TANKA TAKE HOME — Adelaide B. Shaw February 5, 2025

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

Introducing a new perspective to our Wednesday Feature!

poet of the month: Adelaide B. Shaw

Bio:

Adelaide B. Shaw lives in Somers, NY. She has been creating Japanese poetic forms–haiku, haibun, tanka, tanka prose and haiga–for over 50 years and has been published widely. Her work has been featured in Red lights, Presence, and Haiga Online, as well as being in anthologies. Adelaide’s book of haiku, An Unknown Road, available on Amazon, won third place in the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award in 2009.  Her other books,  The Distance I’ve Come,Travel Souvenirs, and Ancient History are available on Cyberwit and Amazon. Adelaide also writes fiction and non-fiction and has been published in several journals. Some of her published Japanese short form poetry are posted on her blog: www.adelaide-whitepetals.blogspot.com

We had the pleasure of asking Adelaide a few questions, and she graciously took the time to answer them.

1.

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

AS: I did not come from a literary background, but my parents encouraged us to read. They bought us books, and I used the library a lot. As a child I read all the Bobbsey Twins series and the Heidi books, as well as all of Grimm’s fairy tales, all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s books, including the verses.  As a preteen I read Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and Gone with the Wind. I didn’t understand all of it, but I, too, fell in love with Ashley  Wilkes. The only writing I did was for class assignments.

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. 

AS: I discovered haiku back in 1969. I was intrigued and fascinated by this very short poem. I read books on haiku and began writing my own. Several years later I discovered tanka. What appealed to me was the longer length and that I could express emotions. The ancients used this forms to write love poems, and I wrote tanka to my husband for any occasion. As to why I keep writing tanka. . .this is what appeared in the Tanka Hangout column in Ribbons:

my tanka diary

a personal spilling

of emotions;

only on paper can I say

what I truly feel

hydrangea bush

one blue blossom

amidst the pink;

how strange it is

to be so alone

        Red Lights, Jan. 2008

I buy fresh basil                

at the farmers’ market

wishing I knew

how hers grew such lush leaves—

one question I didn’t ask          

          Skylark, Spring 2013

Both of these poems use images from nature to then ask a personal question, a very classic and timeless representation of tanka.

In the first tanka there is one blue blossom amidst a riot of pink. We know that the color of hydrangeas changes with the pH of the soil. So it must be something extraordinary to have a single bloom be of a different color from the same plant. What caused this unusual circumstance? How strange it is to be so alone, especially when you have always been a part of a group. Such a beautiful and natural transition...

The second tanka takes on the thoughts of a gardener - how did her basil turn out better than mine. But then the ambiguity in the last line- what question did the poet not ask? Was it about the basil? Or is she referring to something else totally. There is a lot of dreaming space here.

 Prompt for this week:

We invite you to write tanka creating ambiguity in the reader's mind.

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. No tanka sequences, please.

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.