TSA’s First Tanka Day

Sunday Banquet

The festivities began on Sunday evening, June 29, 2003 at the Sal Anthony’s Restaurant, a pleasant Italian restaurant in one of New York’s quieter sections, Irving Place and 17th Street, just south of Gramercy Park. Twenty members and guests were in attendance. After a delicious Italian dinner, we enjoyed a reading by the following featured readers: Brian Tasker, Laura Maffei, Pamela Miller Ness and Michael Dylan Welch. Among others, Brian Tasker shared the following tanka:

long after she’s left

the garden she tended

weeds reclaim the flowerbeds

my heart too

has grown wild

Laura Maffei read tanka she categorized as office, travel, and love poems. Michael Dylan Welch asked if we remembered when we wrote our first tanka and what the influence was. Jane Hirshfield was named by several people as an early influence. Pamela Miller Ness read a selection of her tanka with flowers as the theme. Finally, Michael Dylan Welch read his haibun on the subject of the horrendous 9/11 [see “Hand in Hand”], closing with the line, “sun sets on the day’s darkness,” and then lifted us with a selection of love poems.

The evening of wonderful food, companions and poetry ended with an open reading in which attendees read one tanka each.

—Peggy Heinrich

Monday Program

On Monday morning, June 30th, twenty poets gathered at The Collegiate School in NYC for the first tanka conference in the English language. Many of the participants—from such diverse addresses as Iowa, England, Washington, India, and North Carolina had arrived in New York the previous Thursday to attend the biannual [actually biennial] Haiku North America conference. Participants enjoyed socializing over a bountiful catered continental breakfast before President Michael Dylan Welch’s official welcome and introduction. There followed an open reading of tanka and a memorial reading led by Pamela Miller Ness (see “Personal Choice” column elsewhere in this issue). William J. Higginson’s presentation “A Brief Tour through 1,000 Years of Tanka and How It Got that Way” was a scholarly examination of modern and classical tanka and waka with numerous examples of transliteration of Japanese text with English translations. It is the presenter’s position that “generally speaking, modern tanka hardly vary from the classical form”:

Classical waka:

At a harvest hut

a longbow is left standing

no one around.

To guard the mountain field

maybe he’ll return at night.

—Shotetsu (1381–1459), translated by W. J. Higginson

Modern tanka:

the antelope

not running and the man

who doesn’t hunt—

understand each other

they avert their eyes.

—Sasaki Yukitsuna (1938–), translated by W. J. Higginson

The title of Brian Tasker’s presentation, “A Ripening Peach: Tanka as Theatre, Tanka as Ritual,” and the creative way in which the author deals with the title subjects were inspired by the death of his father, Brian discussed “the impulses that rise out of the unguardedness when we are least identified with the idea of being a poet”:

the hospital clerk hands me

my father’s belongings

in a plastic bag

the familiar smell

of a ripening peach

After browsing the book table and enjoying an outstanding buffet luncheon catered by the school, the group selected partners to write tan-renga (see selection following this article).

Pamela Miller Ness’s presentation, “To Dot or Not to Dot: The Question of Punctuation in Tanka”, offered a workshop illustrating standard and non-standard punctuation used in various tanka examples. Included in the presentation were three graphs: (1) Analysis of punctuation formats selected by major translators of Japanese tanka into English, 1919-2003); (2) Analysis of punctuation formats selected by poets represented in American Tanka 1996–2003; and (3) Analysis of punctuation formats selected by poets represented in four anthologies of English language tanka published between 1994 and 2004.

The program concluded with Michael Dylan Welch’s presentation, “From Chord to Melody: Defining Tanka in English,” which was treated as a roundtable discussion. Group comment, differentiating tanka from haiku, suggested that haiku starts with an experience producing an emotion, while tanka begins with an emotion to be expressed through symbolism, nature, or personal experience. As Gerald St. Maur wrote (Haiku Canada Newsletter 1999), “to compose a tanka is to articulate reflectively it moves us from the poetry of the noun to the poetry of the very; in weaving terms, from the thread to the tapestry; in musical terms, from chord to melody.”

Closing remarks and another open reading of tanka were followed by a wine and cheese reception and dinner at Zen Palate, a local vegetarian restaurant.

—Marian Smith Sharpe, TSA Secretary