TANKA TAKE HOME: 14th February, 2024 David Rice - poet of the month

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

Introducing a new perspective to our Wednesday Feature!

February 14, 2024

poet of the month: David Rice

David Rice has been writing tanka for about thirty-five years and continues to write a tanka most days.

He was the editor of the Tanka Society of America's journal, Ribbons, from 2012-2019. His poems have appeared in many tanka journals and anthologies, and he has written seven tanka books, including three with other poets (Cheri Hunter Day, Autumn Noelle Hall, and Lynne Leach.) He is donating all the proceeds from his latest book, Sequelae (2023), tanka prose, to the Climate Emergency Fund.

TTH: How do you develop a tanka? Please guide us through the stages of a poem.

I write most of my tanka while walking. Walking, as many before me have remarked, helps get me away from my buzzy thoughts. Although tanka do not have to link an image from the natural world with a thought/feeling, writing tanka that way helps me both get out of myself and into myself.

I copy the poem into a tanka journal when I get home, and then I leave it alone. After some months pass, I re-read; it's amazing how many lousy tanka I can write. I rewrite those that still have a spark, tightening the link-and-shift, looking for the meaning.

TTH: Who are your favourite tanka poets? In addition to tanka what other genres of poetry do you write or read? Tell us about some of the books you've enjoyed.

I am especially drawn to tanka poets who write about the natural world (Jenny Angyal, Autumn Noelle Hall, and Debbie Strange come to mind) or relationships (Maxianne Berger, Joy McCall, Edward Rielly, and Kathabela Wilson, for instance)—and, of course, Margaret Chula—but I am leaving out many, many poets I like, and I apologize. I also read free verse poetry, both contemporary and poets in the canon. Helen Vendler's Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, is a treasuare. For those tanka poets who are getting older, I “highly recommend” Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems, edited by Harold Bloom. I enjoy reading Jane Hirshfield, who translated tanka for The Ink Dark Moon, and who is a contemporay free verse poet with a tanka sensibility.

We are deeply grateful to David for sharing his beautiful work and thoughts with us, and look forward to a month of reading his poetry.

1.

at the performance

my grown daughter

dozes

her head on my shoulders . . .

favorite part of the show

American Tanka, Issue 8, Spring, 2000

2.

Showing Up

fire and smoke

Mount Lassen closed

all those birds

we watched for forty years . . .

did they fly fast enough?

Our ardent wish is to find the wisdom hidden within ourselves to live here in harmony with all the other glories of evolution, but wishes don't pay bills, and unless we ignore all the evidence, undeniably showing we can't live within our earth-bound means, the bill we owe the earth is beyond our ability to make our governments pay, and our individual bank accounts are insufficient. What can we do, beyond raging or clinging to hope, neither of which will stop our species-centered, self-centered rampage through the biosphere?

winter solstice

a crow silhouettes

against the pink dawn

today more light

can be a start

from Sequelae: tanka prose (2022)

fire and smoke: Fujisan Taisho Award, 2021

I picked this tanka and this tanka prose to juxtapose a parent's tenderness towards their child, and the callousness with which we children of the earth treat Mother Earth. I believe all parents long for affectionate gestures from their children even after they've become adults. The earth flourishes when we treat her with respect. David's writing expresses love, frustration leading to a helplessness...

Challenge for this week:

Today is Valentine's Day. Keeping with the theme of love, please write of tenderness. Use a delicate touch, an understatement, a fleeting moment.

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.

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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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