Category: Tanka – Rest of the World

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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Call for submissions: ‘Moonbathing’ – A Journal of Women’s Tanka

‘Moonbathing’ Issue 14 is now accepting submissions.

‘Moonbathing’ will publish two issues a year: Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer.

Submission guidelines:

‘Moonbathing’ will feature only women poets.

Send a minimum of 5 tanka & a maximum of 10 tanka per submission period.

‘Moonbathing’ does not publish tanka sequences or tanka prose/ taiga.

Please use Arial font/or a similar front, 12 pt size, single spaced (not double); also put your full name beneath each tanka & your state abbreviation or country abbreviation.

Send your tanka in the body of an email to:

Pamela A. Babusci (editor) moongate44@gmail.com

No attachments: make submissions in the body of emails only please.

No previously published tanka or simultaneous submissions; no tanka that has been posted on-line, on Facebook/Twitter or on a personal website/blog.

Submission deadlines:

Spring/Summer: in-hand deadline – May 15th (spring/summer themes or non-seasonal only).

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February 21, 2009

Saša Važić reviews Jack Fruit Moon by Robert D. Wilson

Jack Fruit Moon by Robert D. Wilson; published by Modern English Tanka Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21236, USA;  pp. 204; ISBN 978-0-9817691-4-1; preface by Dr. Steven D. Carter; forward by Sanford Goldstein.
You’ve known me for years, better than anyone else. That’s what Robert says. And I stop to think…. Never seen that man. Does he even exist? Could be as I used to get a coltrane’s e-mails with a bulk of haiku, tanka, haibun… almost every day for some two or three years… I did not even have time to take a breath, to calm down my feelings. It was almost unbearable. The e-mail man never asked how I felt nor such a banal question as is: do you like my poems? I used to call him shadowman….a man from the shadow during those days. He had nothing against each other… So, we agreed. I know him.

almost 60
this gnarled tree reminds
me of an old
man riding a bicycle
in his underwear

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Tanka Prose Anthology

Engineering Tanka Prose & Haibun:

Considerations Arising from the Tanka Prose Anthology

The Tanka Prose Anthology. Edited with an Introduction by Jeffrey Woodward.
Baltimore, MD: Modern English Tanka Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-9817691-3-4.
Perfect Bound, 6” x 9”, 176 pp., $12.95 USD.

Contributors to the anthology: Hortensia Anderson, Marjorie Buettner, Sanford Goldstein, Larry Kimmel, Gary LeBel, Bob Lucky, Terra Martin, Giselle Maya, Linda Papanicolaou, Stanley Pelter, Patricia Prime, Jane Reichhold, Werner Reichhold, Miriam Sagan, Katherine Samuelowicz, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk, Linda Jeannette Ward, Michael Dylan Welch, Jeffrey Woodward.

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