples of the changes, similarities and differences in the tanka poems of people around the world. Perhaps we should take a few moments to examine the process as well as the current position of this phenomenon.

First, a backward glance, through my eyes. As I read the entries spilling out of envelopes in 1990, I was thrilled. Each packet of poems seemed as good or better than the last one. I was pleased to see how well English writers had adopted so many of the Japanese tricks and techniques of the form. It seemed we Anglos had learned quickly; we were being good students.

The fact that the first judge, Sanford Goldstein, had close ties to Japan through his years of living there, as well as his translations of the tanka of Akiko Yosano and Ishikawa Takuboku had prepared him to be able to select the best poems which reflected our assimilation of the oldest Japanese poetry form. In making his choices, Professor Goldstein was careful to include a wide variety of writing styles, subject matter and different techniques of pivoting.

When the entries for the 1991 contest arrived I was shocked and dismayed. For days I asked myself, "What went wrong?" "Why are these poems less successful than last year's?" "Was I personally bored, now, with the form?" No. "Were others less interested in tanka and therefore their poems seemed flat and less well-written?"

When George Swede, the judge that year, returned the small packet of winning cards he had selected and we had matched them up with the numbers to find the authors, I gathered together the pile of poems which were not chosen. I read them through and then re-read the award tanka.

It took a few days, but finally I realized what had happened. In the first year most writers were following the examples of the famous Japanese tanka and thus, were able to write some very good imitations. But already in one year a large number of authors had written enough tanka so that they had thrown off their Japanese training wheels and were wobbling, but now on their own way to writing non-Japanese tanka! What a surprise. What a gift! This was better than I had ever dreamed of or hoped. The writers, by listening to their hearts, were showing us the best ways to assimilate a new poetry genre.

By re-reading Professor Swede's selection, I could see he was aware of this and had given a balanced picture of the different stages these 90 authors were experiencing.

In 1992, when Jane Hirshfield agreed to judge the contest, I wondered how she would view the fledgling efforts of tanka writers. Jane had just finished revising her translation of two of Japan's most famous tanka writers - Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikabu - for her book, The Ink Dark Moon, which was going into a second edition. Would Jane automatically place the contest entries next to these famous tanka still swirling in her mind? If so, I feared she'd find our very different.

While Jane was judging the nameless set of cards, I closely read the set of poems I had. I marked the ones I felt were the best. And because I could see the names, I judged each person's work on the basis of what I knew the author had one previously (when this was the case) and where the innovations were and how the poet's own voice was coming through.

Jane Hirshfield judged the contest from a completely different angle, as she revealed in her excellent essay for Tanka Splendor 1992. She judged from her heart. How well did the poem use images, techniques and sounds to bring her to feel what the author was feeling? She wasn't looking for Japanesque poems, although her own tanka are deeply dyed from the shining examples of the old waka-tanka. The contest entries were permitted to come to her as modern poems (which most of Hirshfield's poetry is as seen in her books of Gravity of Angels and Alaya) and it was on this basis she judged them.

It was gratifying then, to see how many of the poems she selected were ones I had marked as outstanding.

One of the reasons for asking George Ralph to judge in 1993 was his ability to capture several wins in the Nippon Poetry Society's tanka contests. The other reason was that I had been reading George's work in the many pages of his tanka published in Mirrors since 1990. I could see his changes from the longer, almost 31 English syllable to his present much shorter ones. He had wide experiences with his own tanka writing and I felt I could trust his.

As I studied the box of poems sent in that year, I felt I could more quickly spot where a writer was in his/her progress with tanka. Was one in the first euphoria of trying to do a great Japanese tanka? Struggling to put the feelings in the best possible way regardless of what one learned? Or was one more practiced so he/she could use the form and its limits to an advantage in an almost effortless gesture? An ever-larger growing group now had acquired their own "voice" - recognizable in a crowd of unsigned cards.

One indication of the English independence from the Japanese form is the ability to accurately reflect our Western ideas of philosophy, our stands of art and poetry as well as the use of concrete images which are meaningful to us.

Though many poets and a certain number of Westerners have studied and even adopted Zen Buddhism, many authors, from childhood reading or education, first absorbed Western thinking unconsciously through delight in the great resounding lines such as "And death have no dominion. . ." or "I am the captain of my soul. . .". It takes an acrobatic mind to admire, and we do sincerely, certain lines of Japanese poetry when the feeling they express are not the ones we value for ourselves.

An example is in our divergent ideals of love. A thousand years ago in Japan the aspect of love which was accepted as suitable for literature was the one of longing. For the class writing at that time - members of the emperor's court - the works were a reflection of what society thought them to think about themselves. Even a modern Japanese couple view their love differently than did their ancestors in the same way we do not view love as did the Europeans in the "dark ages".

Yes, we are all humans and we do share many of the same feelings regarding love. However, how we view our love or what we deem important to share with others is not all the same.

To the reader of contemporary poetry, the many Japanese (and now English) poems bases on longing, can at some point, be seen as "adolescent". The love-sick lamentations of a teenager are rarely the 'ideal' love motive of a modern poet. A look in Exquisite Corpse or the Paris Review exposes one to graphic descriptions of the parts and positions. One cannot simply look backwards or on the newsstand for that aspect of love to share in a poem. One must decide for oneself what is to bee seen as most vital, interesting and enlightening. This is part of the development of one's own voice.

When Japanese poems are translated into English we learn of words that are meaningful in another culture, but maybe not to us. When I hear the word 'haze' I think of the yellow-brown cloud of choke-smoke over Los Angles or I remember "green week" of college initiation. I have never forgotten a tiny, young girl helping me with translations who, when she read the word 'haze' in Japanese, began to weep.

I am not saying we cannot be sensitive and appreciate new awareness. We can and we do, but every poetry fashion looks at the world through a narrow slit. Images, feelings and ideas which are 'acceptable' in that genre constitute only a small percentage of what is happening. One of the miracles of bringing a new genre into another culture is not only that the tiny slit is pointed in a new direction but the combination often widen the slit at the same time. We cannot write only of cherry blossoms when the apple is such an important part of our pool of archetypes.

Well, I've digressed. We left George Ralph back in Holland, Michigan, on the Christmas break from his job as Head of the Department of Theatre at Hope College studying the entries. Not only was he thorough, he was extremely fair. Among the winners that year were examples of the more 'modern' styles as well as many representative from the 'school of older tanka.' I respect his care as it is not easy to have an appreciation for a style which one has 'written though' to get to a new and what one considers more 'challenging 'set of limits.

Occurring between these four years of the contest and this year's results was, for me, a huge event. In the winter months of 1993, Werner and I read and reread through all the poems ever submitted to Mirrors International Tanka Awards to search for the poems to be included in the book, Wind Five Folded.

We worked it three ways. First we each read the poems individually. If we felt the poem was a good example of tanka, or if the poem touched us with its words and ways, we put our initial on the back of the card.

When we both had finished, all the cards which had both names on the backs were put aside in one pile. Another pile had all of those with Werner's marks and one had my marks. A fourth pile was of those cards which had no mark. In the evenings we'd read to each other poems we had marked saying why we had picked it. After discussing it we agree (or agree to disagree) and the card was given another mark and added to the pile with two marks.

Then all the cards, even the ones with no marks, were sorted out again into piles of all the entries submitted by an author. Again we went through the cards looking at each author's entered works. This time we judged the author's individual poems against his/her collected entries. Which were the best examples of this poet's voice or vision? At this point, some of the unmarked or one-marked cards were tagged as 'in' because even if an author didn't agree with all our ideals of the form, the genre was being used in an unusual way that deserved exposure.

It was interesting to observe as I typeset and proofread, and proofed, and proofed again, how the poems with each reading were viewed differently. Each time certain poems would "blaze forth" to thrill and excite me. Now when I can read Wind Five Folded for the pleasure, I love to enter the book where the pages open themselves to me, to dip in to capture a gen which can resonate through my mind in my idle moments.

All of which brings us to this year's Mirrors International Tanka Awards. By choosing a judge, the contest is, at some level, already judged; I thought. Though Geraldine C. Little has been one of the early members and an officer of the Haiku Society of America, she has probably given more of her time and talents to writing in European genres.

As one who wishes to promote the assimilation of new genres (Japanese and Chinese) into English poetry, I felt her choices would reflect her interests and experiences. Her own book of tanka, More Light, Larger Vision (AHA Books, 1992) is an interesting experiment of combining ideas of a new way to write a tanka (using enjambment, and 5-7-5-7-7 syllable lines incorporating punctuation within the lines) while adhering to the Oriental subject matter set into 20th century America. Her marriage of ideas was validated by the HSA awarding her book, More Light, Larger Vision, First Place in their 1993 Merit Book Awards.

Geraldine Little has been true to her personal vision in her choices for award tanka. This year, more than ever, the winners are those who come to tanka outside of the haiku scene. Yet within her choices for poems are also some of the short, almost haiku-like ones. The rhythms are varied; not so classic. With Ms. Little's choices, I feel the whole tanka 'scene' has been moved a step in a new and important direction.

I am eager for next year's entries to arrive to see where you, the poets, have taken us as your understanding of new ideas for the form increased.

With the termination of Mirrors magazine in my hands in March, 1995, we have given the contest a new name - one which some people had inadvertently begun to use - Tanka Splendor Awards - as this booklet has grown to become the connective link between the contests.

One other change should be mentioned. Each year we'd received a set or two of linked sequences or a series of tanka. Having no way to compare such works, we had to let the links be judged on an individual basis. However, since we want to reflect what authors are doing, and because we felt Tanka Splendor would benefit from the addition of some sequences, we have added another category for entries: tanka sequences of 3 - 7 five-line tanka. Whether the poem has one or more authors is up to you.

Though the majority of these "after words" have centered on the judges of Mirrors International Tanka Awards this is not entirely fair. When I try to think of the number of hours each author has spent in reading, studying, thinking, writing, and caring for his/her tanka, the amount of time is so overwhelming one mind cannot grasp the majesty of it. It is all the authors who didn't 'win', who keep working, who keep up their enthusiasm, who keep hoping their work will find acceptance: it is you who are most vital!

Again a deep bow of thanks to each and every person who has contributed to these tanka exchanges. You have certainly made my world a livelier, lovelier place to be.

Tanka Splendor 1994

Copyright © AHA Books 1995.

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