TANKA TAKE HOME —1January 2025

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

Introducing a new perspective to our Wednesday Feature!

poet of the month: Xenia Tran

remembering

the light from the sun

in every leaf

the changing colours

of life itself

Between Heather and Grass, Xenia Tran (2019)

snow melt

how soon our seasons feed

the bubbling stream

I still see you bending down

to drink its water

Ribbons, Winter 2020: Volume 16, Number 1

Member’s Choice Tanka, Honourable Mention, Ribbons, Spring/Summer 2021: Volume 16, Number 2

We had the pleasure of asking Xenia a few questions, and she graciously took the time to answer them. Here’re the first two.

Q1. TTH: Do you come from a literary background? What writers did you enjoy reading as a child? Did you write as a child?

Xenia Tran: I was born into a creative family and my father was an artist, poet and photographer. At primary school, reading and writing poetry was encouraged and we were all given a book with blank pages to write poems for each other. I still treasure this collection of poems written by my eight-year-old classmates, my teachers, friends and family. As a child, I enjoyed reading the poems of Simon Carmiggelt and fairy tales by Hans Christian Anderson.

 Q 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?

Xenia Tran: I joined a women’s writing group just after my husband and I had left London for Kendal, and my teacher and fellow writers encouraged me to submit my poems to journals. This group really got me started as a published poet, and since I was mainly inspired by Irish poetry, I decided to attend Summer School at The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queens University, Belfast. After completing this, I enrolled for a Postgraduate Certificate in Creative Writing at Newcastle University and have been writing poetry regularly ever since.

I was first introduced to tanka by the Dutch poet Anna Maria Mulder – Swanenburg de Veye, who wrote under the pen name J van Tooren, and translated Japanese tanka published between 500-1980 directly into Dutch.

My first introduction to tanka in English came via The Ink Dark Moon, Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani. I was blown away by how much could be conveyed in so few lines and tanka poetry remains, alongside haiku, one of my favourite forms to write.

Brief Bio:

Xenia Tran is a poet, artist and photographer who lives in the Scottish Highlands with her husband and their adopted senior border collie Bria. Originally from The Netherlands, she writes in Dutch and English, and her work regularly features in calendars, journals, and anthologies.

With an academic background in language and applied linguistics, she later undertook postgraduate studies in creative writing, where her interest in Japanese poetry forms was born.  

She loves combining her images and reflections in photo haiku and tanka art and enjoys writing haiku, haibun, tanka, tanka sequences (both solo and collaborative pieces) and tanka prose.

She blogs at www.tranature.com and has published two full-length collections: Sharing Our Horizon (2018), in aid of animal rehoming charities, and Between Heather and Grass (2019), in aid of Children with Cancer UK and animal rehoming charities.

 Prompt for this week:

There is a meditative, reflective quality about Xenia Tran’s poems. One feels calmer after reading and re-reading them. How sensitive her eye and how deep her observation must be if ‘in every leaf’ she can see ‘the changing colours / of life itself’. In the second tanka as we listen to the music of ‘the bubbling stream’, we are also entranced by the music that imbues her tanka. Seasons change and yet a memory stays fresh and clear: ‘I still see you bending down / to drink its water’ (the bubbling stream’s water).

We invite you to write tanka using simple language where the meditative, reflective mood is strong.

Give this idea 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 this theme too.

PLEASE NOTE:

1. Post only one poem at a time.

2. Only two 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 300 words) to be considered for inclusion in haikuKATHA monthly magazine.