Category: Tanka in Australia

Limestone Tanka Poets Meeting

June 28th

Arriving at The Friends Meeting Place before the Woloman Room filled up with 10 Limestone Tanka Poets ready to settle into their first face-to-face  (but self-distancing) meeting since February, the usual welcoming ambience enveloped us.  However, instead of making a close circle of chairs the space between was measured, hands sanitized and the novelty of seeing each other a joy. It wasn’t long before the laughter began. There were tanka competitions to remind us there is still a sort of normalcy in the publishing world. We had submissions to workshops, suggestions and knowledge to share and tea and coffee in a thermos or two to keep us sustained.

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Twenty-first Bowerbird Tanka Group Meeting

The twenty-first Bowerbird Tanka group meeting was celebrated on 30th November 2019, in the Crommelin Arboretum at Pearl Beach. Again it was heart-warming to note how far poets will travel to explore and share the poetic genre of tanka.

In addition to a presentation by Michael Thorley on shasei, and a ginko relevant to this, appraisals by three poets of a tanka they particularly enjoy, written by someone they have not met were shared and helped us to explore the more distant national scene as well as the international one.
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Hyakunin Isshu

And a new opportunity for English-speaking tanka poets

As most tanka writers would be aware “Hyakunin Isshu is an anthology of one hundred Japanese waka poems composed between the 7th and 13th centuries. The anthology was later adapted into a card game deck and played a significant role in familiarising Japanese people, both young and old, with classic literature.” It still does.

Although the anthology has been translated into English in book form by various people, until very recently the card game deck had not. In September 2019, the Japan Foundation (JPF), in Sydney promoted the game’s first English translation and offered the opportunity to play it in their premises at Level 4, Central Park, 28 Broadway, Sydney.

Please read about this game and invitation here.

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