2020 Sanford Goldstein
International Tanka Contest Winners
Margaret Dornaus and Claire Everett, Judges
A big thank you to Margaret Dornaus and Claire Everett for going through 925 poems to find winners for our 2020 contest and for providing thoughtful commentary. This year we had the highest number of submissions ever, no doubt because we made the contest free to enter (with a maximum of seven tanka per person) in celebration of the Tanka Society of America’s twentieth anniversary. We received entries by 160 poets from 25 countries this year: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan , New Zealand, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Scotland , Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam. We also thank everyone who submitted and look forward to seeing your work again next year! —Susan Burch, TSA Contest Coordinator
First Place ($100)
plague-year parsnips
browned in butter—
the flavor
of my mother’s victory garden
in another sort of war
Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina
In five concise lines, this tanka addresses the harshness of this plague year while
resisting the temptation to be maudlin. The result is a poem that conveys the
everydayness of the struggle to survive Covid-19 in a powerfully understated
way. Comparing a contemporary pandemic garden to a World War II victory garden
underscores the historical similarities and differences between both times,
while sensory details summarized by “parsnips/browned in butter” and the use of
alliteration point to a simple act of survival that, despite everything, imbues
the poem with an underlying sense of hopefulness. —Margaret Dornaus
The use of the expression “plague-year” crystallizes the horror of this
unprecedented crisis, juxtaposed with a seemingly everyday and homely
experience. When the poet’s mother planted her victory garden, there would have
been just as much uncertainty as we feel now—yet still there was hope—the stuff
that binds us together. The parsnip’s extensive root system, which holds it in
the sustaining earth, makes this an even stronger image. The fact that the
“Forces Sweetheart” Vera Lynn died during the Covid-19 pandemic makes this
tanka all the more bittersweet. —Claire
Everett
Second Place ($50)
another indigo evening
with windows wide open
to smell the rain
what is the color
of loneliness?
Pamela A. Babusci
Rochester, New York
Like other winning entries, this moody tanka raises a rhetorical question ultimately
left to its readers to answer. The open-endedness of the question contrasts
with the poem’s simple, straightforward language, such as the second line’s
alliterative “windows wide open” that serves to intensify the first line’s less
common and more descriptive “indigo evening.” The image also gives the sense of
someone with arms wide open to the rain, the darkness, and all the emotions
that arise from embracing that experience. The color indigo alludes to one of
the seven colors Newton classified to describe a rainbow. Indigo is also the
color used to represent the Third Eye or “brow” chakra linked to
self-knowledge, intuition, and a kind of universal spirituality that might
interpret “loneliness” as an opportunity as much for growth as for sadness.
Regardless, the poet’s skillful use of more than one sense—sight and
smell—combines to create a memorable and contest-worthy tanka.
Honorable Mention
watercolor poppies
blowing across the field . . .
why
is it so hard
to learn from history
Rebecca Drouilhet
Picayune, Mississippi
Like
the first-place tanka, this poem compares this pandemic time to another
historical reference point. In this case the image of windblown poppies
conjures a symbol widely associated not with a victory garden but with World
War I’s Flanders fields. The reference also emphasizes the current pandemic’s
comparison to an unseen enemy and the previous war’s coincidental role in
spreading the devastating 1918 flu. Just as Covid-19 has escalated into a
worldwide health crisis, the previous pandemic resulted in widespread suffering
and loss of life. The poet might have been speaking of humankind’s failure to
learn from war, but there is also an inherent allusion to the post-war pandemic
lesson: a cautionary tale that speaks to the impact of hastily abandoning
quarantines that might have averted unnecessary casualties. It’s no wonder that
the poem, like one of the other tanka recognized here, ends not with a
statement but with a question as the poet skillfully shifts from a personal to a
wide-angle and thought-provoking viewpoint.
For this year's contest, the judges chose not to select more than one honorable mention, and chose not to give third prize to the one honorable mention after the original third-prize poem was disqualified.
|