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Tanka Splendor 1990

Mirrors
International
Tanka
Award

Judge: Professor Sanford Goldstein
Purdue University
Lafayette, Indiana

GRAND PRIZE WINNER

She comes at night,
wrapped in convulsive perfumes
and scarred by longings,
lavishing the wrong names on me
at the worst moments: my muse

Carl Brennan
North Syracuse, New York

Award winning poems arranged alphabetically by the author's name.

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The November sky
darkens with the approach
of an unexpected storm:
in this crowded room
your deepening absence

Margaret R. Bennett
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

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you return
and walls of loneliness
disappear
the horizon is far
and the ocean is full

Penny Crosby
Gualala, California

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over the coffees
in quiet out-of-the-ways
my eyes drink her in
and lock her in memories
for all the in-between times

Edmund J. Daly
Plainfield, New Jersey

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The thousand colors
of my daughter's plain brown hair
in morning sunshine --
and for a moment the light
in my wife's hair touched with grey.

Bernard Lionel Einbond
New York, New York

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lonely
must be that
young pine too,
leaning toward
the hill-top moon

Anna Holley
Austin, Texas

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if only
because it might
still visit you,
must I now envy
even the autumn wind

Anna Holley
Austin, Texas

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The laughing gull
that skims the Hudson
not fearing its depth --
could I have lived like that,
trusting the surface?

Doris Heitmeyer
New York, New York

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On the morning bus
I look past the handsome face
to the red maple.
When did it happen -- the change
in the leaves, the change in me?

Doris Heitmeyer
New York, New York

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moth circles the light
as she waits by the screen door
footsteps on gravel
the scent of his cigarette
moments before its red glow

Jean Jorgensen
Edmondton, Alberta, Canada

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not a breath
of autumn wind
at twilight --
now can you hear
my heart beating?

Jim Kacian
Berryville, Virginia

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Barefoot on the beach
You kick the tide's white
Back where it came from,
While I listen to shells
That rise and fall in my ear.

David LeCount
La Honda, California

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Nasturtium picking
For the dinner salad, I tire
And think only
If the evening were without guests,
Or polite words at parting.

David LeCount
La Honda, California

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Sundown:
only one view --
enough for the painter.
His pencil stops and stumbles
across the linen winter.

Conrad Miesen
Anhausen, Germany

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The inferior part
of my tongue knows about
the bitterness of life.
Landscapes full of doubt,
an unexpressed pain.

Conrad Miesen
Anhausen, Germany

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. . . and the woman
leaning
from a latenight window
closing the shutter
closing the moon

Anne Mckay
Vancouver, BC, Canada

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a swirl of high clouds
between the retreating sun
and the frosted earth
I fold away the old quilts
that did not save my asters

Carol Purington
Colrain, Massachusettes

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This smell
of the sea,
the smell
I remember
before I was born.

Alexis Rotella
Mountain Lakes, New Jersey

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The warmth
inside the greenhouse --
a woman
humming
to her unborn baby.

Alexis Rotella
Mountain Lakes, New Jersey

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Our old dog
looks at the stairs
a long time
before he starts
to climb.

Alexis Rotella
Mountain Lakes, New Jersey

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Wind, do not tease me
do not muss my hair
my joy is too large for the house
and I cannot go in
to await his coming

Pat Shelley
Saratoga, California

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little boy,
falling asleep holding
your penis,
the snow is filling
the crooks of trees

Stephen D. Small
Wellsley, Maine

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Walking past a church --
skate-boards roaring down the road,
candles on my mind,
while something far from saintly
sings through boarded-up windows

Jack Stamm
Tokyo, Japan

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On this faded scroll
long-eyed women exchange cups
with their quiet men;
the moon or dragon's eye
bathese them in a wistful light.

Jack Stamm
Tokyo, Japan

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So much like our
restroom art, those graffiti:
Herculaneum,
awakening each morning
under the mountain's shadow.

Jack Stamm
Tokyo, Japan

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In the chirruping
of autumnal insects I
hear epipanies
of rain on an umbrella
which, yes, I have left at home.

Jack Stamm
Tokyo, Japan

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An intense full moon
hangs above the shadows where
two cops brace a man --
so bright you can almost hear
spray paint graffiti cursing.

Jack Stamm
Tokyo, Japan

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Like silk on water
the motion of your hand
is gentlest now
where love has been
most impatient

Dave Sutter
San Francisco, California

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cold winter morning
as i wait for the call
a white hair falls
from my head
and sticks to the phone

George Swede
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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writing a poem
of longing for her
i'm irritated
by the interruption
of her phone call

George Swede
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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side-by-side
the way they used to sit
on the country store porch --
the three old timers
in their graves

George Swede
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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Judge's Tanka:

jabbed for blood
and the vein missed;
oh, substitute nurse,
must I carry
your black and blue?

Sanford Goldstein
Lafayette, Indiania

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Some Comments on Tanka
and on the Mirrors Tanka Competition
. . .

A decade or so ago in Bill Higginson's book that he had labeled a handbook on haiku, I was jolted to learn I was one of the three tanka poets in the West. The honor seemed at best trivial, for few knew anything about tanka. The world was all haiku, haiku haiku, from elementary school children to the ever-growing Haiku Industry. So on reading the 365 entries to Mirrors tanka contest, I was jolted to discover the existence of a tanka world lurking in distant corners, a minor tanka world to be sure, but expanding.

I am equally jolted by the name of the Mirrors book, Tanka Splendor, in which these thirty winning tanka appear along with the one tanka I selected as best. "Splendor" is an elegant word, an aristocratic word, and its nuances suggest something out of Seidensticker's splendid translations of those innumerable tanka in The Tale of Genji. Some of Akiko Yosano's tanka in Tangled Hair contain this element of splendor:

In the quiet of midday
The peony dreams
While low purple clouds
Trail
In the sky.

The tanka of editor Jane Reichhold contain this element in her Gift of Tanka:

flowered wind
in your wild hair
the will of love
as a bright nimbus
frames your rosy face

In Red Lights, Mokichi Saito often has something that borders on the elegant:

this sky
beyond the eastern mountains
steeped red
in the red
morning-glow

It seems fair to say that often in these poems of "splendor" nature is dominant. But what are we to do with Akiko's poem? --

After my bath
At the hot spring.
These clothes
As rough as my skin
As rough as the world

Or Takuboku's? --

Husband's mind on travel
The wife scolding, the child in tears!
O this table in the morning

Or Mokichi's? --

at Ueno Zoo
magpies
were devouring
meat
meat blood-red

I feel Takuboku comes closest to analyzing the modern tanka when he says in one of his essays, "Poetry must not be what is usually called poetry. It must be an exact report, an honest diary, of the changes in a man's emotional life." He called his tanka "sad toys." and in another essay he said his poems were no more than what he was actually thinking, actually feeling, at that brief moment.

And so I believe that modernity in tanka, even in haiku, must go beyond the pretty, the beautiful, the splendid -- though these elements may of course appear in tanka or haiku. I feel my own tanka are more Takubokuistic, and thus this poem written a few weeks ago:

I have my own needle's
eye, harder than that
for camels, a plethora
of fives, triple-humped and broken,
wedging toward the good

I happened to be reading Margaret Drabble's The Needle's Eye (she is coming to Purdue as our Literacy Awards speaker in April) and I was reminded of the Bible and difficulties, so that image seemed to fit my attitude about tanka. I deliberately broke up the line rhythms, for I wanted something rough, something jolting, something to suggest tanka's difficulty.

It is perhaps easy to spill the five lines down, but achieving a good tanka is difficult. The Japanese themselves say a tanka is harder to write than a haiku. I have never felt getting a good one was easy! Yet tanka seem more conducive to the American temperament because of the range of emotion, from the sublime to the nitty-gritty, and any stark moment is there for the writer to take, or any sublime one for that matter. The winning tanka by Carl Brennan in the Mirrors competition came closest to suggesting, even with a kind of elegance, the difficulty of poetic creation.

That entire gamut of emotion a tankaist can use is, however, seldom pursued. The tankaist often stops short, too timid to seize the thirty-one, too prissy to burn with a hard gem-like flame. I find too many tanka remain in the realm of nature description. I miss the personal element. Even Shiki, with his fondness for nature, is never far from himself as he writes his haiku-like tanka, but tanka that have to be called tanka:

unable to be seen
through these clouded windows
on this spring day
of endless rain
my yellow yamabuki blooms."

What remains most difficult for those of us writing tanka or even haiku is an inability to stand out as a voice behind or within the poem. Our diaries are not published, nor are our letters. We have no long tradition of our own to rely on. We seem like disembodied, voiceless makers. In short, no one knows us. The bare haiku or tanka (full of splendor or sadness or some nasty inadequacy) must stand on its own traditional syllabic or free-form feet. Many of the entries in the Mirrors contest were a splendid 5-7-5-7-7, but 31 syllables will not necessarily a good poem make. Again I refer to a Takuboku essay.

A village schoolteacher decided to send Takuboku one tanka a day, and Takuboku waited for the mail to see how long the man would continue his "meaningless effort." An enormous number of tanka were sent, tanka Takuboku considered "no more than mere representations in thirty-one syllables of natural features suited to poesy."

Takuboku concluded the man might be able to write a good poem if the writer squarely faced the fact of his own "pitiable" quality and "unflinchingly thought through how pitiable he was and why." What Takuboku meant is ambiguous, but it seems to me he was saying that each poet has to confront his/her basic self, his/her limited self. In many of the Mirrors tanka, the thirty-one syllables did not let me feel (even on the quite limited basis of one tanka) that individual quality. Many of the poems might have been haiku except for the syllables, and yet even as haiku that aspect of a veiled self was lost to me.

That individual voice aware of itself must confront us in tanka, and into the poem too must be one or more of the Japanese aesthetic principles of wabi, sari, yugen, sono mama, to cite a few of the ten or so principles.

Now is not the time to define the Japanese aesthetic except to say that the emotions behind these aesthetic principles are not unique to the Japanese. Yet the Japanese seem to breathe everywhere the very air of tanka. American tanka -- and haiku too -- need much more of that Japaneseness no matter what the setting or content or language of these magnificent poetic forms.

Sanford Goldstein
Purdue University
February 10, 1991

After Words, Thanks!

First and foremost, a deep bow of thanks to each entrant for sending their tanka to Mirrors International Tanka Award 1990. Without their efforts, interest and involvement, none of this would have been possible.

My gratitude to Dr. Sanford Goldstein, who judged the contest. I am especially pleased with his choices; that he offers a selection of tanka exemplifying a wide range of methods and styles of writing tanka Among the poems in Tank a Splendor are results of studying Japanese tanka, lessons learned from essays on tanka by translators, and, as in the grand prize wining tanka by Carl Brennan, an individual voice out of the European tradition of poetry. I am also grateful Dr. Goldstein took the time from his busy schedule to write his astute essay "Some Comments on Tanka and on the Mirrors Competition..."

The goal of the contest was not to proclaim one style or method of writing tanka as best" or the only one, but to show what is being written by whom at this time. Never can there be one perfect example of a genre for all ages. Styles come and go, fads occur and fade; every authority has a pet principle to ride. Our needs and appreciation of the form change.

The greater goal of the contest was to encourage waters to look at what others are writing, to determine what they themselves would like to be writing, not to judge others, but to decide what rules, or limitations, or techniques, to use in the future based on what is admired or not from selections such as these -- the best in the English language, in Tanka Splendor.

At this point there is no English school of tanka, no dominate authorities to look to for precise instruction. How exciting! With no one to say how we must punctuate, pivot, or perceive, we are at the state all can search, backwards into the literature for models and patterns in the poems, impulses and reasons in the essays, and forwards for impressions and expressions through the veil of our own emotions without having the personal vision quest invalidated. Perhaps we have evolved far enough to withstand any one person saying "the poem must have this or that to be a true tanka". Perhaps the 1200 year history of tanka will prove greater than any one teacher.

I feel through cooperation and the sharing of knowledge, and the careful reading of each other's poems, and a dedication to writing, we will create a new aspect of an ancient form. Tanka is just beginning the journey east and west out of Japan. How readers and writers of tanka respond to the history of tanka and the present manifestation of the genre, will determine the future of tanka in English. This is a sacred venture. Pass along the fire with care and thanksgiving.

Blessed be.

Jane Reichhold
Editor of Mirrors

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