Atlas Poetica Issue 18

Home , Headlong Flight, Jun Fujita, Scattered Clouds, The Bazaar, Uru people

ATLAS POETICA A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka

Number 18 Summer, 2014

M. Kei, editor Amora Johnson, technical director Yancy Carpentier, editorial assistant

2014 Keibooks, Perryville, Maryland, USA KEIBOOKS P O Box 516 Perryville, Maryland, USA 21903 AtlasPoetica.org [email protected]

Atlas Poetica A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers and scholars who may quote brief passages. See our EDUCATIONAL USE NOTICE.

Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka, a triannual print and e-journal, is dedicated to publishing and promoting ﬁne poetry of place in modern English tanka (including variant forms). Atlas Poetica is interested in both traditional and innovative verse of high quality and in all serious attempts to assimilate the best of the Japanese waka/tanka/kyoka/gogyoshi genres into a continuously developing English short verse tradition. In addition to verse, Atlas Poetica publishes articles, essays, reviews, interviews, letters to the editor, etc., related to tanka poetry of place. Tanka in translation from around the world are welcome in the journal.

ISBN 978-0615985374 (Print) TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial asylum, Murasame & Matsukaze ...... 28 Educational Use Notice ...... 4 Nevada Hills, Matsukaze & Murasame ...... 29 Numinous Tanka, M. Kei ...... 5 the burning day, Matsukaze & Murasame ....29 charred remains, Matsukaze & Murasame ....30 Tanka in Sets and Sequences The Morrigan Returns, Carole Johnston ...... 30 Going to Gore Orphanage, Tish Davis ...... 7 Siren, Bernice Yap ...... 31 Abyss, Alexander Jankiewicz ...... 7 The Birthday Party, Sergio Ortiz ...... 31 Memorial Day: The Ghost of Charlie Miller, M. Striding Eagle, Brian Zimmer ...... 32 Kei ...... 8 Agitator, Marilyn Humbert ...... 32 Tom blan d, Joy McCall ...... 9 Unnamed Road, Marilyn Humbert ...... 33 Elemental, Kath Abela Wilson & Brian Katsura Rikyū, Marilyn Humbert ...... 33 Zimmer ...... 10 Sky Blue, Genie Nakano ...... 34 the child had to play, Joy McCall ...... 11 Reasons to Not Return, Geoffrey Winch ...... 34 The Song of the Sea and Mountain, Sonam Lost Worlds, Jenny Ward Angyal ...... 35 Chhoki & Sergio Ortiz ...... 12 Childhood of Christ, Gerry Jacobson ...... 35 A Book of Houses, Leslie Ihde ...... 14 Crossroads, Charles Tarlton ...... 36 the fate of the yoxie, Joy McCall & Shading, Charles Tarlton ...... 37 Kate Franks ...... 15 Calliope/My Ex: Love/Trouble Maker, Chen-ou Eleven Stones, Debbie Strange ...... 16 Liu ...... 38 Selkie Sisters, Debbie Strange ...... 17 Trees, Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton ...... 17 Individual Tanka ...... 40 Skeletons in a Pantry, Genie Nakano ...... 17 Feeling Paris, Natsuko Wilson ...... 18 Articles Knocknarea, Autumn Noelle Hall & Claire Review: Poetry and Melancholy: Jeffrey Woodward’s Everett ...... 19 Another Garden, reviewed by Charles Tarlton63 Camino, Carole Harrison ...... 20 Review: January, A Tanka Diary by M. Kei, a penny for the guy, Joy McCall ...... 21 reviewed by Patricia Prime ...... 69 the morphing garden, Michael Dunwoody ...... 22 Review: A Rumination on M. Kei’s January, A Tanka Earthly Carapace, Sonam Chhoki ...... 23 Diary, reviewed by Jeffrey Harpeng ...... 71 shall we gather, Joy McCall ...... 24 Review: This Short Life : Minimalist Tanka, by ghosts, Joy McCall ...... 24 Sanford Goldstein, reviewed by Joy McCall73 ancestors, Joy McCall ...... 25 Mini-Review: circling smoke, scattered bones, by Joy over the rail, Joy McCall ...... 25 McCall, reviewed by Steve Wilkinson ...... 73 traces of light, Tim Lenton & Joy McCall ...26 Tanka in Three Lines?, Matsukaze ...... 74 holding the shape, Joy McCall & Tim Lenton26 The Problem of Tanka : Deﬁnition and Differentiation, a stirring of belief, Joy McCall & Tim Lenton 27 M. Kei ...... 77 erosion, Tim Lenton & Joy McCall ...... 27 the scent of ancestors, Matsukaze & Announcements ...... 95 Murasame ...... 28 Biographies ...... 98 Educational Use Notice

Keibooks of Perryville, Maryland, USA, publisher of the journal, Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka, is dedicated to tanka education in schools and colleges, at every level. It is our intention and our policy to facilitate the use of Atlas Poetica and related materials to the maximum extent feasible by educators at every level of school and university studies. Educators, without individually seeking permission from the publisher, may use Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka’s online digital editions and print editions as primary or ancillary teaching resources. Copyright law “Fair Use” guidelines and doctrine should be interpreted very liberally with respect to Atlas Poetica precisely on the basis of our explicitly stated intention herein. This statement may be cited as an effective permission to use Atlas Poetica as a text or resource for studies. Proper attribution of any excerpt to Atlas Poetica is required. This statement applies equally to digital resources and print copies of the journal. Individual copyrights of poets, authors, artists, etc., published in Atlas Poetica are their own property and are not meant to be compromised in any way by the journal’s liberal policy on “Fair Use.” Any educator seeking clariﬁcation of our policy for a particular use may email the Editor of Atlas Poetica at [email protected]. We welcome innovative uses of our resources for tanka education.

Atlas Poetica Keibooks P O Box 516 Perryville, MD 21903 Numinous Tanka

Last fall, I edited two special features that in his hand; if not, it’s a dizzy leap from the received an overflow of submissions. The cliffs above a thrashing sea. Garage, Not the Garden : Tanka of Urban Magic is very much in the eye of the Life filled the double-sized special feature, beholder, but whether the spooks herein plus issue 17 of Atlas Poetica, while All frighten you or make you laugh, we are Hallow’s Evening : Supernatural Tanka has certain that you have never met anything like nearly taken over issue 18. That these two the cavalcade of spirits unleashed within ‘unconventional’ themes (by tanka standards) these pages. saw such a large response advertises tanka’s In addition, our expansion from eighty- untapped potential—this small form really four pages to one hundred and four pages can handle any content that the poet cares to enables us to publish tanka in translation pour into it. from around the world, book reviews, and This is not surprising given the divine non-fiction on a variety of subjects of interest origin of the form; it was invented by the to readers and writers of tanka in every issue. goddess Wakahime (“Poetry Princess”) who Next issue we will have a focus on poets taught humans how to make both from India and South Asia wherever they incantations and ordinary songs in the tanka may be. We invite submissions by poets of form. For several centuries thereafter, it was and writers upon the Indian/South Asian not unusual for the gods themselves to theme. We will also focus on responsive and contribute tanka to anthologies. The human collaborative tanka, and are open to poet through whom they spoke was merely submissions of nonfiction articles and book the channel. The numinous nature of tanka reviews relating to either focus. is amply illustrated by the plethora of tanka As always, we will consider tanka, waka, in this issue that tap into mythology, religion, kyoka, gogyoshi, tanka prose and tanka legend, fantasy, magic, horror, and the most sequences of any sort, but will choose mysterious topic of all, Death. thematic items first. However much space In these pages you will find urban remains will be filled with other works. legends, headless horsemen, wendigos, aliens, curses, wishes, myths, magic, Gothic tales, ~K~ and much more. Our poets draw upon the collective psyches of cultures around the M. Kei world: from the tomb of Baudelaire to the Editor, Atlas Poetica neolithic stones of Ireland, from the wilds of The Betsiboka River empties into Bombetoka Bay in New Jersey to the tremulous heights of the northwest Madagascar. Himalayas, from the musket fire of the American Revolution to the coco leaves of Cover Image courtesy of Earth Observatory, NASA. the Andes, we find ourselves keeping psychopomps, and madwomen. If we are lucky, we will meet the angel with the orange

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 5

Going to Gore Orphanage it passes through our mood rings that steady burn . . . Tish Davis windows rolled up hands in the air

orphans ~Vermilion, Ohio in their wooden beds in their wood-walled dorms; outside, a rabbit eyes gleaming red

After the séance, we gather under the street light and pass a soft cloth. We must make sure my Rambler Rebel is handprint-free. We’re heading to the hollow where the orphanage burned, where the ghosts still scream and sometimes even leave a print on a passerby’s car.

a mailbox Abyss far from tract housing left to die Alexander Jankiewicz with its red ﬂag up . . . cicadas, nothing but cicadas I can’t explain it in any other way than this: I’m lying in bed alone as a young child. A tunnel transparent wings— of light appears near the ceiling in the corner of after two sharp turns my room. It doesn’t speak with words, but I know teetering at the top that it wants me to enter. I try to ignore it at ﬁrst, without the moon but it won’t go away. I can sense it wanting me to a fresh struck match enter more and more strongly. I hide under my blanket, too afraid to call out to my parents for abandoned help. I can only hope that the light will go away. after two sharp turns and overlooking the hollow sometimes where even the light won’t go my mother’s whisper saying good night something echoes through the years alone in the dark no one wants to say the cicadas’ ~Chicago, Illinois, USA golden shells are also abandoned

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 7 Memorial Day : The Ghost of Charlie Miller

M. Kei

You never expect to meet a ghost on an Charlie doesn’t know he’s dead. I saw him autumn day as blue and gold as George two miles south of the church, galloping north, Washington’s uniform, but there he was, Charlie just around the corner from Cooch’s Bridge. Was Miller, the Headless Horseman of Cooch’s he riding to warn his friends of the approach of Bridge, bent over his horse’s neck, galloping the enemy? The Redcoats were swarming and along the shoulder of the road. Washington was fighting a slow retreat in defense of Philadelphia. O, youth, so bold and brave, your father mourns you, laddie, you served your country your friends weep for you with all your heart— and we tell your tale to this day— and your precious head you never died, lad, even though they laid your body low He was there, and then he wasn’t. He was a flicker in the corner of my eye, and just like that, Charlie Miller is still riding that last ride, he was a bloody flicker seen from the corner of crouched over his horse’s neck, young body his friends’ eyes as the British cannonball took off supple and strong as he races north to fate and his head. The wound remains in the church’s eternal fame. He was just a boy like so many wall, but Charlie doesn’t seem to know it. others, a boy who thought he was a man and paid a man’s price for the liberty of his country. just sixteen, you answered Washington’s call, O, Charlie! fought the Redcoats, you’ve lost your head, defended your native land, but never your heart, and left your immortal legend we’ll lift a cup to you and your eternal fame His father didn’t want him to join up, but Charlie, half-grown, was sure he was a man, and Charlie Miller really existed, and his story is his country was at stake. He mounted up and what I’ve said. Legends abounded after Charlie’s rode to meet the British. Every soldier who goes death. They say he went on fighting the British, to war leaves behind an unhappy father, but and the redcoats fled at the sight of the Headless young men never look back. If they did, they’d Horseman brandishing his sword. Others say a see old men weeping. Old men know what death ghost passed through George Washington and is. saved him from a sniper’s ball as he watched the battle. Still others say men were found butchered such a likely lad, on sentry duty, their hair as white as if they’d with a body as sweet seen a ghost. as grass I didn’t know his story when I saw him. All I in the autumn sun, saw was a teenage boy hunched low over his and in the grass you died horse’s neck, riding north, forever north.

~Cooch’s Bridge, south of Newark, Delaware, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 8 Tom blan d

Joy McCall

It is not just the living that are frequent visitors to the cause of numerous tales of hauntings and cobbled streets of old Norwich . . . disturbances in the building throughout the years. These include the ghost of a young girl who Situated at one end of Tombland are The apparently starved to death in Augustine Steward Maids Head Hotel and Samson & Hercules House next door after it was boarded up during House. Both have ghost stories associated with the plague, as well as spectral monks, shadowy them, and when you explore their heritage a little figures, and recurring nightmares for worshippers further it is perhaps easy to understand why. The of being buried alive in a huge pit full of dead Maids Head dates back to the 13th century, when bodies. it was called the ‘Murtle Fish’. The name was changed following a visit by Queen Elizabeth I to lost Norwich in 1578. Like most places visited by the Royal Party in 1578, the Black Death or Plague around the corner was destined to follow in its wake. A member of from the all-night bars, the large party spread the plague as they travelled an old church— from place to place and Norwich was no cobblestones pave the way exception. to untended graves From August 1578 to February 1579 almost 5000 victims of the plague were recorded in the damp and cool city. In total almost half the entire population of and musty, inside Norwich perished from the Plague during this a woman sits— time. While rats thrived in the narrow alleyways, dim light filters the grim cry of ‘bring out your dead’ rang through grimy windows throughout the city. As the number of bodies grew in colossal number, formal burials were distant thump abandoned in favour of mass-graves or ‘plague of music, and clubbers pits’. Cartloads of bodies were taken to the shouting and singing— Cathedral Close, which became a large burial the woman lifts her head, area. The graveyards behind St. George’s church her prayers disturbed are so high as they were raised to accommodate the huge number of bodies. on the hard pew The church played an even more sinister role she settles to sleep, during this time, being the site where shivering— opportunistic looters of the dead and dying were rain begins to fall taken if caught. After being bound at the ankles rats scratch behind the altar and wrists, they would be dropped headfirst from St. George’s church onto the unforgiving ground below the nave below. Their bodies, whether dead or still alive, thick lime in the pit would then join the plague victims in the lime- shifts a little— filled pits. then closes again One of the largest plague pits in Norwich over nameless small corpses was dug below the Tombland church of St. George. This grim feature, along with the close ~St Georges, Tombland, Norwich, UK proximity to the Cathedral, may be the root

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 9 Elemental

Brian Zimmer & Kath Abela Wilson from her bike fallen stars burnt bread she tells him what lives that overstuffs the sky under the bridge dark swarms along our trail a secret tamed by ﬂowers we mock a ﬁgurehead certain he knows that murders innocence

enchanted retain eyes meet a sense of place you and I she says solo ended and a giant turtle trust the wind covered with trap doors to turn the page a stick wand we are the arrow summons the muskrat sky-spent skein upstream a bloom unwound a spell of waiting symmetry of ﬂight as things take their course from set to rise

out of camouflage burst in dream from my creek-loud night he recalls downstream how in ‘64 feeling the wake no one had seen of transformation a boy step into sky a raven leads awake no dream the Morning Prayer: she floated off “she is in heaven” . . . started over after fighting-back suitcase bulging left two days in the snow with dandelions

we doves mourn time flames leap its mangled nest bite and devour our winged words not a word a soothing song to sculpt from the silent man a new earth’s core become torch wheels spin flint sparks our bikes past our crumpled paper swollen cornfields a couple’s passion the king is dead leaves the scent of birth long live the king in beach fires

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 10 gather wood sit close together the child had to play there are stories too cold to tell Joy McCall beyond the blaze

stalagmite me from the tree roots bolt upright in bed the wild tribe emerge you cannot sleep until . . . one by one— no quenching circling the tree, they dance his irrational anger on the hill until dawn candlelight softens the room hand in hand my face these strange small people the lost face dance and sing— of the past their fingers white as roots, their skin rough as bark fireworks in the air a finale their voices that belongs are the creaking of trees out of reach in the dark wind— their footsteps like dry nuts as it trembles falling on soft ground a great fissure opens before him he turns off the plow how they smile, removes his cap with teeth like the little bones of harvest mice— underground streams their hair prickles in the great cave like chestnut spikes waterfalls unheard unseen they know are there when they laugh it is the stream flowing, ~Kettering, Ohio / Staten Island, New York, the spring bubbling— USA they slip away to sleep at noon, drunk on rain

~Norwich, UK

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 11 The Song of the Sea and Mountain

Sonam Chhoki & Sergio Ortiz we why do you hesitate, hold hands and smile— what do you see in my face old photograph if not reﬂex I trace the sandalwood frame of the earth, a bed hold our moment for a while of golden saffron

our bodies, pale gold foxglove heads seagulls surrendering open to speckled violet throats . . . to the wind . . . it seems time brings us into bloom— I’m not the only one is it for miracles we live? with hidden intent

I cling to a hope a swarm of bees thinner than wisps awakens the stars . . . of incense swirls I have a lump that we’ll meet again in my throat, a sense in a new rebirth of wrong, a homesickness

wind chimes a plane blinks break the echoes through a star-strewn sky of our absence . . . late in the night but the world is ﬁlled with music, you trail through my thoughts and in between the music, silence leave all these question marks the sun backlights my mouth yellow aconite slopes closed behind a sigh . . . what the gods won’t tell us: I walked hope through Shangri-la is a poison-tipped arrow in spring showers

a poisonous sea reading Marquez rises on the night through a rain-laden night of our pain . . . I leave my sleepless room and we wait for the unforced ﬂow for the almond and oregano heat of words and sleep and dreams of Macondo the memory it was inevitable: of a writing hand won’t do the smell of bitter almonds for the grief of naming things . . . reminds the sun inks the dawn sky me of the fate with etchings of blood of disgruntled love affairs

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 12 wings in full span the stars two moths circle a butter lamp are too ﬁxed in their orbits round and round to care . . they dance to a rhythm hope is now whimsical notes set in the chrysalis of karma of a knowing ﬂute

the moonflowers so fearfully pale, surprise me, a rose that bends to the breath shining in the night of the gale, to soften their plaintive and stands adrift howling in the ruins of her sorrow invariably the mountain stream words scatter like cloud wisps carves stones in its headlong flight when I try to speak . . . down the valley . . . the blaze of peonies this ancient pulse of endless flow in the morning sun empties all memories

soft I go the dead to gather sun and wind, gather white shadows my speech from the past . . . the speed of darkness— real marionettes I am the tree that trembles have no strings the night is swollen with words split portal of lightning— but the disheveled goddess dark clouds shadow-play at dawn gifts me blind ﬁngers of rain only the dross of dreams— touch my face I unremember our love burnt in the ﬁre of lies

watching a certain kind of Eden you on the bed . . . holds me enthralled . . . I mine each moment your eyes for the ore that holds are a green twine, an antidote for endings the saddest of rope ancient grief of the moon ~Bhutan / Puerto Rico, USA forgotten by the sun at dawn . . . a crab quarries amongst the empty shells for the salt of memory

no one believes in their own life anymore that’s why they’re lonely, and unable to ﬁnd their own nakedness

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 13 A Book of Houses

Leslie Ihde the ﬁrst house I watched your body walls and rooms sleek muscles under wind I was still parting water inside hidden with breath and and away joyous movement later I built walls my dream house with fabric with courtyard and cats draped on chairs a little fountain you couldn’t come in places to play again unless I let you only room for me but you did my married home worse than a rape come too late your three year old laughter catching up on lost time a terrible truth dawns timeless afternoon sun —permeable walls lengthened tree shadows alarm then stream house island alarm the gushing water moat no walls to the house that I am in split by boulders others aren’t outside around and around my body is with yours me pretending I was the world we grow together old the house you made wind blew my third house with your arms down the vacation your skin and your mind we planned together the others kept out not sure the years by judgement alone or the season tomorrow

I was a mermaid the fourth house you pushed my raft has ocean as foundation squirting water from your mouth ﬁshes for its walls a roman cherub no space not ﬁlled with water steering me —it was illusion, anyway

~Psychotherapy & Self-Discovery using Art

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 14 the fate of the yoxie*

Joy McCall & Kate Franks

We sat, my Canadian daughter and I, in the the yoxie’s lot old beer garden, playing Scrabble over a tee-total is hard and with no sefting lunch. The patched-up pub is in the shadow of harder still the ancient church and was once the priests’ ale the cruel defungs await her store. Parishioners used to come for their pints, once jorp-justice is viwalt after the service, since the river water was not safe to drink, being polluted by sewage, cows . . . and bodies. The servants were paid in ale then, but look! she is saved! not coins. the dinsa vedds approach, Three old regulars at the next table were their zirmt music getting slowly drunk on local ale, as usual. They sounds across the quahns, became more and more drunk, more garrulous and the wrepis sleeps, in ruteo and loud. “Let us play the game with you,” one said. ~The Buck Inn, Norwich, UK And so it began, the maddest game of Scrabble I ever played. We gave up on sense and spelling *yoxie, a maid of old, dim and unschooled and reason. The rule became: only nonsense words, but a meaning must be supplied.

the Beymar spoke thus to her Gom: “befok the yoxie! I will swear a plinote against her; bring the Jorp!”

he comes! the rog he wields and gooman wears, a bazlat slung across his back to play in case a bright elade can mend

alas! the twavib lot is cast upon the casha— she will seft no more nor tace the cri-ped gniteo

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 15 Eleven Stones

Debbie Strange

Mother lies in a curtained hospital cell, a bloodstone on her tongue. (she cradles the stone angel face of her infant daughter)

No one has time to feed her, and her gruel congeals into limestone. (she carries ﬁeldstones from dawning to dimming day)

She is intubated, tied to the bed, and my heavy heartstone sinks. (she keens as hailstones grind the crops into dust)

Her tumbled thoughts are skipping stones, with neither echo nor ripple. (she polishes the worrystone in her heart’s torn pocket)

The cornerstone of her life has crumbled, but I am the one who falls. (she is the hearthstone and the headstone)

she is 35 when her mother dies and I am born I am 35 when my mother dies it takes 35 days for her to let go

~Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 16 Selkie Sisters Skeletons in a Pantry

Debbie Strange Genie Nakano

Three full maiden moons slipped into the Round 2 AM, I need a shot of whiskey— darkling water—selkie sisters astride galloping sea drag to the kitchen—open the pantry room door horses, their hands tangled in spindrift manes . . . to see a small rat on top of a box of cornmeal staring down at me. I scream, close door—run skinny-dipping back to bed. with my sisters washing moondust For the next few nights, I hear noises from from our hair the pantry—pots and pans sliding, the dogs bark then braiding it with stars courageously. So I buy and set out traps. But I really don’t want to kill him. I just want him out ~Wallace Lake, Manitoba, Canada of the house. After all, I was born in the year of the rat.

I spend Saturday taking everything out of the pantry. He is gone. The only evidence of existence is a half-eaten box of corn meal and a few droppings.

On Sunday, I spend the day throwing things out, cleaning, rearranging, organizing the pantry room—it’s never looked better.

mixed feelings scamper away like a rat Trees in the night those hidden dark demons Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton prayers for a no return

~California, USA Trees of every kind hold a spark of the sacred for me. They steady this world. In winter, I rest my hand against their trunks to feel the heat within.

so quietly the roots of trees cultivate their secret knowledge of time, of space, of wonder

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 17 Feeling Paris

Natsuko Wilson at dawn on the tomb of Baudelaire beneath the airplane several notes are left carefully Paris wakes up pinned with little stones as if a lotus flower begins to open as if people desperately wait for its petals in the dark pond messages from the poet pushing a blue door far in the distance of a small hotel on a small street through the ancient graves in the cemetery i might pass Andre Breton the tower of Montparnasse in the lobby who has just come down stands tall, singing from the upstairs the tune of modern life passing breathing out a flower shop, a key shop, and la creperie the scent of Bordeaux wine of sweet Paris a lotus flower i happen to meet a Gypsy woman peacefully closes her petals sitting at the end of the street until the dawn

~France the tune of Swan Lake played by a cellist on the platform of the métro is swallowed by the screeching sounds of an incoming train a man on the subway tells about his sad life to strangers who pretend not listen but pay curious attention over a chocolate box i bought as a gift for Basha a sales girl scatters playfully fresh petals of red roses

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 18 Knocknarea

Autumn Noelle Hall & Claire Everett on its limestone mount, “in her young age Connacht’s Queen Maeve stands against She had been beautiful her Ulster foe . . . in that old way . . .” no longer can her fair face golden ode poured out in ink— feel the breeze from Sligo Bay Yeats crowns her once again

cloak and spear aﬂame on the breeze every inch the warrior the sighs of the dead who sleep each man in her shadow . . . in another man’s shadow . . . the chill when she turns eastward all who loved her to face Dagda’s Cairns Hill tomb to each, but a sip leave to Maeve her of ‘she who intoxicates’ cairn of stones on the summit that he might thirst . . . of Knocknarea she ﬁlls twin drinking horns from for luck, this offering, as well: the head of the King’s prize bull a sea-smoothed pocket stone

~Ireland feet on the scree of scraper and arrowhead, ﬂint and chert, wild as the wind in her hair she guards the Hill of the Moon hip high, the wall circumscribing its rim and hip-to-hip laid North to South, the graves of those who danced in her footsteps

Faery Queen treading the rings of time sun and moon still gild the Lake of Brightness rising ﬁrst, in her eyes ).

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 19 Camino

Carole Harrison

this fast train a stork across morphing landscapes on a steeple an alien ‘S’ shaped I long to walk, to feel clattering . . . the mud between my toes wins the argument

screaming a patch work I am here, I am— of red soil and spring grasses graffiti stitched with poppies my need to be known ever cheerful—your smile the script of my soul threading the years In southern Spain, days of walking, forests of Early days, our first camino in Spain, one encina oaks, thousand year old trees. Fascinating hiking stick each. My idea. He thought it silly. aged shapes. What tales could they tell? What Left his firmly attached to his back pack . . . . shepherds with their flocks passed by . . . pilgrims Without warning, two maneaters, straight from on their way to Santiago? hell . . . held off by just one thin hiking stick. Keep walking! Don’t look at them! Keep walking! ancient oak Be strong! He tries to get his stick. Can’t! Keep silver topped soldier with me! Keep walking! An eternity, probably saluting the years— only 100m, the fangs of Hades disappear back to scars on twisted trunks their flocks of sheep. I collapse on the badges of a life well fought ground . . . . way below us he takes my hand the white village growing carries me up hills smaller . . . balancing funny how a welcome smile my downhill journey . . . outweighed shattered glass together we walk through fear the castle locked hiking shadows storm the door, he says, stir the thick Iberian air waiting for a key . . . of empty streets . . . so easy to bridge gaps by magic a door opens— than surround ourselves with walls dos café con leche between stone walls an adobe house memories and wild flowers returns to the earth a song of colour— a crumbling heap when did you last dance so freely melting memories— not afraid of anything? what will remain of us? ~Spain and Australia

Previously appeared on Poets on Site, Facebook.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 20 a penny for the guy *

Joy McCall

staunch in their faith he is thrown the Catholic men into the dark jail hatch the plot mocked and beaten over cheap ale tortured on the cruel rack in the Dog and Duck tavern he confesses the young man tied by his feet in a ﬁlthy airless behind the horse undercroft he is dragged makes the sign of the cross through the streets of London blessing the martyrs of his faith past jeering crowds he sweats broken hiding gunpowder and bloody on the scaffold under wood and coal still he prays checking his watch the god of the Romans waiting for the signal does not deign to save him

English Lords his hacked limbs wigged and robed, in the great hall are scattered north, south above his head east and west gather in solemn state that he may ﬁnd no rest passing the laws of the land between heaven and hell heavy footsteps again November the priest-betrayer and English children laugh approaches around the bonﬁres the conspirator is sold Roman candles, sparklers for a few pennies a penny for the guy

~England

* Guy Fawkes Day, November 5th, remembers Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, by recusant Roman Catholics, to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill the new Church of England King.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 21 the morphing garden

Michael Dunwoody

i took measured sips in the mothy dusk of intoxicating air whenever i’d regret him carefully careful the summer garden not to interrupt the thrill necrotic with white lilies of his hand still on my thigh recalled all his ﬂourishes

we soared high, higher this crafty autumn eye level with the blue moon a few trees pretend at green set in a sky quick roses set frail buds with fleeting wished-upon stars flies mate in the cooling sun when i kissed him that first time while i wait as i promised madcap butterflies despite promises shocked my heart to a frenzy i have become a frail dream of zig-zaggery more space than substance whenever he read my eyes undifferentiated set his warm red mouth on mine in fables of his lost loves just a glance askance in his diary and like a cat my lover is our past too everyday madness in his eyes to be wept over? searching what shadows allow please no, i believed in love was gone at my looking back earned a name incised in stone

~Canada the grid of burlap binding the frail hydrangea was creased with blue snow when he chose to walk away from my promise of summer near the shaded bench where we dreamed as lovers ornamental grass hacks the sanguine azalea into joints of memory

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 22 Earthly Carapace

Sonam Chhoki into the lichened-cave it fills She arrives astride a tiger the ancient cavern, eyes and nostrils aflame and shakes the oaks it singes the moss— Mara closes his ears a talisman to this day writhing on the jungle floor

Mara “This noise you make, slithers in a haze of myrrh churns me inside out. swinging his hips But I will not be quelled, to a deep-throated song this battle has just begun of eternal knowledge and pleasure and is yet to be won!” in a swathe She replies: of deepest red brocade “My tiger of compassion he intones: awaits you, “Walk my path of love, let us soar the Garuda’s heights Become be the One forever!” to the Rainbow of Bliss.” the Sage utters no words Mara spits, Mara swears will her years of solitary he swivels his head meditation and shrieks by glacier lakes and peaks tearing birds off their ﬂight, douse the ﬂames of such passion? startling the nagas in their sleep images rise the Sage in fevered succession: opens her Third Eye Mara sighs, Mara cries, of Crystal Light— he dimples, he dances, in a whorl of ululation he lunges at her Mara swirls and dissolves the Sage In Tibetan Buddhist iconography Mara is the god who creates closes her eyes and summons cosmic illusions. He is famously depicted as the one who tempted from her depths the historical Buddha with visions of carnal pleasure. I’ve used this template to portray a female Buddha who is confronted by a lightning swell Mara’s illusionary promises. She is inspired by the eleventh of the cosmic OM century Tibetan Yogini Machig Labdrön (1055–1149).

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 23 shall we gather ghosts

Joy McCall Joy McCall the bank slopes down there’s a spirit to where the stream runs in the Main Street bookshop under the bridge— in Tipp, Ohio— the priest comes dripping a small child humming up from the baptising an old settlers’ hymn eight motorbikes on a cliff in a row alongside above a Welsh cove, the river inn— an old cottage— ale and pork scatchings a gentle ghost the bikers’ communion neatly folds back the quilts my long-haired friend on friday nights, chilled from the immersing the sound of a hammer huddles by the ﬁre— on an anvil— he says nothing, deep a blacksmith singing in his own holy space low by the old forge wall in the gloom on the cliff edge the priest shares our table walks a bent old woman, our rough altar— talking to herself— he gets drunk and sings hymns through her grey body as the day wears down I see the waves breaking we pitch a tent in the old hall under the willows where the strangers dwelt in darkness— a robed rabbi walks— my friend sleeps in leathers, he repeats the sacred words; the priest lies naked, snoring there is no ﬂesh on his white bones

~The King’s Head Inn, Barton Broom. Norfolk, England ~Strangers’ Hall, Norwich, England

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 24 ancestors over the rail

Joy McCall Joy McCall for the Gypsy the stout landlady of the Sea and Shore pub a cold wind blows leans against the bar— in the walled garden and steel in her voice, calls he talks to me ‘time gentlemen, please’ of the visionary and the persian woman peasants all, the sour-faced villagers a small bird sits down their ale— on her bare shoulder and smoking rank roll-ups whispering they stagger home carrying a message from a man she does not know a small group of drunken sailors eyes are watching call for more ale— my ﬁngers need to touch the old one stands snifﬁng, the stone face swaying on his feet it is cool and smooth and calls me to stay a small child appears in the doorway the sculptor crying ‘father’— smells of cedar chippings the old drunkard, white-faced, and cat mint lays the tankard down he speaks of poetry and unrequited love back on the ship the seamen gather I ask the names around their captain— of all these old ones he stares at the dark sea, of stone and wood— calling ‘my son, my son’ he does not know, and they stand silent among the herbs ~Orford Ness, Suffolk, England ~The Old Bungay Road, Norfolk, England

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 25 traces of light holding the shape

Tim Lenton & Joy McCall Joy McCall & Tim Lenton between the ﬁelds I dream now a path stretches outwards with my back against through mud and dust: the ruined wall— I reach for distant forests, of spinners, weavers my intentions unclear and the smell of damp wool

what waits there defiant flint among the bare trees, in unsuspecting fields calling to him? stands facing out I hear the small voice shrugging off my pale lost years of the east wind, crying and intercepted light this far north of my own light summer, shades of green fade scattered these damp days into the mist into shadows— and skeletons wave to me my spirits falling, in a persistent dream rain on the shallow moat

unsettled holding the shape by this rutted path the old builder mapped out, I turn away— fierce stone grips sky: these furrowed fields hide even the fallen windows old bones and dark secrets open my watering eyes traces of light roofless walls in the turn of the land once whole, this great hall uncovered here: fallen, silent— nervous deer dance at the edge, I stare into the face balanced on history of my own ruin

~Sufﬁeld, England ~Baconsthorpe Castle, Norfolk, England

Inspired by yoss22/9476276961/lightbox/>

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 26 a stirring of belief erosion

Joy McCall & Tim Lenton Tim Lenton & Joy McCall

I need now where a road falls the clear sacredness into the sudden sea, of these old bells— storm skies looming, the kind call to prayer, hidden waves nibble away the slow passing of time at the ground I stand on with the promise how fragile of wine, a new world and are the crumbling cliffs living water: of our island— I bathe in familiar sounds, and deep in my bones and unexpected light the same slow eroding

on the wind surface tension Sunday morning bells disguises solid roots across the ﬁeld— beneath my feet: a distant old church, buried too far down for a stirring of belief oceans to uncover strange dreams break through mammoth tusks into my pale green world caught in the layers, of fading life, exposed by tides— and I reach out for slivers in all dark crevices of sharp reality some old light remains

splinters, shards, fresh water ﬂows down, the breaking of things, hidden between bleak hill a silent bell— and bright valley: broken voices sing I catch a glimpse from my old a deeper, lasting song and glistening cavern

~Shotesham St. Mary, Norfolk, England ~Happisburgh, Norfolk, England

Inspired by yoss22/9479061884/>

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 27 the scent of ancestors asylum

Murasame & Matsukaze Murasame & Matsukaze

do they haunt you dark nights these many women? a storm calls the voice the mad streets from the deep— are not the place I cannot sing for a sleepless poet without wind and rain

these women in this padded house move around me sideways a broad voice many eyes behold walks the length me of these old ﬂoor boards— in silent derision outside wind and fury

do they deride mice run or are they dancing under my worn oak ﬂoors around you? in the night— a moth will always these small quiet things burn in the ﬂame bring me strange comfort

in the madhouse yesterday i was remembering these women nod in passing the scent of our ancestors shedding that i dropped commonplace tears somewhere in the for something i’ve lost cold underbrush

ask them then the cracked bones to give you what they find of my kinfolk on the madhouse floor litter this land— even a bowlful of tears from every small green field can clean a deep wound their voices call to me ~Louisiana, USA / Norfolk, England ~Louisiana, USA/ Norfolk, England

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 28 Nevada Hills the burning day

Matsukaze & Murasame Matsukaze & Murasame beneath knitting galaxies a persimmon sky a fresh bowl in an old of chokeberry blooms thatched cottage at a where is your ﬁre teak desk writing tanka i say where is your ﬁre?

a young man the hayfield resting his chin catches fire and burns on brown hands on and on his head filled with music my wild spirit aches and dreams and old waka with loss after loss an aged wife in this penitent morning stirring noodles rushing to the courtyard after a long day can i help but when all is quiet seated inhale the smoke and ashes in her room, one with darkness of the burning day over the horizon?

brown poet sins circling following his faith in the hot winds, torment across the land my weary head noise all around him I fall to my knees his soul patiently waiting not expecting mercy from the picture window am i branded an overcast sky with a scarlet letter these little do i move Hawthorne-like storms coming from in the heat of day Nevada hills muttering my prayers?

~Las Vegas, Nevada, USA / Norfolk, England ~Louisiana, USA / Norfolk, England

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 29 charred remains The Morrigan Returns

Matsukaze & Murasame Carole Johnston in these eyes she stalks me sometimes light in the shadows sometimes darkened clouds of morning and on some occasions I ﬁnd black feathers the color of rain in front of Starbucks

I ignore in brown eyes the first sign sometimes storms shoving thunderclouds the feathers then the sun in my pocket breaking through I ignore the second sign at other times crow prints in my eyes on my windshield tsunamis every morning hurricane force winds the crack of a cool wind the sun pops orange on the city fills the sky the flash with copper light of a light’ning strike as feathers fall hits the walls I smell the burning I ignore of many dreams the third sign black wings stretched across on some cold morning the russet dawn taking the steps two at a time down into my soul a thousand trying to salvage feathers follow me the charred remains of dreams my black wings beat with the hearts ~Louisiana, USA / Norfolk, England of a thousand crows

~Ireland

The Morrigan is an ancient Irish trinity of goddesses, known to foreshadow death in the form of a crow.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 30 Siren The Birthday Party

Bernice Yap Sergio Ortiz

That ﬁgure Gambia. Alhaji, twenty-one and gay, had been by the lonely shore planning his birthday for months. The guest list a love song carefully locked away; there was that real threat calling to the sea of decapitation to consider. However, he could white foam on her shoulders no longer ﬁnd peace by avoiding life.

Stumble on how old is need, dried grass, old sand how knotted are the corridors grits your toes of loneliness? dragging over each wave Imam, there is no angel as they cut into your feet with an orange by my bed

The moon His friends gathered by the poolside, each with a cool pearl, ignoring his past shut in him like the leaves of a book, her shadow eyeing the uninvited guest snapping photographs. the dark edge a cut hiding in her gaze freedom is a ﬁre that runs like a staircase She grins up then down— a mouth full of glass my lover’s lips the color snags against of soft-skin mangoes your palm, your hand they tear the ﬂesh out ~Gambia

~Australia

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 31 Striding Eagle Agitator

Brian Zimmer Marilyn Humbert for Joy My youngest brother is untamed. More than a rebel, he is an anarchist. I don’t understand his as if I were choices, but he’s my brother and I love him. a mirror to shatter the stone eagle I wait steps forth unchained with my brother from its common plinth in this small room without windows psychopomp only a cold metal seat guardian of the dead do you miss My father chose to turn his back and walk away. the corner burden that kept you flightless? while his son waits for trial— see what I see he weeds and the artist saw dandelions heads predation from his manicured lawn of every stone eye follows sepia and song My brother chatters away to me about this and that—does he not realise . . . bow of wings does not portend escape stifled flex of strength by the air inside is not the curve of flight I walk outside your bones never hollow to the endless roar of freeway traffic ave, ave, the despair of the body ~Mt Druitt Courthouse cells, Sydney, NSW, parted Australia from its destiny meets fate head-on

Striding Eagle, 16th-century, Venetian marble; Artist: Unknown; Saint Louis Art Museum. Originally a funerary object supporting a sarcophagus, eagles symbolic of Christ’s Ascension into Heaven & the Resurrection of the Dead. Working in Italy, sketches of this sculpture were made by Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens, in the 17th century.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 32 Unnamed Road Katsura Rikyū

Marilyn Humbert Marilyn Humbert our bike strolling paws the tar band through Katsura gardens hungrily— I spy the moon the thrum in the lotus pond of pulsing hearts washing his round face my arms encircle weeping boughs his leather-clad waist over Miyuka pathway windblown hair Heian feet tangled days on worn river stones drift into days beneath my steps trees snap by Gepparo Teahouse birds rise, wheel snug among pines— and swoop I sip we attack the curves warmed water of this untamed road fragrant with leaves stopped, roadside— a path leaves on sprawling trees of white stone brush my face framed by blossom ﬁngers unknot on tangled wood, twisted curls whisper of distant voices the smell wooded islands of leather and fuel in Katsura grounds on we plunder in the shadows bitumen and back roads sighs of a prince to the dimness of night and his lady

~Outback, NT, Australia ~Katsura Imperial Villa, Kyoto Japan

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 33 Sky Blue Reasons to Not Return

Genie Nakano Geoffrey Winch a woman old friends’ homes inside a sky blue room where we drew real ale she waits for straight from the barrel emptiness long-buried beneath this junction: to be filled that taste travelled with me it’s been weeks now brewers, biscuit-bakers, how long will it take dignified people digging the hours turn into days, the vistas of bulb fields: nights into weeks those traditional trades weeks into another day smothered by the new seagulls screech once again fly into grey clouds we return to the crem: piercing their birth sacs how many more rain begins to fall dreams to ashes and she waits memories to dust? scent of where I was schooled, earth after fallen rain played guitar, began to flower the air, ground, city streets by miles she sniffs her hands and arms evermore distant she is back again even more by years fall, falling, flow as does the town sorrow flows underground this junction keeps growing: waves come and go latest gantry signs she embraces the gift tell of parts that never were asks no questions never will be part of me

~United States ~Junction 11, M4 Motorway, south of Reading; and the town of Reading, Berkshire, UK

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 34 Lost Worlds Childhood of Christ

Jenny Ward Angyal Gerry Jacobson snowmelt Back there it’s dark, cold. Melting snow, from mountain glaciers slush. What’s it all about? I’m outside it. Why do blesses they sing carols? Why Christmas trees? It’s all Pachamama’s belly . . . around me but I am not part of. Ask questions. her rising fever chills me The adults deride it, yiddish it as “Crutzmuss” or something like that. I soon learn it’s not kosher for a little Jewish boy. Like the bacon smell in the breathless grocer’s shop. at 13,000 feet I blow softly We have our own winter festival, Chanukah. across two coca leaves . . . Huddling together around the candles. Singing the ritual of wishes hymns in ancient Hebrew. And “Chanukah gelt”, gifts of money. A sop to Jewish children living in an alien world. twilight in the Temple of Virgins Years later, in another life. On stage in on Moon Island— Llewellyn Hall. In the choir for Berlioz’ oratorio I leave an offering “Childhood of Christ”. A sudden ﬂash of of blood-red gladiolus recognition. “What’s a little Jewish boy doing up here singing about baby Jesus?” And “Is my mother turning in her grave?” the Uru people live on islands made of reeds belonging cut adrift not belonging I reach for the shore longing in this river of stars now is the dance of my disconnect ~Peru & Bolivia ~London, England and Canberra, Australia

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 35 Crossroads

Charles Tarlton

CARMODY: You see that? Fifty cars or more, all with and again silence their headlights on. Some dignitary’s funeral? threatens to invade the sad rhythms of the dead BLIGHT: Or some other kind of parade. slowed to stop—direct me, Lord ta-dum, ta-dum, a tedium lingering rain now its wildest rhythms Gratefully, I was walking back from the slowed—direct me, Lord grave, sending my thoughts to any other place, ta-dum, ta-dum—a tedium urging them away, when it abruptly ceased to at the blackened lychgate rain. The tree bark soaked was darker now, and the lawn sparkled in the wet as if baskets of No funeral today, but it’s not like nobody has shattered glass had spilled, but either no one died. News circulates from all corners of the noticed or all were so gorged with emotion they dying world—of murder, accident, disease, and could not muster more. thousands lost in a ﬂood, gone overboard, or starved. Life struggles on against the dying, the plain fact of it against the cold statistics of despair. there has to be an end to death and dying sad, sad, Columbine for the living to get on raw combination of dove with the little that is left and eagle’s talon delicately blue and white that storm withdrew uncomprehending star while sheets of the yellow sun snapped over the lawns night lay frozen like the new-making of a bed in a sullen graying hush or a table festive set thuds and scratching gone I hoped to talk to the moon comes hopeful sunshine when it ﬁnally appeared to guy our long sad faces

The stars are nearly out, ﬂamboyant, lustrous He bent over there at the edge of the in a sky made obviously of arched Plexiglas. And cemetery and picked something up. “What did the wind is blowing hard down here against the you ﬁnd,” his brother asked, walking along, “the slinky yielding trees, the trees glad for the exercise end of a string?” “The end of something,” he now their leaves have dropped, and the leaves answered, “we’ll have to see where it leads.” skip and swirl, dancing for all the world. I hawk out—direct me, Lord then our rain tires ta-dum, ta-dum—a tedium lets angled sweeps of sunlight quit at the blackened lychgate fall overwrought across strewn muddy puddles down from the littlest twigs

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 36 you could barely breathe Shading when the orange blossoms were thick as soap suds Charles Tarlton thermal winds pushed fondant swells up into the mountains CARMODY: They were afraid you were coming. They were sure you wouldn’t have one nice thing to say. you could arrive at the airport in sandals BLIGHT: But you all look so lovely, I mean, really lovely. get on the flight I was a child in southern California and we and get off where you needed had a garden where my mother raised a few a parka and fur-lined boots potatoes, green beans, onions, and carrots. The weather was dry and hot so we had to water the peasant hands, thick plants every day from a hose connected to the fingers, their meatiness belying house. One day, about when I usually did the concert pianist watering, it started to rain. The sky turned gray but a pencil stuck in there and seemed to lean down very close to scratches out feathery verse everything. I stood in what was suddenly almost darkness, the unfamiliar rain soaking the From the highway, mountains of the Swiss vegetables, and I could have been anywhere— Alps, their names unknown to me, rise up like like France, you know, or China in the movies. cataclysms of stone, rocks bigger than you could ever imagine rocks to get, flat faces of granite a the rain just hisses mile high and two miles wide. People live in so where did you get the idea villages tossed like grain for birds or chickens it hopes to rinse around their base, around the lowest slopes where away our sins or sadness grass still grows. These people must believe in —rain mixes its own dish these mountains, throw themselves down in front of—what? It’s hard to name it, because under a low tree “mountainous” is a word that already indicates transfixed in passing headlights massive (or more). at dark noon see the lonely boy dream at Quéribus he’s a wild Apache scout where the wind blew us off the mountain the air is inky a hundred weary soldiers black and I cannot even see clawing their way up, and in my eyes blink this is that fine parchment they cut deep pits where here and gone is written in Malta to get the stone In a winter apple orchard, amidst the thistle to build their churches and broom of the empty branches, here and and the fortress Citadel there an apple was missed and waits, waits in the they devoured the island snow. But the shadows are too long now, the days too short, and ice hangs under the smallest twig, at the airport drops of ice hanging where dew or rain froze one waiting to fly home dark morning. When the leaves come back, two months in Europe everything seems to suggest, when the leaves are already forgotten come back . . . . time blown along in the wind

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 37 Calliope/My Ex: Love/Trouble Maker

Chen-ou Liu

Written on October 25th, 2013, 42nd anniversary of the expulsion of Taiwan (Ofﬁcially the Republic of China) from the United Nations

I am not for a week into her anymore writing poems for my blind date but I promise the muse and I to make her live forever like two mice with our legs in my love poetry caught in a glue trap revising the chill air for hours in dim light this Easter morning . . . the muse and I Miss Lee, straddle the thin line my ex and the muse between pleasure and pain morph into one our laughter Oh, you are and conversation a published writer penetrate Fan Lee this winter night’s silence . . . sounds like my ex . . . the shadow and I alone with the muse

Medusa trapped for hours on top in the sex scenes in a labyrinth of words of a movie . . . the muse and I my ex does the same stand facing each other in my winter dreams under the blazing sun the red line set awash and my credibility in Summertime on the line: and moonlight every snowy night Fan Lee whispers just one dream with my ex my tanka of longing

ﬁrst sunrise . . . La petite morte I keep rehearsing rolling off her tongue . . . Hi! Miss Lee, for me now nice to meet you there is no separation before the old mirror between sex and poetry for Roland Barthes

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 38 artistic the muse’s face masturbation! in the lake of my mind when I remember I ﬁsh for words my ex’s cutting remark rippling something shrinks from our ancient past sex is sex, the past nothing more and nothing less . . . like a headless ghost . . . I comb this ache through Fan’s words in my heart in search of nuance keeps me awake a tanka my poetic mind the site of a struggle emptied for meaning . . . by snowy loneliness— is my dispute with the muse I’m hungry cloaked in clichéd images ? for passion fruit

Madame Bovary a purple rose divided by Fan’s bookmark tattooed on my ex’s bosom will our dreams we used to sing be overlapping California dreamin’ on this midsummer night? on such a winter’s day

Fan and my ex walking alone carve out their spaces with my old shepherd in my thoughts on Christmas day the harvest moon hangs high the tumultuous crowding over the Taiwan Strait of memories the muse rising ﬁrst sunlight from a sea of words slanting through the window . . . covers her breasts . . . I realize I am pregnant my ex’s shadow and my own with verses of longing will never meet again

Fan cries out, my New Year poem, Your ex stands between us . . . writing is making love water stains to the muse . . . on my ﬁrst chapbook, a raw primal pleasure The Border as Fiction coming in wave after wave

Fan Lee’s face ~Ajax, Canada; Toronto, Canada; Taiwan Strait, blurring into my ex . . . Taiwan in the attic the cold air sucked in and out with my shadows

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 39 Brane Grgurovi č In a spring evening the crescent moon sinks Alenka Zorman, Slovenian-English into a stormy cloud. Translator / slovenska-angleško prevajalka A grey-haired woman moans in her wheelchair. Odpiram okno za novoletni pogled v širjave morja. Po topli plohi Od nekod se spušča galeb. jadralec preleti nebo Ah, streha ni moja! v barvi mavrice. Cvetni list se osuje I open the window s tulipana v vazi. for the new year’s view of the wide sea. After a warm shower A gull ﬂies from somewhere. a hang glider ﬂies across Ah, the roof isn’t mine! the iridescent sky. ~Slovenija / Slovenia A petal falls off the tulip in my vase.

V tišini jutra valovijo v soncu jesenske trave. Mimo okna gre sklonjena senca neznanca. Matjaž Tevž Potočnik Autumn grasses Alenka Zorman, Slovenian-English wave in the sunshine Translator / slovenska-angleško prevajalka of a silent morning. A bent stranger’s shadow Še neolistan passes by the window. se hrast dviguje v pomladno nebo. Z bližnje hiše odpade V zimskem jutru poslednji kos ometa. spatiﬁl na polici odpira bel cvet. Still leaﬂess Trepet maminih ustnic an oak stretches govori o bolečini. to the spring sky. The last piece of plaster In a winter morning falls off the nearby house. Spathiphyllum on the shelf opens its white blossom. My mother’s trembling lips Pomladni večer. speak about the pain. Prvi krajec potone v nevihtni oblak. ~Slovenija / Slovenia Siva ženica tarna v invalidskem vozičku.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 40 Sanjam svoj poljub Alenka Zorman na njegovi rami in svojo mamo, Alenka Zorman, Slovenian-English ki nemo blagoslavlja Translator / slovenska-angleško prevajalka najino toplo bližino.

I dream about my kiss on his arm, and Daleč vsaksebi about my mum s prijateljem poslušava who wordlessly blesses isto pesem . . . our warm closeness. V pomladnem večeru zaustavljava čas. ~Slovenija / Slovenia

Wide apart my friend and I listen to the same music. In the spring evening we try to stop time.

Neznani ptič je na balkonu odložil puhasto pero. Sanjarim o tebi, kako me primeš za roko. Ivanka Kostantino An unknown bird has left its feather Alenka Zorman, Slovenian-English on my balcony. Translator / slovenska-angleško prevajalka I am daydreaming of him who holds my hand. Večerno nebo si v kodrasto pričesko Vnuk odpotuje. vpleta žareč trak. Na morskem obrežju V reki deročih misli joka babica— iščem drobce otroštva. z milnimi mehurčki v trepetavi roki. Evening sky interweaves a red ribbon Grandson departs. in its curly hair. His granny cries The rapids of my thoughts search on the seashore— for the pieces of my childhood. with a bottle of soap bubbles in her trembling hand. ~Slovenija / Slovenia

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 41 Elizabeth Howard he comes walking but how—him sick to death I wave as I have ever done after I dump her body he turns, stares unseeing I enter the bedroom his eyes, glazed mirrors her red wig on the dresser the eyes white and staring ~Tennessee, USA the echo of her voice a treacherous journey through night snow to the hidden cabin— a wiry strand of gray hair in my old cup out of emptiness Diana Teneva a broad white wing waving or is it tail or fin? who or what the creature behind the well with my message of the day? you appear thirsty for love . . . winter dusk the kiss you dare not give to me wraiths rise out of the smoke wisp across the hearth gather in dark corners the treetops whispering hoarsely scribbling in the sky my name flickering streetlight can you read it in the mirror from where you are the old drunk’s shadow staggers once again through the empty house a snowman with a nose shortened exploring an old graveyard by a sparrow . . . spider silk and Spanish moss my daughter wants an Eskimo kiss smother my face creatures slither through the leaves I flee, crows calling, caw, caw following Ariadne’s thread dead and gone for three days I rummage it’s Aunt Lucy calling my mind throughout the night mazes where is my gold ring? where my gold teeth? ~Bulgaria

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 42 Mixtec pueblo— Margaret Van Every they greet us barefoot on dirt ﬂoors we buy rugs and candles and learn to measure progress by how well we hold back time the dead return on their day of honor ~Mexico miss their friends and family mole and tequila rancheras at top decibel *The ﬁrst Talking Cross is said to have spoken in Chan Santa Cruz,Yucatán, in 1850. In the Mayan tongue, it urged the enslaved workers of the sisal haciendas to revolt. despite their efforts The location became the capital of the Caste War to make them scared of hell (1847-1901). The cult of Talking Crosses still exists in the church will never win: Yucatán. fearing life more than death Mexicans embrace the skeleton

if only we donned our mask and cape rang the bell and waited for the door to open invite us in for sweets

this fecund population bound to the church not by the promise Karla Linn Merriﬁeld of eternal life but for love of the virgins here and now Florida titans half green algae half fungus in Yucatán lives a double life— the talking crosses* one chloroplast is said to speak in Maya only quench your thirsty giant heart the gospel of revolt to ears attuned to suffering Florida’s airplants soft starburst spines dripping dew Spanish moss draping— día de los muertos one quiet breath is said to in this ancient Mayan village replenish the emptied soul the bones are brought to light scrubbed with remembrance ~Florida, USA returned to earth another year

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 43 Vasile Moldovan Kath Abela Wilson

purple butterﬂy Coming out majestically my feathers from the veil of mist a cauldron a mask Sphinx in the Carpathians . . . sing a potion stirring What he can read in the stars insects and birds because his silence is so deep? a blue bag of bones inside my backpack Waked from sleep into the night a dizzy child smells I “do” the fresh air the jailhouse stairs of this pure morn breathing God himself ~Pasadena, California, USA

a grandson runs I stare at the sky back under the bed outstretched on the grass . . . scared of himself the scattered clouds staying home spooky night hide for a moment to trash his costume the Lord’s countenance ~San Diego, California, USA

Maybe this is macabre white coated the ﬁrst celestial sign workers in the laboratory after the tempest: needles and pins the enemy camps round em up roughnecks from united by the rainbow bad dream moving company

~Santa Barbara, California, USA Angel voice or human speaking? on our wedding day always the same we heard about his fall resounding cymbal my estranged father just like a bronze bell my jealous ﬁrst love chose that day to die

Only an old man ~Pasadena, California; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA in the empty bedroom all alone my dad left my mom for her just like the Lord how sad she conﬁded in the Garden of Eden after he died in her dementia he lived ~Romania downstairs with another woman

~Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 44 gay bashing attack the night I teased him the old haunt above the bay by putting beer in his soup cross country he sent nasty emails to all my dream of you our friends about me dying on a stretcher and the witch’s brew

~Staten Island, New York; Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA ~Pasadena, California, USA he brought mom cold-cuts his monstrous shouts after the affair I all night awake afraid his son appalled wrapped in a white sheet at betrayal so when he did if this had been a ghost story the same he avoided cold cuts it would have been better

~Brooklyn, New York ; Staten Island, New York, USA ~Santa Barbara, California, USA sound of a rocker since I became pregnant in grandma’s room without intercourse she’d call in the priest in the course of pregnancy for last rites a prescription I worried I might have a dog for her daily dose of spirits but of course I didn’t

~Bryan, Texas, USA ﬂying nun 6th grade class threw everyone’s books out the window little old black bonnet head making the tough guys cry

Kathy Noonan ﬁrst grade Toki if you read this you know I have heard tell it’s true you chased me of the ogress Asin: heavy clomp red mane huckleberries from school all the way home are hers and hers alone, and her voice foretells death high school sweetheart youth pastor he worked in a butcher shop says bow down to Christ enchanted I gave him entrails or burn in Hell from my biology dissections then strums as we sing he gave me extra organs of God’s unconditional love

~Staten Island, New York, USA ~Paciﬁc Northwest, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 45 Patricia Prime Debbie Johnson in sultry thunder a vulture circles an enormous blue moon a bloody rabbit carcass hangs in the darkening sky— which reminds me this is the day of the dead how much I desire to taste when spirits rise from graves your blood tonight like a thriller in Hitchcock vein a left foot wanders costumed revelers the night in search of body on Halloween night feels incomplete chase each other down the street just as I feel empty when you are away Shhh—there are vampires knocking on the door—be quiet! under full moonlight You can have the money a tombstone casts its shadow and sweets—all of it yourselves over fresh grave site I say to my grandchildren mirrors the darkness I feel since your untimely demise the spook touches me on my bare forearm his hand heavy fog covers folded round the haft of a knife abandoned cemetery as he demands ‘trick or treat’ eerie music plays as a skeleton’s ribs the most profound are strummed by a ghost and deadliest of Bosch’s visions his own hell ~Iowa, USA beneath the illusions based on medieval facts fox-trotting at the Halloween Ball dancers dressed as Satan and an angel their wings ethereal Christina Nguyen round the Ouija board it’s not the fact the marker summons up we’re selling you short letters— girls there’s a loud scream when a girl it’s the fact sees her dead mum’s name we’re selling you

~New Zealand ~Minnesota, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 46 zombie carollers LeRoy Gorman do they practice before groaning Medusa had it all Silent Night worked out to death in vitro & no more men but then sex with Circe she lost her head bangles made from bones of men who came up a new bridge short as animals between nations do they rattle Odysseus trolls on both sides take up tourists gone their positions the Sasquatch looks a little older no phitter-phatter fading into forest of little bigfoot feet for another winter on the forest ﬂoor where we clearcut a tank battle our footprint is large lasts ﬁfteen minutes on the history channel sleep all day the reaper has a laugh & skip classes at night that lasts forever teen vampires are not all a whir in the dark that unusual the wingbeats of dragons puts out the most the wingbeats candy of wind turbines the vampire gussied up ~Canada as a vamp thought it was your face I saw in the crowd Matthew Caretti but no it was Halloween to cross over the dark river styx a debutante a worn coin but still for memories of ghosts a nobody no longer there the lake monster yet to be named curses lost in tutankhamun’s vault hard to get into found again Bram Stoker in the bazaar with you dear my wallet gone masked for Halloween nibbling at my neck ~Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 47 long line of devotees Radhey Shiam struggle to get an early chance a stampede fifty devotees injured forty killed a ghost in guise of a saint after a holy dip entered temple I sat on the bank of Ganga went away singing the mother Ganga with the golden idol appeared and blessed me a ghost recites the Bible sitting on wings every Sunday morning of a butterfly sitting near a grave an elephant flew in the sky the watchman is puzzled landed on Everest and met a snow fairy chilly night a lady slipped an aged lady into my bed on the unique carpet to my horror flew higher and higher she was a ghost landed at White House to surprise the President a group of ghosts enjoys feast of gamble at Dewali night bones and wine is ceremonial blessing near the graveyard a drunkard midnight put his wife on bet and lost her at her son’s grave she offered flowers the priest sacrificed to her surprise a buffalo she found her son to goddess Durga smiling before her to bless the couple with a baby in the graveyard on her way to the temple sounds of a piano she saw a round stone I looked around she worshiped the stone a lady in white offered water and flowers laughs at me and returned home ruins of a palace a monk with a bowl I still hear stands at the road sounds of a piano a passer by ladies laughter dropped a dead fish clapping of hands in the bowl

~India

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 48 Tish Davis Amada Burgard allowing us a young girl sits, to tour its lighthouse, it rubs eyes to the ﬁre against my ankles awakening spirits, invisible gray cat she speaks at Fairport Harbor to the trees in the pumpkin patch in darkest forests, far behind the farmhouse on darkest nights, the wind-up bear the slendermen gather, still searching to offer for his lost boy frights

~Ohio, USA dark trees, under moonlight, the black wolf stumbles, becoming man

crows bow, spirits take refuge, the wise woman Paul Mercken wanders amongst the trees Paul Mercken, Dutch-English Translator the raging moon holds no power upon de meester vraagt the will waarom dwaal je weg of the trees van de school het visje antwoordt omdat het vakantie is the autumn trees witness the master asks scattered in a ﬁeld why do you stray away bones of the sacred, from the school magic of the wind the little ﬁsh answers because it’s a holiday ~The Black Forest, Germany ~The Netherlands

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 49 Nu Quang Gerry Jacobson opening the door . . . moonlight . . . George Bush and Dick Cheney shout approaching the Mother “trick or treat” through a ﬁeld gate . . . I ﬁll their bags the grizzled kisses with bowls of Tootsie Rolls of the ancestors

~Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, England waking at midnight I feel a hand press my shoulder lying flat leaning I hear footsteps against his headstone . . . disappearing out of the window two hundred years . . . closing my eyes the veil is thin moonless night walking past a cemetery ~Lamas churchyard, Norfolk, England she starts to run hearing sobs footsteps follow her Finis Terre where the world ends ~United States I’ll never get there now . . . for me there is another my first pilgrimage to the Black Lady Mountain ~Cape Finisterre, Galicia, Spain I gaze out at the dawning sky a goddess standing on clouds twenty five gaunt and dying ~Vietnam how did he feel . . . never became Shakespeare never slept with Fanny?

~Keats House, Hampstead, England

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 50 Joy McCall Susan Burch all soul’s night and through the empty park accused of witchcraft the shadows creep her breasts were cut off and and through the long lonely dark force-fed to her sons a young woman weeps the bitter taste of humiliation down the dark hall of the old manor Based on true story of Anna Pappenheimer. Anne Boleyn carries her severed head under her arm leaving her house barefoot ~Blicking Hall, Norfolk, UK in the rain his bloody footprints the black dog run down the gutter howls in the night, haunting these ﬂatlands— village children wake screaming, from my window dark Shuck snarling at the door I can almost see the hole in the old oak tree ~Bungay, Suffolk, UK the cache of panties the police couldn’t ﬁnd midnight and at the pub door the hanged priest knocks— sitting the weary landlord brings in McDonald’s the penitential ale depressed though everything says, ~The Buck Inn, Norwich, UK “I’m lovin’ it” the ferry drifts detained for down and across the river shoplifting at Macy’s on the tides— my teenage daughter night after night, plague souls yells, “see! here’s my receipt!” leave the doomed village to the man, face blood red ~Surlingham Ferry, Norfolk, UK riding the metro two a.m. the b.o., perfumes, stronger writing dark tanka as the doors close I wonder— a stranger is some far-future human takes my breath away dreaming me? ~United States ~United Kingdom

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 51 black cat Autumn Noelle Hall sinks a single crescent claw deeper . . . Halloween yowl the waning moon pulls me a white tom mooning into its velvet night between pumpkins yearning for his yin— with this candle black cat on the prowl beneath your chin, call her name three times: Bloody Mary . . . 10-second shutter Bloody Mary . . . have no fear turns her into a ghost —it’s just a tanka mirror this daughter Ochtertyre who once tried to kill herself round Samhain ﬁre, a stone now in living black-and-white for every man . . . come morning, they’ll live out the year, licking his name all those whose stones remain off the calavera she tastes only looting my kids’ loot the sweetness of his life to ﬁnd my favorite Día de los Muertos chocolate treats— a Halloween trick I gleaned by my parents’ example epitaph: died laughing when asked how much the princess bloated she’d earned for her poems from the coat stuffed underneath Día de los Muertos her gown calaveras literarias her crown a-top a ski-cap —Iowa Halloween herbalists, Samhain sills of Erin healers, knowledge-keepers where turnip lanterns ward spelled into witches away the Fae . . . and scattered like kernels from far and starved for magick beaten from broom corn my Irish blood bids them stay

the spice of sage I hear tell from the arroyo, it raises they once lynched Italians all their hopes in N’Orleans . . . for a safe border-crossing any head can wear a hood pinned on the pumpkin-pie moon any neck, a noose Halloween birthday he drops treats in goodie sacks dad’s careful carving tricked into thinking eye for eye, tooth for tooth those elaborate costumes all lit up were all donned just for him some punk beats our pumpkin to a pulp—SMASH ~United States

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 52 Natsuko Wilson gennepher walking to my parked car on the street hanging after jury duty on the wall a puppet on a string i get a parking ticket— shadows a welcome relief to return-to-life advance on the sleeping child on the wall of the dental surgeon’s ofﬁce a laser-operated photo the child of a landscape woke up with a start exposes every detail of the trees a witch in black outside her bedroom window a dandelion on her broomstick through a crack in the concrete path between the buildings ~Southampton, England is about to bloom so alone but proudly the child ~Ontario, Canada played on the marshes a gibbet remained by the stile the rotten rope perfectly still

skeletal hulks of prison ships rotting ribcages rising out of the mudﬂats

Nilufer Y. Mistry ~Marshes, River Medway, Kent, England, UK marauding shamal her blinding wall of sand overcasts . . . sandblasts our sleek city towers our walls of glass sunrise for the faithful light desert-dunes on ﬁre & rose-rimmed sandstone minarets ﬂare crimson above the Adhan whispered on the wind

~Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 53 Joanne Morcom Jenny Ward Angyal headless bodies only bones in 200 Mile Gorge under the turned earth where men searched for gold of Bloody Kansas— and found instead those passenger pigeons a wendigo the Choctaw called lost doves more than a legend ~Kansas, USA the Jersey Devil lurks in the Pine Barrens a solitary hunter a priest told her of warm blooded creatures no Jews allowed in heaven— she raised me ~Jersey Barrens, New Jersey, USA under a white oak and named it Paradise no such thing as alien abduction ~Connecticut, USA I’m only dreaming about a planet ruled by lizards the shark’s tooth like a dragon’s tongue searching for Cthulhu filling my palm in the wilds of Rhode Island bubbles of sea foam expedition members on shifting sand first lose their way then their sanity ~North Carolina, USA I read aloud from the Necronomicon to summon the Old Ones slow down but they don’t come slow down the song to do my bidding of the wood thrush until at last it echoes summertime the music of humpbacked whales and the grave robbing is easy ~Virginia, USA I find a use for every body part badlands a good place for digging graves the only watchers spiders and snakes

~Rhode Island, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 54 C. William Hinderliter Pravat Kumar Padhy jack-o-lantern smile my shadow the glint lengthens towards light from the carving knife the cry of owl of the scarecrow reminds me in dream on my doorstep it is still midnight divorce court decree past, present and future she points out embedded in Krishna’s* mouth the small print the far off of our prenup dust, dark and dance of ﬁre signed in blood through Hubble Space telescope

*In the Hindu religion books it is narrated how Lord cemetery moon Krishna manifested the spectrum of universe to his mother, strolling through the fog Yoshoda, by opening his mouth. on the long way home the graveyard Nataraja* whistles back in cosmic dance God particles sparkle the stillness enchanted forest in the discovery tunnel the crunch of the frost on the old deer trail *Natraja is regarded as cosmic dancer and is depicted of the howl of the wind God Shiva. and the wolves on my trail

Boddhi tree—* forbidden love . . . in deep meditation the ghosts of my past closing my eyes still haunting me I turn within discovering the sound of the “wind” reﬂection of sound and light as it rattles my door *Boddhi tree is regarded as the sacred tree, located in Bodh ~Phoenix, Arizona, USA Gaya, India. Lord Buddha attained enlightenment under the tree.

~India

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 55 an old Matsukaze abandoned cabin— consulting a medium, she searches house full for a vein in my arm of local children gathering for a seance— next door each year a grandmother dies buying costumes and candy, Nana warns us about abandoned cemetery devils and demons a shawl of mist damp leaves, their brittle sound my friend unnerves the children tells me the Mayor’s wife conducts a black mass in the basement Day of The Dead of St. Matthew’s Methodist Church my neighbor’s son thinks it’s cute to dress up outskirts of town— as rotting ﬂesh several deranged ones escape the local asylum on Halloween— grandma Marlice Hammond’s daughter disappears later found at grandad’s grave rehashing the dear sister, years they enjoyed you were on my mind; i, a brown rabbi paced the length of dry corridors everyone reciting *berakhah in the neighborhood *berakhah: Hebrew for blessings/benedictions avoids Mrs. McDougal’s dark home— she sacriﬁced her baby it was while standing in line i wondered were you ok, this Halloween in that quiet had a party town of Norwich? and we opted to watch ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ wanted to send you several waka in two lines each Halloween so their arms could hold you, the children scared suspending you in a blues of love by Mr. Harkless in the cemetery ~Lake Charles, Louisiana, USA calling for his dead lover

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 56 Deborah P. Kolodji Janet Lynn Davis lake ripples of a son’s last breathless, sighting . . . will I ever slow down el vestido blanco my racing thoughts? de La Llorona a roadrunner pauses on the sunlit grass midnights and full moons ~Grimes County, Texas, USA our howls echoing each other a cottontail camping out in a bed a sudden chill of garlic . . . and neck pin pricks . . . why am I drawn to things it’s midnight that ought to repel me? in the Queen Mary boiler room ~home, Grimes County, Texas, USA another argument about ghosts: reﬂections the unexplained leap off the water . . . light blob a statue on your photograph beside the Roman Pool of Diana and the Stag ~Kern County, California, USA ~Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California, USA

at the ER a ﬂeeting connection . . . the screams Alexander Jankiewicz of an unseen stranger echoing mine a ﬁgure at my doorway ~emergency center, Tomball, Texas, USA translucent turning toward me sleepless in bed mission bells above the garden— full moon dreams Joy, Sorrow hearing echoes and at the center of childhood Gloria ghosts from the past whispering my name ~San Luis Obispo, California , USA

~Al Ain, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 57 moth wings Robert Annis silent beneath the fan staring the tree branch into the light hydras over coffee mugs you fall asleep one day I’ll call my hands without wind gnarled the rain falls in bars bed sheets so straight and thin drying in the sun I might slip through my father completely dry insists I sleep more pink sunset bouquets the boulevard three crows palm tree crowns French braid the air pinball a rise and fall in a rogue gust dance before the storm umbrella shadows jellyfish on the sidewalk the train crawls dancing in its stern blue steel to a polyrhythm singing midnight of sopping shoes the cicadas slept their seventeen years all at once the naked summit peeks through tufts Christmas lights of fine nimbus web October branches his brown halo abandoned just a bit wider than mine an ice cube melts in a sweating glass on the tracks we balance, pushing my father’s finger against the other’s maps out our road trip hand to stay in the old atlas upright a dead friend lives through hidden photographs the lake laps my ankles in the stairwell slowly I sink black ants dismantle into black mud a cicada holding a slack line —the shrinking corpse of summer the waiting room is full of anxious limbs midnight plums —an empty chair cool in kitchen shade and clipboard I could not wait between each of us for breakfast to eat them

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 58 a lean doe nine stories stoops to nibble weeds over Times Square from my lawn a maid folds sheets I douse the headlights with her eyes closed in favor of the moon singing in Chinese a purple flower subway car peeks out from the green my brother and I of my garden double check I reach slowly that it’s empty and pull the weed at last before doing pull-ups electric night ~New York City, New York, USA beams from headlights —reflections from the frozen eyes hiking mount Rainier of a deer into mine winter is slow to leave my first snowball a hungry cloud burns my hand nibbles the moon in June I fall asleep to electric rain ~Southeast of Seattle, Washington, USA pouring from the speaker my father’s attic holds its hot breath —a photograph of me fishing with a dead uncle the grass pales thirsty under a clear sky Ernesto P. Santiago flies circle a forgotten trash bag its sleek black shining the “nine-dash line”, and yet another dash Wallace Stevens —Spratly Islands, sends his blackbird my eyes wide as skies to taunt me as I read “The Iliad” its shadow warbles just beneath my pen August full moon ~Florida, USA at the Athens Acropolis, wandering bards— I surround myself with in Central Park patience to lift me higher October wind spreads leaves in waves ~Greece a homeless woman sketches deciduous branches

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 59 παλιά κιθάρα— Zoe Savina μια σκιά τα δάκτυλα το μπράτσο γυμνό Constantine Fourakis, Greek-English μ’ ένα πουλί τατουάζ Translator γλυκά να τραγουδά

an old guitar, θα ‘θελα κάτι a shadow of ﬁngers που να μην με προδίδει the arm is naked Θεός ή φίλος with a tattooed bird αγάπη να μην είναι twittering sweetly . . . και κλαίω τις προδοσίες . . . ~Greece I’d like something that will not betray me, a God or friend, yet, love it may not be and I mourn betrayals

κομμένο ρόδι μικρό σπουργίτι τσιμπά . . . κόκκινο στόμα —κι άλλοι το αναζητούν για της χρονιάς το γούρι! Geoffrey Winch

a cut pomegranate a small robin pecks on it clearly as the sea . . . a bright red mouth Blake saw Milton —sought by others too never envisioned for this year’s good luck! restaurant sailing-club beach-huts tennis-courts houses putting-green

~William Blake’s cottage, Felpham, West Sussex, UK πρώτο άνθισμα στην όχθη των χειλιών σου ουράνιο τόξο cofﬁn-lid ledger stones —μια απόσβεση θυμού with blazoned swords or crosses μ’ επτά μόλις χρώματα but no written legends: could be crusaders the ﬁrst blooming buried beneath this nave on the bank of your lips, a rainbow ~St Wilfrid’s Chapel, Church Norton, West Sussex, UK —an effacement of anger in only seven colours

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 60 Michael Dylan Welch Alexis Rotella continuing drizzle— In a Paris café in the ﬂood plain a white angora inside the Japanese dyke on a velvet cushion bales of hay rolled eating bits of ﬁlet just like Nebraska each dipped in cream.

~along the Mogawa River, near Gifu, Japan ~Paris, France

I’m a taxidermist The bell of the lily says the other man beside the priest in my rain-streaked shared cab— as he gives me too, my father says the driver his last rites.

~New York City, New York, USA ~Windber, Pennsylvania, USA up late the night before The sea has many ears our ﬂight to Japan— the old woman again I zip with deep and then unzip apron pockets our suitcase tells my brother and me.

~California, USA ~Rehobeth, Delaware, USA

Is Santa real I ask my uncle— as real as Jack Frost he says. Pat Geyer The child I was buttercups visits the old woman in sunshine, these little who lives by the creek cups of gold . . . as leeches suck bad blood i share a chalice of rain from her tumored arms. with my thirsty garden fairy ~Cairnbrook, Pennsylvania, USA ~USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 61 I trawl the birth records Eamonn O’Neill for my elder brother born dead would he have protected me would I now be whole my Ireland the lady asks what can I tell her— my born dead brother we have rivers was never talked about and we have dreams my mother of the secrets took to her grave so much of the unsaid we grow old in Ireland realising that our lives my younger brother could topple doesn’t talk to me the Church of Rome and I don’t talk to him this legacy of the unsaid is frightening at my age I begin to dream again of words suddenly there is tenderness in Ireland this anger amidst the fairy tales yet just for today I curse those who stole my soul these killers get close they shoot uncaring I read those pretty poems it’s all about the next fix as if pretty in Dublin makes you cry but I can dig deep to the darkness of the dead any night in the posh shop doorways our huddled homeless is this what it’s all about most people don’t give a shit this rawness in Dublin of the gut you turn out the light and there are only plastic flowers by the Liffey’s side the boardwalk junkies hell ~Dublin, Ireland he waits for a fix sure I’m already dead the fucks it to you anyway

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 62 Poetry and Melancholy: Jeffrey Woodward’s Another Garden

Reviewed by Charles Tarlton

Introduction of black is the key to the late intensity poem allows us to get over them, to stare into the of color, the foil for his generous palette . . . . (1) abyss symbolically and survive it.

The first four sections of Another Garden, a Dreams Deferred hundred pages or so, are made up of selections from Woodward’s tanka, tanka sequences, and It was the common perhaps even required tanka prose. These are in turn divided up into ambition of young American men of a certain four sections: A Deck of Cards, Partial Census, Blue generation to defy convention and devote Flag, and The Simple News. A fifth and final themselves to the bohemia of Art—poetry, section, Lagniappe, contains two influential essays novels, and paintings for their own sake, made in by Woodward and an interview with Woodward poverty, on drugs, or as expressions of social and conducted by Claire Everett. All three of these sexual alienation. Everyone can readily identify prose pieces deal with Woodward’s views of the icons of this dream—Salinger and Vonnegut, history and future of tanka and tanka prose in Eliot and Ginsburg, Rothko and Motherwell. English. I will consider the poetry first and then But, for every aspiring young talent who achieved at the end turn briefly to the critical writings. artistic success in this mode, there were thousands more for whom the dream fizzled and they had waste places and disturbed sites to drop the show and earn a living. Many of Woodward’s poems zero in on this Right across the poems in Another Garden we storyline. There is the young man posed in can detect a persistent underlying rhythm of romantic garb, armed with a book of poetry, and melancholy. There are poems about faded youth, his head filled with the artistic heroics of about lost and faithless love, about dashed hopes Rimbaud, who has to admit to himself and us and dreams; there are poems about lives ground (mixing Heraclitus and Kerouac) that “no one down by misfortune, failure, madness, death, steps twice onto the same road” (Photograph at 19). resignation, and routine, and there are poems In another context, while his contemporaries about regret and foreboding. Here and there, the were choosing the way of economic success, the poet musters up brief moments of ironic voice of the poem “squandered the fortune of optimism in which he takes a stand for hope or my youth—on the luxury of reciting aloud even happiness against these tendencies, but like another man’s finely-tuned phrase or praising the stick writing on the beach, the waves of fatalism harmony of another man’s palette” (Halo). But, it wash up again to all but erase these. is not all idealism and puerile hope. Still, pathos in the tone and subject of the poems does not necessarily mean despair in the there must be a book act of poeticizing; a poet may write of misspent about this place youth or love betrayed but still do so in ways that with such counsels as allow poet, poem, and reader to find solace at may save me from the lonely another level. Viewed in this way, the poetic act is fall of a winter’s night an example of what Kenneth Burke called— “equipment for living.” Facing pain, sadness, or In another tanka prose, Woodward celebrates fear through the language and structure of the the Chinese poet Tao Qian, “who chose the rudeness of the common country path over the

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 63 sophisticated corridor of imperial preferment, she lies on her back the patient poverty of studious seclusion over the in the cool grass awhile ready riches of a busy courtier’s life” (Peach a winding stream Blossom Spring). Tao Qian’s poem of the same nearby parallel title, a utopian fantasy of a daydreaming a cloud in the sky fisherman, betrays a common longing, “the same today and yesterday.” my taste inclined through a long dry season in a time of war to stone and water . . . I too would flee here but now it is there, for love, peach blossoms in the tangles of your hair scatter and color a villager’s white hair But such moments of ardor are rhythmically counterpoised by darker sentiments like this— * * * though the mayfly I too would sit may not live to with the ancient ones love tomorrow for a time in loving tonight he in the delicate shade outlives your vow of peach blossoms or this one, even more bitterly— Peach blossoms here symbolize leaving the world behind in the pursuit of Art, but tellingly, lying on her side Woodward puts them in a daydream, like the pretty chin propped up attitudes struck by the self-conscious youths in her hand she perched above the river in Woodberry Taver n, who looks girlishly innocent drink tequila neat, and “speak of Velásquez as if and yet she lies he were one of our crew” (Woodberry Tavern). The young poet who looks out from these These short bitter lamentations on false love, recollections is, of course, long gone. He exists betrayal, and loneliness recur right across the now only in Woodward’s artfully rendered text, like currants in a scone (so that you get one nostalgia as a green and hopeful spirit whose in almost every bite). Here is one last example— future was, when these snapshots were taken, unknown. Woodward leaves it there, and does long incised upon not drag that youth’s precise fate into the picture, an upright slate of stone as if he meant to preserve that innocence. the now illegible but once familiar name through a withered garden of one left here alone

But, there is another voice in these poems, an Not only does this theme of lost or betrayed older and wiser voice that is not so green, a love recur regularly in Woodward’s individual bruised voice that talks almost wholly in tanka, it is also the central focus of three of his pessimistic terms about—love—as a tug-of-war major tanka prose—Souvenir, Venetian Blinds, and between fond, ﬂeeting, and sexy memories, on Morro Bay. Crucially positioned as these works are the one hand, and a residuum of heartbreak, on at the beginning, the middle, and the end of the the other. Here are some scattered small poetry in this book, they remind us of the central examples of the former— importance here of the pathos surrounding

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 64 physical love. They demand and will reward a And then, reversing the more sanguine logic of closer look. the tanka prose, The Silence that Inhabits Houses, In Souvenir Woodward has constructed a about Matisse’s painting of a room in which the nearly perfect tanka envelope—one tanka, a bit color black is featured and in which bleak faceless of prose, and another tanka. In the ﬁrst tanka the readers gaze upon a wordless book, the Venetian poet looks up to catch an adventitious glimpse of blinds here are drawn to shut out the items a girl in a popular pub— present in both poems, the “royal palm and seaside view.” Though closed, the blinds do not light falls from her hair block everything, but— onto a gold necklace and lapis lazuli let the midday light and palm a carafe’s close shadow pass through to stripe of cerulean blue peach and green a satin sheet and sleeping woman too Directly, this reminds the poet of someone— “you in high summer here at my side your But the woman who was— eastern city far behind.” But the poet is disturbed by the vision and abruptly leaves “that nakedly there shimmering aura where it lingers with an before admirer about a corner table.” Nevertheless, the “shadow” of the remembered “you” dogs the is now fully clothed and— poet out into the darkness of October, “into a sudden evening into a windy street.” the interior We are set up, at this point, for some further intimately poignant revelations: what is so disturbing? we ebbs away want to know. The poet immediately obliges with with the click of her heels this closing tanka. with the tide of the bay

if I turn back now And, then she is gone, because erotic suggestion, and look to the east as Woodward hints in another tanka prose also the heavens blacken containing disturbing blank faces (this time a clock’s), is consubstantial with the ebbing away of A setting of dire intonation if ever there was one; “the primal tidal sway” (The Black Clock). and then we get this— Casual liaisons rise up to frustrate the longing for real love in the tanka prose, Morro Bay, when where tonight you lie at ease the poet wakes through “the slit of my rum- beside another. soaked eyes and stare[s] offshore past the stranger whose satin robe parts innocently as she tosses A second, seedier narrative can be found in back her platinum pageboy with bangs and I the tanka sequence—Venetian Blinds. Love affairs taste the salt in the air.” And, here comes the tide that begin in “a rented room / with a single again— window” offer, perhaps, a ﬂeeting ecstasy, but seldom real happiness. The interior of the room a seaworthy trawler delivers a temporary “intimacy,” yes, but there is called from night something foreboding in these tanka lines— ﬁshing to port rolls with a billow her high heels click in the morning glare a door clicks to

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 65 Lest we imagine the scene here to be more In the space remaining I would like to pursue genteel than previous assignations, the poet this last thread by an examination of three of quickly disabuses us. “Somewhere between Woodward’s tanka prose: Tor House, Needles by midnight and dawn,” he discloses at the end, “I Night, and Seamen’s Bethel, New Bedford, each dark misplaced her name. She did not ask me and I and bleak in its own way. did not tell her mine” (Morro Bay). In Tor House Woodward recounts a visit to We can perhaps treat this one last tanka as a Robinson Jeffers’s stone house in Carmel, summary of the Woodwardian outlook on the California. A sad, inevitable, and deterministic transience of love— outlook saturates the poem, although to be strictly honest, it is not said to be Woodward’s I did not flinch but view so much as Jeffers’s—“man will be blotted closely weighed her every word out, the blithe earth die.”(2) Jeffers is depicted as and only then walked out building Tor House, his stone house-edifice of as I’d walked in, alone granite boulders hauled with great effort from the through a withered garden beach against all odds. Then, ironically, we hear Jeffers’s own words again— Bleak, Disheartening Travelogues The square-limbed Roman letters once seaworthy, indeed, but Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain lately beached and left to rot Robinson Jeffers’s pessimism was not unfounded; Woodward’s choice of persons and places to in time his headland at Carmel was stuffed with “visit” in his tanka prose tends toward the the newer sort of expensive houses, about which desolate and the piteous. Not all of his poems James Tate has more recently written— eulogize bleakness, of course, many focus on more comforting topics—beauty and tenderness. your strange carbuncular creation, Still, the larger part of his attention is devoted to now rented to trillionaire non- stories of indigence, madness, dejection, literary folk from Pasadena. isolation, failure, and affliction. Listen to some Edged in on all sides by trilevel representative and general observations— pasteboard phantasms . . . . (3)

the grass is withered Woodward’s sympathetic lament turns back and every flower upon itself, though, as he seems to realize that he, of the field also the same as all the other tourists, has “come now their proud colors muted now to marvel at your handiwork, even now to rest muddied red, gray or brown their hands upon your stone.” The wear and tear that erodes whole civilizations, the inexorable the stunted pine grinding down by Time about which Jeffers had that I planted years ago waxed so philosophically has not in this case still stands there happened. The stones in the present still appear stooped over to be eternal, only the context has changed, has refusing to grow become urbanized, and in Woodward’s words, Jeffers is left only to lament his loss of “an like the weight of unbroken field of poppy and lupin.” The tanka a great stone to that finish this poem carry the dismal mood to the calloused hand the end— now stonily numb this winter sun

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 66 not far from the house and then this at the very end— I ﬁnd the wind-worn Monterey cypress and gray and scraggly through did you plant this one, the halo of your high-beams this gaunt one, this evergreen the trickster coyote

go, then, with the grain Needles “here” is surely not so much a place as a of this, your granite— stage or phase on an otherwise unspecified and, I see you there, a child perhaps, pointless journey. of the wind, of the tide . . . In some ways, I have saved the clearest and brother to a stone example of the melancholic tone of Woodward’s overall vision for last. Seamen’s Bethel, New Bedford, The tanka prose Needles by Night causes odd recounts Woodward’s visit to the chapel reverberations in me when I read it. I grew up in commemorating dead whalers and fishermen in San Bernardino County, California, where New Bedford, Massachusetts. Woodward mixes Needles, being on the California-Arizona border, history (the story of the Chapel and its dedication is the most eastern city. As boy and much later, I to the dangers of sailing) and literature (episodes have crossed and re-crossed that desert in all sorts by Melville from and about Moby Dick). of old and new cars. It is a remote and desolate Once the mood has been set by a brief (is it place in the day, eerie in the headlights of a car at original to our poet?) sea shanty, we learn of the night. “[t]hirty-one cenotaphs on the wall that name Woodward manages to give expression to all and number the men who did not dock again, at this in his repetition, at the beginning of each this port”—one fell to his death from the mast, prose passage and in the first following tanka, of one taken by a shark, one simply lost at sea. We the words “coming into Needles.” The learn in rapid succession that Melville was anticipation generated is then thwarted, of amazed at the “actual cannibals” hanging around course, because (as Gertrude Stein said about the town, “savages outright.” Oakland) “there is no there there.” You no more The dead sailors died for lamp oil, “dipped than come into Needles, then you are as quickly with whalers in the blood of their prey, the flesh out— and harpoon together cleansed.” In Ahab’s mad terms, as he baptizes the harpoon, “Ego non coming into Needles baptizo te in nomine patris,” he says, “sed nomine only to pass through diaboli.” Death at sea, Ahab’s madness, the and quickly moralism of Quaker merchants, all come into the wide desert together in the anathema of this chapel, of the night again dedicated to exactly what—a sailor’s dangerous With each of the poem’s “re-entries” we are: life and death, racial curiosity, moral and “at the end of a blistering day;” or “on the dusty religious posturing—“this salt-cured and seasick coattail of a bit of night wind and heat chapel?” lightning;” or “on the sly and under cover of The tanka prose concludes in bleak terms. darkness;” or, finally, “by way of the main street “The winter light of New England is constant 10:30 p.m. a digital bank clock remarks for the and pewter on the panes. I rise to take my leave record 112 Fahrenheit . . . .” The desolation of but the thirty-one tablets stay, the winding-sheet the desert at Needles is further reinforced by two of the wind unraveling below in the harbor.” dramatic images that punctuate the tanka— I’ve sat in this pew, then, and every hour or so the ghost not unpredictably far of tumbleweed floats on the road back from the pulpit . . .

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 67 I shut the chapel door, sleet that aims at slavish imitation of Japanese on the cobbles of Johhny Cake Hill models in subject and form. True tradition, it seems to me, can be deciphered only by We might end, then, with Father Mapple’s serious study of tanka literature and history, (Melville’s own creation) paean to gloom, delivered by the identification of those vital qualities in this very chapel, “Woe to him who seeks to that transcend generational change as well as pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed by an identification, on the negative side, of them into a gale!” capricious trends and stylistic mannerisms. In summing up, I want to bring forward one last tanka tucked away at the end of a section We must presume, of course (if only to be entitled “Resident Angel.” T h i s t a n k a logical), some limit which lyrical innovation summarizes for me the overall tone and cannot exceed without breaking its link to tanka sentiment of Another Garden. It is a gem. prose per se, but, luckily, no one now can say exactly what or where that limit lies (although, of no way to skip it course, some editors would like to chain tanka but I toss the stone and tanka prose to their own diffident and sidearm nonetheless mechanical restrictions). At the center of and listen to it clatter Woodward’s contribution in this connection is the across the frozen river idea that, whatever its origins, tanka prose has now been assimilated into Western poetry and is The poet resolved to encompass his experience in more or less free to follow where the poets writing this collection, no matter that the effort might it want to take it. Art not edict will dictate the reverberate in unexpected, harsh, and often bleak future of tanka prose; better, as it were, alive than caverns. dead. The push and pull between prose passage Coda: On Tanka Prose and five-line poem when set over against each other is always complicated. To prescribe any one Finally, Jeffrey Woodward’s Another Garden kind of relation here as more correct, as purer, or provides us with clear examples of his formal and more legitimate would stymie the potential pedagogical contributions to the promotion of flowering of the form. What I mean is this: tanka prose in the West. Appended to the poetry sometimes an effective tanka prose arises from is a section entitled, Lagniappe: Two Essays, One the harmony of the prose and the poem, from Interview, containing three seminal prose the derivation of one from the other; but other contributions by Woodward, each of which times it might as easily arise from a conflict displays his knowledge and erudition in the between them, from the spark generated by the history and exportation of Japanese poetic forms. two in unnatural proximity; and, finally, a These essays will appeal especially to poets powerful tanka prose might also grow out of far and readers curious about other forms of more oblique connections, as when, for example, widening, so to speak, the context surrounding the poet seeks to induce the poem by provoking the individual tanka poem, as in tanka sequences marginal, hidden, or anachronistic aspects of the and the like. But, there is a second and more prose to generate one or a series of more or less important thread in these essays that concerns dissonant tanka. Tanka prose can find inspiration the question of tanka prose in the history of not only from its Vermeers and Mozarts, but also literary genres. Here is Woodward at his best: from its equivalents of Cy Twombly and Philip Glass. Two temptations beset tanka. The first lies in Charles D. Tarlton an appeal to ossified “tradition,” in a San Francisco/Dublin misinterpretation or falsification of tanka January, 2014

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 68 Notes pleasantries to dense poems about life, death and everything in between. (1) Jeffrey Woodward, Another Garden (Detroit: The tanka present a refreshing variety of Tournesol Books, 2013) Pp. 13-178. content and one is drawn to the honesty and (2) To the Stone-Cutters immediacy of his thoughts and observations. The Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated title is appropriate, not only in a metaphorical Challengers of oblivion sense but also because the tanka refer specifically Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records to a year in the life of the poet beginning from fall down, the cold and dreary month of January and The square-limbed Roman letters continuing until the following January. Each Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well tanka appears on a monthly basis on the day on Builds his monument mockingly; which it was written. For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, In these tanka images of processes in nature the brave sun and of the natural world are analogues of Die blind and blacken to the heart: feelings and intuitions which cannot be expressed Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and in any other way. Descriptions of the scenes, the pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems. birds, the water, the plants, set the mood and 1924 measure the emotions. Images and the language (3) “Failed Tribute to the Stonemason of Tor that contains them evoke happiness, love, sex, House,” Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems (1991). pain, joy, sadness and loss. Perhaps one has to shift into another gear to read this poetry, with its quiet, confident rhythm that links the poet to the world known and unknown. Sometimes the tanka are presented in a traditional juxtaposition of human and natural elements, as in the first tanka:

a fresh leaf white in the winter January, A Tanka Diary of a new year; by M. Kei it seems a shame to mar it with words

Reviewed by Patricia Prime Just as effective are those tanka which are a form of analyzing what will happen after we are January: A Tanka Diary by M. Kei dead and gone: Keibooks, Perryville, Maryland, USA, 2013 $US 18.00. when the world of men is gone, Available from Amazon as a Kindle e-book for who will scatter $US 5.00. the ashes of our existence, who will place the memorial M. Kei is a distinguished author, poet and of our dying? editor of Atlas Poetica. His latest poetic offering, January: A Tanka Diary, is a collection of 640 tanka The authentic voice of the poet can be heard of which 220 are unpublished. The rest have in many of the poems, including those that seem been collected from the tanka he has written and to come wholly from nature: published in many venues. Finely articulated, the poems range from resonant lyricism to breezy

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 69 ﬁrst birdsong of the year my son and I somewhere, crawl through the bilge amid all the brown gloom, of an old wooden boat, a small life is painting the Copperkote happy to greet the day for another ﬁfty years

This collection of interwoven poems in The poet takes a long slow plunge down which the ‘subject’ is simultaneously created and memory lane and comes up with some truly dismantled, placed and complicated by the memorable lines: “even the grackles / have lost tanka’s self-conscious attention to perception, to their luster”; “her third eye /shining at the the constructing of images and therefore to the world”; “Mardi Gras beads rattle / against the status of a work of art in its contemplation, is lamp.” From his children to his passion for masterful. sailing, Kei moves sure-footedly. One deft tanka M. Kei is a major tanka poet. His follows another and we are left with the craftsmanship is impressive, language honed to impression of a sequence of finely honed poems. the instrument of his intellect, wit and observations. Occasionally he lets us into his Kei can be moving and intimate: closely-guarded inner sanctuary, as much by implication as by direct words: waking the same time throwing away as always, old papers, this first day of I found a love letter— being unemployed I vaguely recall that boy-man and he plies his craft honestly and precisely. He possesses a poetic language that circles through In the following minimalist tanka, he time and place, picking up the rhythms of life as comments on his passion for the sea, his sailing it goes. His poems are full of stories: life on and career and the loss when he has to give it up: off the sea, writing, listening to music, reading, watching the birds, friendships and loss. There is I miss the boat also an abiding sense of longing and belonging crave it which transcends the minimalism of the five-line the water poems. The epiphanies Kei uncovers in his the herons journey through the year derive from and the world illuminations that are redolent of the poet’s awakenings to life and all its vicissitudes. Kei also addresses the everyday life and companionship of his children in these two beautiful tanka:

leaning on the windowsill, my daughter helps me count white-throated sparrows

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 70 A Rumination on M. Kei’s January, A Tanka Diary

Reviewed by Jeffrey Harpeng

My youngest grandchild offers me a fake a fresh leaf flower to sniff while the other sets up the white in the winter backgammon board next to the computer. It is of a new year; seven o’clock on a Saturday morning and in this it seems a shame scene backgammon girl says “Granddad, you’re to mar it with words just sitting in front of the computer.” That’s how she sums up writing and reviewing. To say “it seems a shame” might have told the There are flavours, scats, scents and plain moment it was composed, how the thunder telling of the distracted life in M. Kei’s writing. grumbled and the pale lightning flickered, but I Rather than being a light bulb connected to the found this small conceit more and more mains, the book measures a year as a lightning inappropriate as I read and reread, tracked and rod out in the storm. backtracked my way through the year. “Throw double six and you move four pieces Apparently M. Kei soon overcame shame, for six places, or two pieces twelve,” I say to my there are twenty tanka set down for January 1. granddaughter, “but you can’t use it if the other For myself, I bookmarked the following as my player has two or more pieces where you want to opener. go, and before you do anything you have to get that piece back on the board.” And so goes a cold it is, loose headed view of composing tanka. and colder still, M. Kei has garnered, gathered and preened a this dawn in two hundred and seventy page day-book-worth of a new year brief phrasings in praise of the fleeting, two in an old house hundred and seventy pages of secular pieties and ruminations on the repetitions that paint the The echoing cold, colder, old, adds layers of fading canvas of permanence. chill, and frames still. It becomes a quiet point in The tanka in M. Kei’s January, A Tanka Diary deep time, and the whole poem is resonant with are alive with the small and difficult finesses of a petite poverty. It seems more the measure of relationship and affection, with the awkward the day and an appropriate place to write away gravity of sexuality, they are proud with a sacred from. relationship with boats and open water, they are M. Kei’s forte, as a composer of brevities, is to attentive to the small, fine graces of day to day find the marvellous in the mundane, to make the life with his children, and in woodland rambles mundane marvellous, to assign just-so he and the world give and take account and tell phraseology. Here he turned his subject into a the toll of things passing away in each other. He meditation, into a spell. writes ever alert to the craft, the craftiness of tanka, and its possessive, obsessive heritage. going to the funeral The diary year begins with a fresh leaf, with a it snows a little in Illinois; small conceit. In its whiteness the leaf finds coming home commonality with the winter; it is an exotic from the funeral, literary foliage. it snows a little in Illinois

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 71 Or borrowing a quill from Dickens, he can that is as it should be, for in this ‘another summer’ is show suffering, already known. ‘another Sunday worshiping in the cathedral of the Chesapeake’ and summer is seeping into wood, the hungry wood that is the pew in this great cathedral of the poor man struggles water and wind and sky. Such sequences through the snow, accumulate delights to the individual tanka. baby in his arms, On other days, as a lightning rod, he was little girl in his footprints struck with a voltage of humour. It was carried to earth by the laconic and wry in his bones and He presents it as a mirror. Are you carried, brainwaves. His reports of those tingles and carrying or following? shocks are plays and monologues well suited to Not every tanka is iconic or an illumination. the elbow nudge time frame of tanka theatre. Some are the road travelled, the pages turned, to get to those spellbinding reverences, those another reveries. On occasion when I backtracked from a book of tanka tanka that captivated me, I found, as in the for review— following, the resounding of words echoing back sparrows chirping and forth multiplying relationships between one in the spring rain tanka and another. My grin teetered on becoming a smirk at the I didn’t know ‘just-so’ evocation of the jizz of reviewing. From he was dying when among my sparrow chirping thoughts I hope I I stood on have told you something meaningful or, better the quarterdeck of his still, have given a sense of the playful seriousness soon-to-be widowed ship January, A Tanka Diary provoked in me. To add a bit more cheek, I’d like to suggest an alternative pretty soon to the following tanka. Instead of perhaps, let that I’ll have to get up and line read ‘in a tanka’. Let this distortion be my go back to work ﬁnal litmus reading. another summer seeping into the wood of the boat a bit of green in a sidewalk crack— another Sunday perhaps spent worshipping in i have already the cathedral of the Chesapeake, been reincarnated this wooden boat the only pew

In this sequence, the ‘pretty soon’ of tanka two drew me back, to the ‘soon-to-be widowed’. With that rereading tanka one becomes as a daydream woken from. There is the haunting of a weariness-unto-death. We are neither at the beginning nor at the end. It is another summer seeping into the wood of the boat. Say those lines again, yet again and their phrasing is an oratorical piety, another summer seeping, a joy, sanguine with the pity of all things passing. And

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 72 never Review : This Short Life : will I know Minimalist Tanka it, the sound of Reviewed by Joy McCall one hand clapping He already, long ago, realised that none of us This Short Life : Minimalist Tanka will ever know that sound—and yet all we sheep by Sanford Goldstein keep listening, wondering, while he sits outside Keibooks. 6x9”, pp, 162, print & ebook the fold, knowing. Sanford’s books are some of $15.00 USD / £10.00 GBP (print) the most valued things in my life. He is a true $5.00 USD /£ 4.00 GBP (Kindle) gentleman and a scholar—but more, he is the kind of man who is the best kind of friend. This I have loved Sanford Goldstein’s tanka since is a wonderful, intriguing book, made perfect by the ﬁrst book of his that I found in the late 70’s, the combined forces of my two favourite tanka This Tanka World. Each time a new Goldstein poets. I’m so happy it came to be. book came out, I bought it. His voice is like no other in the tanka world. I gave up trying to * * * emulate it decades ago. His translations sit on my bookshelves too. His books of tanka are dog- eared from travelling with me. Many of them are Mini-Review : circling smoke, inscribed from him and so they matter even more. He is as good a friend as he is a poet. The scattered bones two are inseparable. Sanford thought that Journeys Near and Far— Reviewed by Steve Wilkinson his recent collection—would be his last published book. He didn’t count on M. Kei being wise circling smoke, scattered bones enough to know there were far more tanka to be by Joy McCall published. I’m guessing, and hoping, that even Edited by M. Kei this present book will not be his last; the old man Keibooks, 6”x9”, pp 176, print & ebook still has so much to say. ISBN-13: 978-0615880006 He can still write tanka like no one else. $15.00 USD / £10.00 GBP (print) Tanka which seem simple but hold deep truths. $5.00 USD /£ 4.00 GBP (Kindle) Tanka that seem complex but go straight to the heart of things. Sanford writes honest, modest To read Joy’s tanka is to walk with her in her poems, that tell the stories of his daily life, journey through life. Along the way you will following the example of his own hero, encounter joy and sorrow, loss and longing. You Takuboku. will encounter enigmatic characters from her life and her town. As I read her book my emotions were moved I spit on many levels. She succeeded in transporting me on tonight’s on a roller coaster ride of introspection and lonely manuever, meditation. On many occasions after reading I ﬂoss, particular poems I just sat there in the silence of I scribble poems my own thought, considering that which I had just read and how it related to my own world. Overall Joy’s book is a book of well honed He writes: tanka sequences that deserves its place on any bookshelf.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 73 Tanka in Three Lines?

Matsukaze

Since my return to tanka the earlier part of The three lined tanka is a form invented by this year (March 13th), the amount of tanka tanka poets of the Naturalist School, Shazenso Sha books I now own have doubled more than the (“Plaintain Society”) of which the top three tanka haiku books I possess, and I’ve voraciously poets were Wakayama Bokusui, Kubota Utsubo, consumed anything/everything related to Maeda Yugure. In Japan there are two branches ‘tankademics;’ in such a short time. Having of tanka: the Naturalist School and the Myojo studied different tanka composers both American (“Morning Star”) school. and Japanese, I realized there was one I hadn’t The Myojo school was founded by Yosano read, and that was Tawara Machi; author of Hiroshi (Tekkan) and his wife Yosano Akiko. The ‘Salad Anniversary.’ Myojo was marked by extreme romantic/ I purchased the Juliet Winters Carpenter symbolist images, lofty words and the frequent translation and in her translation of Ms. Machi’s use Japanese pillow-words, sometimes used in a tanka, Carpenter opted to translate each tanka modern fashion but still reminiscent of classical into a three lined stanza. In the book’s Afterword waka. The Naturalist School drew inspiration she stated: from everyday life, nature, and used colloquialisms and vernacular language. The Tanka are often described as “five-line” start of experimental lineation in tanka began poems, but this is misleading in several with Maeda Yugure who began writing tanka in respects—not least being the fact that they irregular lines as his reformation of the waka are almost always written in a single line in form. The mantle was taken up by the fourth Japanese. [. . .] In her second tanka major poet of the Naturalist School, Toki Akika collection, Toritate no tanka desu (”Fresh-picked (Zemmaro). Toki studied under a minor poet by tanka”), Tawara has experimented with the name of Kaneko Kun’en who was known to writing tanka in two and three lines of have flirted with nearly every tanka school in various lengths (although she claims that “in Japan and experimented with free tanka of her heart” she still thinks of tanka as a single irregular lengths. Kun’en was called a ‘city poet’ line). In my translations I have generally because of his style, though not very significant; adhered to a three-line format, and have he still boasted of an urbanity that went beyond aimed at brevity without attempting to most of the ‘country poets’ and Toki was duplicate syllable counts. attracted to Kun’en’s open nature. Around 1910, Toki published his first My interest was immediately piqued to not collection of tanka titled: Nakiwarai (“Smiling only discover the history of three lined tanka, IF Through the Tears”) which became a huge it existed; but to also try my own hand at shocker to the tanka community. The collection composing in that form as well as in five lines. was made up of 143 tanka all written in roman The history of the three lined form is discussed in letters and formatted in three lined stanzas! In the pages of Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of this, Zemmaro was working to free tanka from its the Modern Era—Poetry, Drama, Criticism by Donald old fossilized associations. Therefore his tanka Keene. I will give a brief history of the three- were extremely antithetical to the pervading lined tanka with the intent of encouraging tanka atmosphere of tanka collections and anthologies. composers to further their experimentation.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 74 Ishikawa Takuboku, a friend and fellow over a bowl of spaghetti, tanka composer, reviewed Zemmaro’s work steaming hot, we trade anecdotes calling him “Less like a tanka poet than the tanka about old cinema and rain poets of the day.” In his three lined tanka, Zemmaro still used classical language, but the material was drawn in the naturalist manner: over a bowl of spaghetti, from commonplace happenings and events. steaming hot, Zemmaro clung closely to the 31-morae/on we trade anecdotes tradition no matter how he divided up his tanka. about old cinema He invented the three line form and that same and rain form was later adopted by his friend, Takuboku, who so favored it that his only two collections were published in that form. In Takuboku’s Poems morning breakfast, to Eat, translated by Carl Sesar, he further gives a of blood oranges, a few dates, and talk bit of insight on rendering tanka into three lines. of the explosion of Pan Air flight 450 After reading this information it seemed to me that the three line tanka form is indeed more legitimate than most might think. Studying a bit morning breakfast, about tanka lineation from the Japanese of blood oranges, standpoint I would humbly submit that five lines a few dates; and talk is not what makes tanka, tanka; but its of the explosion musicality/rhythm, and its fiveness-five poetic of Pan Air flight 450 phrases/segments/thought-parts arranged in either one, two, three, four, or five lines. Of course I am not in any way advocating the seated— demise of the standard five line form, but I am with the dilettante on the floor listening saying that based on a few talks with M. Kei and to Forrester’s contralto sing Wolf further reading, it appears that the reason we in America compose tanka in five lines is based on the tanka’s fiveness or its five poetic phrases/ seated— segments. I humbly submit that in the way of with the dilettante experimentation, three lines should be an added on the floor listening variety to tanka composition and should be the to Forrester’s contralto decision of the tanka composer. This takes singing Wolf nothing away from tanka as a poetic genre, but I believe it adds a richness and vibrancy to an already ancient, enduring art form. The only i wish to do right— downside is that I don’t believe most of the tanka tonight i lie in bed under a man publications would be willing to accept tanka in 3 not my own and still feel sweet lines or any other derivative outside of five. Tanka in three lines would be one of many techniques/tools in the tool box of the tankaist. i wish to do right— Below for your consideration are a few of my tonight tanka in three lines, the first several accompanied i lie in bed under a man by their five line versions for comparison. not my own, and still feel sweet

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 75 waiting, a long wait So we should write it in two lines or three for my man’s blackness to return home— according to its rhythm. Some may criticize my man addicted to heroin us by saying this will destroy the rhythm of tanka itself. No matter. If the conventional rhythm has ceased to suit our mood, why washing rice grains— hesitate to change it? (Ishikawa, p. 47) i ain’t no man’s nigger, not even in the belly of racist America At this juncture in my tanka study, I do not have some intellectual/philosophical why these were composed in threes and not ﬁves. I simply Allende del Sol, Mexico sang them in threes. half factory, half tourist town where another elderly woman was murdered Works Cited the futon, Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of axis and crux of this unfriendly house— the Modern Era—Poetry, Drama, Criticism New York: each night he sits there nursing gin Columbia University Press, 1999. Machi, Tawara. Salad Anniversary; translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter New York: Kodansha International, 1990. my body a lean axe Ishikawa, Takuboku. Romaji and Sad Toys. Sanford has hacked its way through the night Goldstein & Seishi Shinoda, trans. West Lafayette, now morning, i stand poised in prayer IN: Purdue University, Press, 1977. and you Murasaki, did you sink into each phrase you penned? dressing for the journey once a professor of 15th century lit, four summers later a schizophrenic episode i move quietly, not to disturb the village slumbering in a hidden ravine of my soul over a Borodin string concerto peeling lettuce, my thoughts smell like plums

Take, for instance, the tanka. We have already been feeling it is somewhat inconvenient to write tanka in a single line.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 76 The Problem of Tanka : Deﬁnition and Differentiation

M. Kei

1. Introduction 2. Background

Anyone who reads tanka in English has Adapting tanka to English was no easy task. noticed a trend of the late 20th century that Although the earliest known publication of presents a unified and instantly recognizable English-language tanka occurred at the tail end form and content. Once known as “tanka spirit,” of the 19th century (Lafcadio Hearns’ translation this set of characteristics was widely accepted as and anthology, Japanese Lyrics, 1894), it was not at defining the form in English. Then, starting in all obvious how to render tanka into English. The 2006, with the publication of Modern English two major attempts of the early 20th century Tanka, a far more diverse genre of tanka began to were the tanka of Sadakichi Hartmann (1867– be published and continues to this day. With the 1944) and Jun Fujita (1888–1963). benefit of hindsight, it is possible to see that the Writing in Drifting Flowers of the Sea (1904), tanka of the late 20th century and early 21st Hartmann composed tanka in what is now called century was not a universal definition, but merely the “sanjuichi” form, from the Japanese word for a powerful vogue. I call it the “New Wave” “thirty-one.” His tanka were metered and because it departed in significant ways from the rhymed poems of thirty-one syllables in the tanka that had been previously published, and classic Japanese pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. Clearly because, like a tsunami, it overwhelmed the Hartmann, Japanese-born and well educated in previous approaches. Japanese and Western literature, conceived of Tanka embodying “tanka spirit” have been tanka as a formal verse, so he added the formal published both before and after the period of Western elements of meter and rhyme to his 1986–2005, but they did so in competition with a Japanese structure.2 His results are musical, but wide variety of other approaches. The period they aren’t good poetry. A single example of his before the New Wave was characterized by a work will suffice, highly diverse and experimental body of poetry, both in translation and by native English Like mist on the leas, speakers, and translations from languages other Fall gently, oh rain of spring than Japanese, such as Spanish1. Most of this On the orange trees previous body of literature was unknown to poets That to Una’s casement clings— and readers of the New Wave, and where known, Perchance she’ll hear the love-bird sing! frequently dismissed as unworthy and irrelevant. During the New Wave, tanka was something Sadakichi Hartmann3 magical and mysterious that only the hierophants of tanka could understand. Novices could learn Here we have an orange tree instead of a only by long toil at the knees of dead Japanese cherry tree, but the archaic, consciously poetic masters and their self-appointed acolytes. Little diction deliberately mimics the classical diction of attention was given to tanka in English, and those waka, as tanka was known before it was reformed who wanted to learn about tanka were constantly at the end of the 19th century. referred to classical and sometimes medieval Jun Fujita, publishing in Poetry Magazine from Japanese poets and editors—as if nothing had 1919–1929, left behind a small body of tanka happened in the intervening eight centuries! poetry and literary criticism. In 1922 he criticized Yone Noguchi, another Japanese North

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 77 American, for adopting the “carcass” but not the syllable lengths are closer to Japanese than “essence” of Japanese poetry4. In discussing a English; a sanjuichi written in Spanish or Italian poem about a waterfall, Fujita noted that doesn’t struggle to balance the Japanese Noguchi focussed on the roar of the waterfall aesthetics with the requirements of the form. rather than its silence. Fujita stated, This may be why tanka was readily taken up in Romanian8 and also had a vogue in Catalan.9 It To feel and create this poetic silence, and may be that the struggle for adaption and the through it to suggest the roar, the power, and resulting variety is part of the definition of tanka the majesty of the fall without describing it, is in English. What follows is a survey of numerous the mission of Japanese poets.5 methods and attempts to adapt tanka into English. Fujita’s own work embodies his principles. 3. The New Wave While you pant deliriously, I awake To the bold moon, 3.1 The Wind Five Folded School of Tanka The somber hills, The Wind Five Folded School of Tanka was And myself. one of the most prolific and influential schools of tanka to arise during the New Wave (1986–2005). Jun Fujita6 Led by Jane and Werner Reichhold, it had a major influence on poets of the period. An early The five poetic phrases of tanka have been adopter of the World Wide Web, the Reichholds formatted as a quatrain, no doubt to meet were able to disseminate their approach to a Western expectations of what a poem is supposed broad audience at a time when very few tanka to look like, but it is highly irregular: 11-4-4-3 venues attempted to do so. A tireless advocate for syllables. If the first line is broken into two, the women poets past and present, Jane Reichhold pattern becomes 8-3-4-4-3. Obviously, formal became the heroine of a generation. form, archaic poetic diction, and classical subjects Reichhold’s editorial vision is embodied in are not what Fujita conceived tanka to be. the multitude of publications which she and her Although Hartmann and Fujita are treating the husband wrote, edited, or published, including same subject, love (or at least passion), Fujita’s Lynx, a journal for linking poets, the Tanka Splendor approach is thoroughly modern. Award, numerous publications through her small Although many newcomers begin by writing press, AHA Books, and its online presence, AHA the sanjuichi form of tanka, they usually Poetry, as well as her own poetry and articles, but abandon it once they become more she only recently organized previously existing knowledgeable. Dr. Richard Gilbert’s article, articles into a series of lessons she calls the “Wind “Stalking the Wild Onji,”7 has been influential in Five Folded School of Tanka,” named after the explaining the difference between Japanese and The Wind Five Folded anthology, which she and her English metrics and the implications for prosody. husband co-edited and published in 1994. The problem of tanka is how to adapt a formal In her lessons, Reichhold describes tanka as: form into a language that simply does not behave like Japanese. Clearly, Hartmann’s solution is not • subjective (meaning you can add your satisfactory while Fujita’s solution gives good opinion, or that of anyone else) poems that don’t look like classical Japanese • emotional, opinionated, hot (often sensual), poems. and lyrical The quest to adapt tanka into English is • can discuss the most intimate body parts more arduous than for other European and functions languages. Romance languages adapt well to the • use an “elegant” language, and choose sanjuichi pattern because their own vowels and elevated euphemisms to cloak the unspeakable

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 78 • are made of sentence fragments and Examples can be found as far back as the phrases and should not read like a complete Man’yoshū. Likewise, numerous verse forms also sentence feature a turn, such as the sonnet, but that • in English, we use the line length to doesn’t mean a sonnet is also a tanka. indicate the length of the 5 or 7 sound units A few other writers were even stricter in their • are usually written completely in lower case definition of pivot, most notably Donna Ferrell, except for proper nouns who equated the pivot with the swing line (a line • can or don’t use some punctuation. that can be read either with what precedes or Sentence punctuation is really wrong what follows to form two coherent strophes), a • use the technique of showing an view she often espoused in postings to her online association, comparison or contrast between forum, “Mountain Home,” founded in 2000.14 images. • taking an image from nature and Modern waka looks to the best of the Court associating, comparing or contrasting with the tradition for examples of form and spirit, emotional situation of a person (it rains, I cry)10 and to our own experience for authenticity of expression. Just as classical waka came to The following tanka is an example of be defined by the uta, or “short poem,” Reichhold’s poetry from The Wind Five Folded, modern waka is primarily expressed in the five-line form familiar to readers of now as night contemporary tanka. Modern waka features everything returns to being a grammatical “pivot” similar to that of clotted moonlight classical poetry.15 stones sleep to be clocks pendled by tides they tick The loneliness Of a single firefly blinking Jane Reichhold11 In the gloaming; A rose slowly fades Reichhold has identified the pivot as the Into the darkness of everything. defining feature of tanka and stated her opinion Donna Ferrell16 unequivocally, “In fact, if anyone asked what makes a tanka a tanka, I would have to say that it The Modern Waka school of tanka did not 12 must have a pivot.” She cites ancient Japanese differ in significant ways from the Wind Five tanka with a bipartite structure in support of this, Folded School. The principle difference was a but defines “pivot” very loosely, allowing for narrow choice of models, explicitly classical, and “implied pivots.” especially Saigyō (1118–1190 AD). Mountain This is not born out by an examination of Home (Sankashu) was the name of Saigyō’s most either ancient or modern poetry or critical famous work. Ferrell did not publish any articles. writings. While a “turn” forming a contrast Her editorial vision was manifested through her between the upper and lower strophes of a own poetry and her commentary on poetry bipartite tanka is common, many tanka do not workshopped in the Mountain Home forum. She exhibit this. Many tanka do not even have a rarely published outside of her own forum, and bipartite structure. Professor Sanford Goldstein, the email list has not had any significant traffic as editor of Five Lines Down, wrote, since 2010.17 The notion that tanka have a bipartite I do not feel I would restrict tanka rhythms to structure is a common one, but the two-part this 3/2 approach. Why not a rhythm of 2/3 structure is not found in the oldest tanka: the 13 or 1/4 or even a rush of five lines down? famous wedding song of the god, Susano-o no Mikoto. The pattern in his tanka is the ancient

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 79 tripartite structure of the original tanka: line 1 Sanford Goldstein22 and 2 are a unit, line 3 and 4 are a unit, and line 5 is a unit. There is no “turn” here, but a steady Another of Reichhold’s points to be building of repeated elements with pleasing contested is that tanka must use elevated rhythm and alliteration. language and euphemism to cloak “unspeakable” subjects. This prohibition certainly applied to the Yakumo tatsu classical waka, but it does not apply to modern Izumo yaegaki tanka in Japanese. Tsumagomi ni Yaegaki tsukuru I leave my house Sono yaegaki o preoccupied with thoughts; a dog with saggy balls In eight-cloud-rising passes Izumo an eightfold fence on the street To enclose my wife An eightfold fence I build, Ai Akitsu23 And, oh, that eightfold fence!18

However, as editor Edwin Cranston notes, Dead of night this is the modern form of the poem. The earliest returning home exhausted Japanese poems were frequently irregular.19 Even from the interrogation— today tanka is often irregular.20 Ultimately this my period begins to flow has led to the creation of gogyoshi, a five line like rage Japanese poem without any requirements regarding line length at all.21 Motoko Michiura24 Aside from structure, the assertion by Reichhold that tanka juxtapose nature and Menstruation, interrogation, canine genitalia, emotion must be contested. This is a common and other “unspeakable” subjects do not appear technique in contemporary Anglophone tanka, in either the Wind Five Folded or Modern Waka and it has antecedents in Japanese classical tanka, schools of tanka, not even cloaked in euphemism. but is not a requirement. Case in point, the works However, in the early 21st century have we of Sanford Goldstein do not adhere to this started to see taboo-breaking tanka in English. prescription. Goldstein, a retired English professor who pursued a second career teaching there’s always a monkey in Japan, has translated (along with his partners) beating off at the zoo— numerous works of modern Japanese literature, school boys laugh, including the major tanka poets, such as Yosano the facts of life not fitting Akiko, Masaoka Shiki, Ishikawa Takuboku, and into the teacher’s plan Saitō Mokichi. Goldstein has been writing and publishing his own tanka in English since the Bob Lucky25 1960s. His approach to tanka is very different from either the Wind Five Folded or Modern The aesthetic espoused by Jane Reichhold is Waka schools. miyabi, literally “courtly beauty.” In other words, another poetry considered to be in good taste by the Father’s day culture and aesthetics of the Imperial court of I did the Heian period (794–1185 AD). It is frequently not visit coupled with fūryū, “elegance,” as in Reichhold’s his grave points above. Father Neal Henry Lawrence,

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 80 Benedictine monk, priest, missionary, and tanka Orientalism. With the exception of Hartmann, poet, wrote, “Like Japanese tanka, tanka in Orientalism is an approach typically utilized by English must never be vulgar, but always in good Western poets. taste.”26 Father Lawrence would probably not It is not surprising that novice poets respond approve of poems about dog testicles, monkey to the exotic content of tanka without masturbation, menstruation, or getting arrested. understanding the underlying principles, so it is Above and beyond that, Reichhold’s inevitable that newcomers to the field will characterization of tanka as “feminine” does a produce tanka about cherry blossoms, kimonos, real disservice. While it is true that women were and temples. However, some poets and editors successful tanka writers, we must also participate consciously and deliberately in acknowledge that the context in which they wrote Orientalism. They usually do so with the best was one dominated by men. All the editors of the intentions and the belief that they are Man’yoshū, Kokinwakashū, and Shinkokinwakashū accomplishing good in the world. were men, and men made up the majority of Case in point, Charles E. Tuttle, founder of tanka poets published in those anthologies. the publishing house that bears his name, did Likewise, the famous tanka poets of the Meiji excellent work publishing books in English on and Taisho periods that transformed waka into Japanese subjects. However, the anthology he tanka were largely male: Masaoka Shiki, Saitō edited in 1957, Japan : Theme and Variations, is rife Mokichi, Takuboku Ishikawa, Yosano Tekkan, with Orientalism. Tuttle tacitly admits as much, etc. Yosano Akiko shocked Japan by refusing the role of the demure and proper Japanese wife to The older images of dainty geisha, pagodas became Japan’s most famous tanka poet. To label and arched bridges, and jeweled landscapes tanka “feminine” ignores that women tanka poets yet remain—although often in bright new had to compete and succeed in a milieu contexts.27 dominated by men. That they did so makes their achievements even more impressive. A single example of “jeweled landscapes” will The elements stereotyped as “feminine” in suffice: tanka are emotional expressiveness and sensitivity to the natural and human environments. These The snow has fallen are the traits of good poets regardless of gender. on the black branches of plum It patronizes women to contrast them as and cherry; on all feminine, emotional and subjective, versus the hills the moon walks, but you objective, rational and masculine men. In tanka, still hide behind your tall screen. the full range of expression is open to all poets. Florida Watts Smyth28 3.2 Orientalism Orientalism is an aesthetic that has Smyth’s work is not devoid of merit, but it is influenced tanka in English from its origin. The predicated on the belief that tanka is written in a earliest tanka in English, by Sadakichi Hartmann pattern of 5-7-5-7-7 about classical Japanese (in Drifting Flowers of the Sea, 1904), are Orientalist subjects. She manages to pack the piece with in nature, embodying as they do a japonisme that Oriental tropes: snow, cherry trees, plum trees, represents an imaginary and Romanticized moon, and a Japanese screen, all while Japan. Given that Hartmann migrated from impersonating a courtly lover. Japan to the West when he was a teenager, it is Forty years later, a more sophisticated perhaps not surprising that he came to view treatment of the same theme is provided by Japanese poetry through Western eyes. All other Jeanne Emrich. Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans whose work I’m familiar with are devoid of

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 81 why do I feel the projection of an Oriental fantasy upon Asia so empty tonight? by Westerners, instead of seeing Asian people for moonlight streams in who they are.31 In addition, even when there is a at every window sincere desire to engage, care must be taken to and you await me avoid “tourist tanka,” by which we mean superﬁcial works that record the traveler’s Jeanne Emrich29 reactions to an exotic locale.

Emrich captures the classical trope of a Thai massage woman waiting for her lover by moonlight at the women’s prison— without resorting to any flagrantly Oriental she works on my feet motifs. At 4-4-5-5-5 syllables she doesn’t embody and plans her escape; either the 5-7-5-7-7 or short-long-short-long-long I can feel it formats, but what she has written is a very traditional tanka in subject matter and aesthetics. Bob Lucky32 If it were translated into Japanese, it would be entirely acceptable to the ladies and gentlemen of Although Lucky went as a tourist to the Heian court. She demonstrates that Japanese Thailand, his experience and thoughts go well aesthetics can be used without Orientalism. beyond the usual tourist venues. Dark, yet Let us consider how Japanese aesthetics humorous, trivial, yet troubling, he gives a could be applied to a different culture. John complex and ambiguous description of an Daleiden chose a Haitian theme: unexpected scene. Lucky’s poem exposes the power imbalance inherent between the Haitian woman, Westerner free to fantasize about exotic Oriental spawn of powerful genes— women and the Asian woman who has no choice work your spell but to endure a stranger projecting his fantasies use your voodoo fingers onto her, a literal prisoner at his feet. to enliven this old man 3.3 Zen, Introspection, and Realism John Daleiden30 A significant motivator of Orientalism during the New Wave was Asian spirituality. Zen in It is hard to imagine a subject that deviates particular and Buddhism in general became from the tanka norm as much as voodoo. In fact, popular in the West. Certainly religion influenced if anyone had suggested that there might be tanka in Japan, and religion of any sort is a something compatible between tanka and voodoo legitimate topic for tanka, but during the New before reading this poem, the reader could be Wave, a subset of tanka were appreciated not so forgiven for being skeptical. Daleiden uses the much for being poetry, but for being homilies melody of tanka, and he applies tanka aesthetics: from or homages to Eastern spirituality. compaction, evocative detail, suggestion, allusion, Classical tanka were influenced by Zen and subjectivity, and eroticism. Words like “Haitian,” Buddhism, sometimes in overt ways, but usually “spawn,” “spell,” and “voodoo” are heavily less so. The Zen master was supposed to be freighted with associations that amplify the poem detached from the suffering of the world, but beyond what is written on the page. ironically, that very detachment led to an In order to critique Orientalism, we must awareness of the transience of the world, which also be certain what it is not. Mention of Asian inspired feelings of pathos, which in turn became topics is not inherently Orientalist. Many people highly subjective tanka in which the feelings of travel or live in Asia and record their experiences the poet were the focus of the poem. This self- authentically. Orientalism, as per Edward Said, is

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 82 referential irony is depicted in the Buddhist monk The hunger for significance marks many Saigyō’s (1118–1190 AD) tanka, tanka poets. Most of them are ordinary people leading ordinary lives. They feel something is even someone missing and they fill it with themselves. This is free of passion as myself both bad and good. Good, when it teaches them feels sorrow: to value themselves and what they find around snipe rising from a marsh them, but bad when it entraps them in a literary at evening in autumn solipsism in which nothing outside the self and its sensations are of interest. As long as tanka poets Saigyō33 devote themselves to capturing “the moment,” they miss out on bigger topics and the growth The transience of the world, represented by that comes from grappling with things larger the Japanese term aware, the pity of things that than the self. pass away, is an integral part of Japanese Then again, is tanka really an adequate tool aesthetics as incorporated into Anglophone for dealing with large scale subject matter? Can it tanka. Although yūgen (mystery and depth) and cope, for example, with a world war? ma (negative space) have been championed by Robert Wilson and Denis M. Garrison where Hitler danced respectively as essential to understanding his little jig Japanese tanka, it is aware, along with miyabi, that outside Paris has had the most influence on tanka written in a mime and a monkey English. The two go hand in hand to form a on the spot where he stood genteel nostalgia that addresses everything from a broken heart to wrestling with cancer. The Michael McClintock36 refined approach dignifies subjects that might otherwise appear banal or trivial, and allows poets and readers to experience the value of Today at Pearl Harbor, ordinary things. At its best, it leads to personal From the shore line, epiphany . . . At highest tide, A gossamer mist, I am With the deepest stillness. I am not I am Hagino Matsuoka37 as I walk in & out of mist Yes. The reason that so few exist is not because tanka is inadequate, but because poets A. A. Marcoff34 are. Tanka’s art of implication enables the poet to incorporate far more into the poem than is Standing written on the page—but the poet has to believe On the wide desert, it is possible before he will even try. Before the silent wind, The trick to writing tanka is to see. Not just My body sank the self, but everything in the universe, large or Into nothingness small, near or distant, familiar or strange, and to value it. When this method of seeing is applied Fumiko Ogawa35 without reservation, it allows us to overcome our own limitations. The world is out there. As poets, . . . but at its worst, self-indulgent navel-gazing. all we need to do is report it. Lucille Nixon, the editor of Sounds from the Unknown, talks about this:

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 83 For example, for years each spring I had poets seemed more moved to write about the admired a certain wild flower, the horse mint, tribulations of the Japanese than their fellow for its lavender coloring, its fringed and citizens? There are two possible explanations: delicate outline, so fragile though balanced one is that everything having to do with Japan is on a stern and forbidding stem, but I had better—a point of view that naturally follows never noticed its tiny coral center. I couldn’t from the insistence that we must genuflect to believe that it was there when first I noticed ancient Japanese tanka masters; but the second is it, and so I looked at the many blossoms to that in 2005 and the years immediately after, the see if all were sent up from this roseate grip of mannered miyabi and personal subjectivity center, and sure enough, they were all the had not yet been broken. If all the tanka they had same, and had been for centuries, no doubt! I ever seen was about love, cherry blossoms, and just had not been able to see.38 [emphasis in Zen, how could tanka poets even begin to original] grapple with the horror that befell New Orleans? The Japanese American and Canadian poets The poets in Sounds from the Unknown (1963) of the mid-20th century grappled with big topics often record scenes of nature, but they also talk and succeeded. It was a manifesto for them. The about war, immigration, discrimination, Totsukuni tanka circle led by Tomari Yoshihiko internment, people of color, oil wells, factories, was composed of “realists as opposed to the stoves, and buses. romanticists or symbolists.”41 Lucille Nixon I scoured tanka literature for Hurricane directly linked realism to Masaoka Shiki and Katrina poems after the disaster in 2005, but modern American practice, but the generation of found nothing. In the years after, only a tiny non-Japanese poets immediately after her did not number of tanka appeared, such as: value Sounds from the Unknown. It was not until after the MET revolution of the 21st century (see Surrounded by detritus below) that tanka poets came to value this A fallen tree, wrecked car, anthology. One FEMA trailer The very different responses to Hurricane The house behind broken, Katrina and the triple disaster in Japan show that A string of Christmas lights glow. tanka in English has undergone significant development in the six years that separates the Mark Burgh39 two events. The frank depiction of destruction and human suffering is no longer taboo. By contrast, there was an outpouring of poems in the aftermath of the triple disaster in Japan in 4. Destabilization of Tanka Assumptions 2011. 4.1 Modern English Tanka Dosimeters The publication of the journal Modern English hanging from their necks Tanka (MET), beginning in 2006, destabilized the even when the children world of late 20th century tanka. Denis M. play tag with me Garrison, a long time poet and editor of short in the green park. form poetry, founded MET as a deliberate escape from the orthodoxies of tanka. In the inaugural Taro Aizu40 issue, Garrison wrote in his editorial,

It is understandable that Aizu, a former It’s time to write, read, critique, and study resident of Fukushima, would write about the our English tanka, per se, which presupposes disaster when he returned to visit his family who the skillful use of our living language rather still live there, but why is it that American tanka than some faux-Japanese-English [. . .]

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 84 Modern English Tanka is dedicated to content, Fire Pearls was the first of the post-New publishing and promoting fine English tanka Wave anthologies, the first thematic anthology, —both traditional and innovative verse of and the first sequenced anthology in English.43 high quality—in order to assimilate the best The only previous book length sequence was Jun of the Japanese uta/waka/tanka genres into Fujita’s Tanka : Poems in Exile (1923), although a continuously developing English short verse there were some chapbooks, such as Goldstein’s tradition. [ . . .] It is not the goal of Modern At the Hut of the Small Mind.44 Prior to Fire Pearls, English Tanka to either authoritatively define anthologies were usually organized alphabetically English tanka or sponsor any particular by poet’s name. Fire Pearls divided nearly four formula or template.42 hundred poems into five seasonal categories. Within each category, poems were sequenced to For the next three years, an outpouring of create relationships. tanka of all kinds filled the 250 pages of each Fire Pearls was followed by a series of issue of Modern English Tanka (MET) four times a anthologies published by MET Press, including year. Publishing approximately 500 poems per The Five Hole Flute (FHFL) (sequences), Landfall : volume, the roughly 6000 tanka published by Poetry of Place in Modern English Tanka (LNFL), Five MET provided an outlet for tanka that had Lines Down : A Landmark in English Tanka (FVLD) previously been kept in drawers. One of the (an omnibus of the journal), The Tanka Prose frequent contributors was Sanford Goldstein, the Anthology (TKPA), The Ash Moon Anthology : Poems master of English-language tanka. Although he on Aging in Modern English Tanka (ASHM), had previously published several chapbooks and Streetlights : Poetry of Urban Life in Modern English was co-editor with Kenneth Tamemura of the Tanka (STLT), Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka, short-lived journal Five Lines Down, MET gave his Volumes 1–3 (TAK5:1–3) (TAK5:4 was published work a wide exposure that served to cement his by Keibooks), as well as collections by established reputation as the leading tanka poet working in and emerging poets. MET Press also brought out English. He wasn’t the only one. Several poets Jun Fujita : Tanka Pioneer, a collection of all of who couldn’t get published under the old regime Fujita’s poetry in one omnibus edition with an rocketed to prominence after publishing in MET. introduction that traces the establishment of Garrison didn’t stop there. He established tanka in English in the early 20th century. MET Modern English Tanka Press (MET Press) to Press also published Goldstein’s Four Decades on publish additional journals, collections and My Tanka Road, an omnibus of the master’s anthologies. The MET stable of journals previous hard to find chapbooks, Alexis Rotella’s included Modern Haiga : Graphic Poetry (MDHG); Lip Prints, and others. Prune Juice : A Journal of Senryu and Kyoka (PRUJ); Garrison also provided technical assistance Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Modern and mentoring to various poets, editors, and English Tanka (ATPO); Modern Haibun & Tanka small presses who were able to copy the method Prose (MHTP); Concise Delight Magazine of Short he pioneered to publish poetry: print-on-demand Poetry (CNDL); and Ambrosia : Journal of Fine (POD) publishing combined with online editions. Haiku. When health problems forced him to He demonstrated that having a free online curtail his commitment to poetry, Atlas Poetica and edition did not hurt print sales, but provided tens Prune Juice found new homes and continued of thousands of readers the opportunity to enjoy publishing in the hybrid print and online editions and learn about tanka. The print circulations of he pioneered. The other journals closed, and Anglophone tanka journals (with the exception of tanka was poorer for it. Japan’s The Tanka Journal (TTJ)) are minuscule, Another paradigm changer was the numbering only a few hundred subscribers. It is anthology Fire Pearls : Short Masterpieces of the the online journals and websites that collectively Human Heart (FRPL) published by Keibooks in reach as many as a hundred thousand readers a 2006. Edited without dogma as to form or year.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 85 In the ensuing years numerous projects have They laid out seven “essential guidelines for come to fruition in the hands of a variety of writing ‘Traditional Tanka in English’ in the ideal editors and poets, but covering those form,”47 which include but are not limited to a developments in depth will be deferred to this set syllable count of 19–31 English syllables, a set author’s History of Tanka in English. What is pattern of lines in the form of short-long-short- important is the sheer mass of MET Press long-long with an ideal syllable pattern of publication. It was not just a shot across the bow 3-5-3-5-5 but permitting minor variations, a stop of New Wave tanka—it was an entire broadside. to end each line (“five phrases on five lines”), and The challenge would not go unanswered. a strong fifth line that should not be shorter than Established journals were unwavering in their the others. They accepted various subjects and commitment to their editorial ideals, but they treatments with the exception of polemics or could not prevent new journals from being didactic works. founded, so they had to compete for readers and My own analysis of syllables in a tanka leads submissions from a much more diverse and me to believe that their proffered syllable count is demanding audience. Some of them folded. So too long to approximate the usual Japanese did some of the new venues. Blowback came rhythm. I recommend 17–26 syllables, but I from various quarters, sometimes from accept considerable variation. This is because the established poets who passed judgment, claiming English syllable is far more dynamic than a that not only were some poems not tanka, they Japanese unit of sound. “Radio diva” is five weren’t even poetry! Most of the criticism was syllables, but “stretched” is only one. informal via email discussion groups and similar Kozue Uzawa, a Japanese-Canadian tanka forums. On the other hand, some established poet, editor, and translator, recommends twenty poets, such as Alexis Rotella, who had been syllables. publishing Japaniform poetry since the 1970s, embraced the new possibilities. Rotella founded As for syllable counting, I personally like to Prune Juice : A Journal of Senryu and Kyoka precisely use about 20 English syllables because this because she wanted to “get things moving.”45 shortness is very close to Japaneses [sic] tanka. If you don’t like to count syllables, just 4.2 S-L-S-L-L as ‘Traditional’ Tanka count words. Use 10 ~ 15 words, or up to 20 The formal response came in the summer of words at maximum.48 2009 in the form of a jointly authored article by Amelia Fielden, Robert Wilson, and ironically, This was adopted and announced as editorial Denis M. Garrison. They published “A Definition policy for Gusts, the journal of Tanka Canada, in of the ideal form of traditional tanka written in issue 7, Spring/Summer, 2007. Uzawa, along English.” It appeared in both Wilson’s journal, with Amelia Fielden, edited and translated the Simply Haiku (SH), and in Garrison’s Modern highly regarded Ferris Wheel : 101 Modern and English Tanka (MET). Contemporary Tanka in 2006. Her own poetry reflects this preference for twenty syllables. While there are linguistic and orthographic differences between Japanese and English white pulp that cannot be fully resolved, we believe that of a baby pumpkin it is possible to follow the centuries-old waka/ no smell tanka formal poetic tradition to a substantial no taste, simply soft and meaningful degree. We do not seek to seeds not yet formed define nor deal with avant-garde innovations 49 based on tanka in this paper, nor do we seek Kozue Uzawa to restrain poetic experimentation by any poet.46 Saeko Ogi is a tanka poet and translator who was born in Japan. She currently lives in

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 86 Australia. In an interview with Guy Simser, she We can see the artificiality of this dictate describes tanka in English as commonly having a when it results in a mangled line for no good pattern of 3-4-3-4-4 syllables, or eighteen reason except to conform to the format. syllables total—less than the lower bound set by Wilson-Fielden-Garrison. When translating this moon English to Japanese, she renders them as watching her dance 5-7-5-7-7.50 Although Ogi provides no evidence on the in support of her contention that “most” tanka in shorelines as if English are 3-4-3-4-4 in pattern, that someone the stars exist who is a highly experienced poet and translator regards it as normative shows yet again that there Robert D. Wilson52 are legitimately varying opinions regarding proper form in English. Wilson isn’t usually as egregious as this, but Regardless of the various pronouncements it’s hard to find a better example of why it’s made, when we look at tanka as it is actually wrong to let the format dictate the line breaks. written by highly qualified and well-regarded The real poem is: poets, we see immense variation. Hypometric and hypermetric lines are common. For example, this moon Sanford Goldstein’s tanka range from twelve to watching her dance thirty-six syllables in length. Goldstein quotes on the shorelines Takuboku in an editorial in Five Lines Down, as if the stars exist Some may criticize us by saying this will destroy the rhythm of tanka itself. No matter. “As if ” can justify a line of its own, but “on If the conventional rhythm has ceased to suit the” cannot. The poem has been forced into our mood, why hesitate to change it? If the conformity with Wilson’s edict regarding S-L-S- limitations of thirty-one syllables is felt L-L. The arbitrary shape is an artifact of inconvenient, we should freely use lines with formatting and does not conform to units of extra syllables.51 prosody and meaning. Wilson prepended the SH edition of In fact, it is not entirely clear that the “Traditional tanka” with an introduction that Japanese count “syllables” at all, as per Richard was even longer than the article. He offered his Gilbert. That is why advocates of the own definition of tanka: “traditional” style have offered S-L-S-L-L as an alternative. The trouble is, short and long what? A 5 lined poem that makes use of breaks sound? printed line length? absolute or relative (cutting words: i.e., punctuation or ellipsis, length? whenever necessary), utilizes a meter similar Not only do English syllables differ in sound, to that found in Japanese tanka, makes use of they also differ in appearance. Examining the Japanese aesthetics, follows as much as formatting of numerous S-L-S-L-L tanka possible the S-L-S-L-L schemata, makes use suggests that the de facto definition of short and of juxtaposition as needed, and is not a haiku long has nothing to do with prosody but is an or senryu masquerading as a tanka such as a artifact of formatting. Thus numbers and five lined poem using one or two words per symbols are used for short lines that when spoken line.53 aloud are longer than their printed length, sometimes even longer than the poem’s “long” Wilson’s definition contradicts the paper he lines. co-authored. In particular, if the paper’s ideal for short lines is only three syllables, they must, of

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 87 necessity, be composed of one, two, or three poets and editors, including this author, disagreed words. Prohibiting lines of one or two words with it, and disagreed even with the notion that imposes an unreasonable restriction to the form, the form of tanka described qualifies as and indeed, Wilson cannot mean that because “traditional.” There is no “traditional tanka” in the two examples he offers each have lines English. A wide variety of adaptions have been composed of one or two words. Maybe what made over the decades and they are all valid Wilson meant is that a line should not be approaches. None enjoys consensus. Harking composed of one or two syllables, but that’s not back to Hartmann and Fujita, we can see that what he wrote. they are both “traditional” in the sense that their Wilson admires a poem by Carole MacRury, approaches have persisted over time and been followed by a variety of poets and editors. sleep-walking Neither of them conforms to the definition given through my childhood . . . in Wilson, Fielden, and Garrison. Both are far until I wake older and have the virtue not only of longevity, to forgive and kiss but of being created by poets who were native my dying father goodbye speakers of Japanese and well-educated in both Japanese and Western literature. In other words, Carole MacRury54 S-L-S-L-L is just one of many legitimate adaptions. “Sleep-walking” is a line composed of a single Translating tanka from Japanese to English is word that demonstrates why counting anything— no easy thing. An entire book is devoted to the words, syllables, or stresses—is a problematic way subject, Nakagawa Atsuo’s Tanka in English : In to compose tanka in English. Pursuit of World Tanka (1987, 1990). It gives The core of Wilson’s definition is the S-L-S- extensive attention to problems of structure and L-L format because the rest of the items are adaption, which in turn provides a number of optional. A five lined poem that uses breaks “as linguistically valid methods of translation. It needed” contradicts the recommended full stops logically follows that the same diverse methods in the “traditional” article. Likewise terms such are also legitimate methods for composing tanka as “a meter similar to that found in Japanese” in English. and “makes use of juxtaposition as needed” provide a lot of wiggle room. His definition boils 4.3 The Kyoka Challenge down to poem written in S-L-S-L-L with Beginning in 2006, kyoka was offered as an Japanese aesthetics. alternative outside the tasteful parameters of the Wilson’s own Simply Haiku is the only venue New Wave. Articles and poetry published in that implements his view of tanka. Of course MET stimulated interest. In 2006, a poem that is his editorial prerogative, but as long as his labeled “kyoka” appeared in Moonset, Volume 2:1, own publications are the only ones to embody it, Spring, 2006. Prior to that, two poems labeled it represents a personal point of view, not a “kyoka-style” were published in The Tanka definition. (Cattails also espouses S-L-S-L-L, but Anthology (2003). The Kyoka Mad Poems email has not yet published its first issue as of this list was founded as a workshop in 2006 and writing.) Gusts shares some of the concepts continues to this day. (Amelia Fielden served on the editorial In 2009, Robin Gill published Mad in committee at the time)55, but Gusts has its own Translation, a massive compendium of kyoka distinctive editorial voice. Editor Kozue Uzawa’s translated from the Japanese, the first and only of preference for shorter tanka results in a lighter, its sort. It was followed by the Mad in Translation suppler tanka. Reader, featuring a selection from the original. As soon as the “traditional” definition Prior to that, the Metropolitan Museum of Art appeared, it was roundly challenged. Numerous and Viking Press translated and published two

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 88 kyoka books illustrated by Utamaro, the famous for Children,” a special feature online. In spite of woodblock print artist, A Chorus of Birds (1981) the name, a number of the poems were kyoka and Songs of the Garden (1984). They circulated and exhibited a playfulness of language not often principally among art lovers, not tanka poets. found in tanka. In 2012, Pieces of Her Mind : Kyoka was also mentioned in some of the Women Find Their Voices in Centuries Old Forms, scholarly anthologies, such as those by Donald edited by Alvin Thomas Ethington, appeared. It Keene. featured haiga, senryu, and kyoka by women. The kyoka below from Mad in Translation is an Japanese American poets had been writing example of how kyoka could parody the classical tanka on humorous or even vulgar subject matter waka. for years.

Though this body, I know, 秋晴の野路行きはて放ちたる屁の音乾けり明日 is a thing of no substance, も晴ならん must it fade, alas, so swiftly, I cross a field the fine autumn day and cut a fart 56 like a soundless fart? it sounds dry—tomorrow should be a fine day too

Alexis Rotella, well known for writing both Konoshima Kisaburo58 translated by David tanka and senryu, embraced kyoka. In 2008 she Callner published a collection of her own poetry, Looking for a Prince : A Collection of Senryu and Kyoka. She Anglophone advocates of kyoka saw it as an also founded Prune Juice : A Journal of Senryu and avenue to escape the mannerism of New Wave Kyoka (PRUJ) with its first issue appearing early in tanka, but although kyoka continues to appear, it 2009. It later spun off from MET Press and came remains a minority interest. It did not under the editorship of Liam Wilkinson, then revolutionize the tanka world. Nonetheless, Terri French. because tanka and kyoka have exactly the same Rotella is the best and most consistent poet form in Japanese but are different genres, it writing kyoka in English. Her poem below shares explicates why form alone is not a sufficient a sensibility with the kyoka above, but it is a definition for tanka. The existence of kyoka also thoroughly modern poem. points out that the content and style of Anglophone tanka are not yet as broad as Old man— advocates claim, although great strides have been first he asks made in recent years. to die, then for 4.4 The Gogyohka and Gogyoshi a ham sandwich. Alternatives In the early 1990s in Japan, Kusakabe Enta Alexis Rotella57 invented gogyohka, a five line poem derived from tanka. It scrapped the sanjuichi form and defined Also founded in 2008, Atlas Poetica : A Journal itself by writing short poems on five lines; of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka (ATPO) “gogyohka” simply means “five line poem.”59 (originally Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place Gogyohka consciously rejected tanka, but tanka in Modern English Tanka) expressly included kyoka aesthetics permeate the work published so far in in its submission guidelines. Thus two journals English. On the other hand, gogyohka came into existence in 2008 that saw kyoka as encourages sincerity of expression, so works that part of their editorial vision. In 2010, Richard would be considered naive or undeveloped by Stevenson published Windfall Apples : Tanka and English tanka readers are considered fresh and Kyoka. In 2011, Atlas Poetica published “25 Tanka direct when published as gogyohka. Starting in

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 89 1994, Enta established a Gogyohka Society in Twitter, but interest in gogyohka and gogyoshi Japan and began publishing the Gogyohka has waned among tanka poets. Journal.60 In 2006, his book Gogyohka was In 2011, Taro Aizu published his published in English. He held the first Gogyohka “Declaration of Gogyoshi”63 in the pages of Conference in 2008. In 2006, he started holding ATPO. Aizu embraced a broad view of the workshops in the United States. This was world’s five line forms of poetry, including followed by the formation of a Gogyohka Society Western and Eastern forms. He sought some sort for North America,61 and the establishment of of unification among them, although what he the Gogyohka Junction forum online. A handful envisioned was not exactly clear. He also of publications in English followed. republished his earlier book, The Lovely Earth, in Starting in about 2010, gogyohka caught the English translation. attention of tanka poets on Twitter. It became a The following poem appears in The Lovely fad with many experimenting with the form. The Earth and embodies the lack of adornment prized #gogyohka hashtag rapidly came to outnumber in gogyohka and gogyoshi. It resembles the the #tanka hashtag.62 Many poets tried gogyohka approach of poets in Sounds from the Unknown, and declared that it offered greater freedom than where kokoro (“heart,” i.e., sincerity) is valued, tanka. Although significant changes and expansions had occurred in the type of tanka Is my cat being published in English, the fascination that really dead? gogyohka held for tanka poets illustrates an I caress ongoing disaffection, even after those limits had her throat largely fallen away. very softly Disputes among poets erupted with a constant discussion about how to differentiate Aizu Taro64 gogyohka from tanka in English. Enta had not been aware of the indigenous English-language Gogyohka and gogyoshi failed to establish tanka movement before he began his workshops, any English-language journals, and aside from and it was difficult to distinguish gogyohka that the acceptance of the forms in ATPO, didn’t didn’t count sound units from contemporary make any inroads among existing journals or English-language tanka that didn’t count websites. Gogyohka and gogyoshi attracted the syllables. Some advocates made the “breath” the attention of far more poets than kyoka did, but it basis of the line for gogyohka, but it is not clear had even less impact on tanka. whether such arguments required the lines to be end-stopped. If so, this is a difference from tanka, 4.5 Small Issues but if not, there is no discernible difference. The This article has explored major developments two have come to an equivalent place via but omitted several smaller ones, such as the different routes. tankeme (2-3-2-3-3 beats), word tanka (one word Debate erupted between Taro Aizu, a former on each line for five lines), shaped tanka (a tanka student of gogyohka, and Enta. Aizu advocated arranged to form a shape, such as a cross or an even freer implementation of gogyohka. Enta circle), and other tanka adaptions. trademarked the word “gogyohka” in Japan. Experimentation continues. For example, When word of Enta’s trademark reached English Professor Stephen Carter, the well-known speakers, ATPO switched to using the public translator, has tried exploding tanka translations domain term “gogyoshi” in order to avoid on up to ten lines.65 Others, such as Marlene infringing on Enta’s trademark. A flurry erupted Mountain, have tried writing tanka in English on among Anglophone poets, but the term two lines. Matsukaze has been experimenting “gogyoshi” did not catch on with them. with three line and one line tanka. Edward Gogyohka continues to be a popular hashtag on Seidensticker advocated a two line tanka in

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 90 iambic pentameter.66 Most recently, Chase Fire profoundly radical position. Clearly, tanka has founded the online journal Skyline, a Journal of originated in Japan and has been going strong Modern and Experimental Tanka to provide a venue there for fourteen hundred years, but just as for tanka experimentation. (Skyline has not yet clearly, it is now written in scores of languages published an issue as of this writing.) Some have around the world. advocated the use of rhyme, quatrain, or other Defining tanka requires a “unified field methods. None of these smaller efforts has theory” that takes in all the various methods of garnered widespread interest or spawned any adaption, tradition, and innovation. The journals aside from Skyline. definition must account for all of tanka’s manifestations from ancient times to the present 4.6 Tanka As It Is in whatever language it appears. It cannot The most comprehensive attempt to survey depend on tautology or solipsism, but must be an tanka as it is found was the Tak e Fiv e anthology objective standard that any reader can apply. series. Each year for four years, the editorial team The pragmatic definition that has arisen read all tanka published in English to select from the work of many poets, editors, publishers, approximately three hundred poems for inclusion and readers is this: in an annual volume, along with several pieces of tanka prose and tanka sequences. In the final Tanka is a short lyric poem originally from year, the team read in excess of eighteen Japan composed of five poetic phrases thousand poems in more than a hundred and conventionally written on five lines in English. eighty venues.67 Media ranged from print journals to poet blogs to symphonic music to Additions and restrictions are proposed by chapbooks to videos and more. The four various parties to expand or contract the volumes, covering material published 2008–2011, definition, but the statement above is generally gives a valuable snapshot of tanka of the modern accepted as being part of tanka’s definition, even era. What emerges is a portrait of a highly when it is not accepted as the whole. diverse field of skilled poets working with a The reason why definition has been so variety of techniques to create poetry that is fraught is the fear that if a definition is accepted, supple, muscular, and insightful. No single it will result in the gatekeepers refusing to publish approach dominates. things that “aren’t really tanka.” This is a legitimate fear: editors have the right—and duty 5. Definition —to publish poetry that embodies their editorial vision. That means they have the right to turn The problem of tanka is how to define it. down poems that don’t adhere to their guidelines. Any definition must be broad enough to Fortunately, publication venues have multiplied to encompass tanka as it is written in English, the point that there are dozens available. Further, narrow enough to exclude its relatives, consistent print-on-demand and ebook technologies, online enough to show its Japanese roots, and flexible venues, and social media provide outlets where enough to permit innovation. All of the ideas anyone can publish anything. We live in an era of described above have merits and demerits, but almost perfect liberty for anyone who is willing to none has been universally adopted. learn some new technology. The reign of the Closeness to the Japanese original cannot be gatekeepers is over. the basis of authority in English-language tanka. On the other hand, distance from the Japanese is 6. Conclusion not the basis of authority, either. This apparently contradictory position can only be resolved if we If anyone can publish anything they wish, step back and realize that tanka is no longer a why do we even need a definition? Because Japanese literature. This may strike some as a definitions allow us to understand what we’re

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 91 talking about. Although it is fashionable to say we 10 All items on this list are verbatim from: Reichhold, don’t want to label our poetry, in truth, terms are Jane. ‘Lesson Seven Comparing Haiku with Tanka.’ handles that help us to pick up ideas and carry Wind Five Folded School of Tanka. Gualala, CA: AHA Poetry, 2011. Accessed 28 August 2011. generally conducted as an intuitive practice, it is actually a skill that can be studied, learned, and 11 Reichhold, Jane. Appears in Reichhold, Jane and enhanced, but only if we have an effective Werner, eds. Wind Five Folded : An Anthology of vocabulary. In short, understanding tanka better English-Language Tanka. Gualala, CA: AHA Books, makes for better poets, editors, and readers. 1994, p 159. 12 Reichhold, Jane. ‘Circling the Pivot Again.’ Lynx, a journal for linking poets. XXII: 1. Gualala, CA: Kei, M. A History of Tanka in English, Part 1 : The North AHABooks, February 2007. Keibooks, 2013. Accessed 18 March 2014. Lines Down: A Landmark in English Tanka. Baltimore, MD: MET Press, 2007, p 95. 2 Kei, M. ‘Introduction.’ Jun Fujita : Tanka Pioneer. Denis M. Garrison, ed. Baltimore, MD: MET Press, 14 Ferrell, Donna, moderator. Mountain-Home : A 2007. Modern Waka Workshop. Accessed 23 August 3 Hartmann, Sadakichi. Drifting Flowers of the Sea and 2012. Other Poems, self-published, 1904, p 10. Digitized 19 September 2005. Accessed 1 November 2007. 15 Ibid. groups.yahoo.com/group/Mountain-Home/ message/9361> Accessed 23 August 2012. 4 Fujita, Jun. ‘A Japanese Cosmopolite.’ Poetry Magazine. Chicago, IL. June 1922, pp. 162–164. 17 Ibid.

5 Ibid. 18 Cranston, Edwin A., ed. & trans. A Waka Anthology : Volume One : The Gem-Glistening Cup. Stanford, CA: 6 Garrison, Denis M., ed. Jun Fujita : Tanka Pioneer. Stanford University Press, 1993, p 7. Baltimore, MD: MET Press, 2007, p 43. 19 Ibid, p xviii. 7 Gilbert, Richard. “Stalking the Wild Onji : The Search for Current Linguistic Terms Used in 20 Gilbert, Richard. “Stalking the Wild Onji : The Japanese Poetry Circles.” AHAPoetry, undated. Search for Current Linguistic Terms Used in Japanese Poetry Circles.” AHAPoetry, undated. Accessed 20 October 2011. Accessed 20 October 2011. 8 Moldovan, Vasile, ed. ‘25 Romanian Tanka Poets in Romanian and English.’ Magdalena Dale, et al., 21 Aizu, Taro. “Declaration of Gogyoshi.” Atlas Poetica trans. Perryville, MD: Keibooks, 2010. Accessed 17 September 2012. 22 Goldstein, Sanford. In M. Kei et al, eds. Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 2. Baltimore, MD: 9 Dornaus, Margaret. ‘Carles Riba and Catalonian MET Press, 2010, p 143. Tanka.’ Atlas Poetica 10. Perryville, MD: Keibooks, Autumn, 2011, p 64–66. 23 Ai Akitsu. In Lowitz, Leza et al, eds. a long rainy season : haiku and tanka. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1994, p. 83.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 92 24 Motoko Michiura. Ibid, p. 103. 38 Nixon, Lucille. ‘Introduction.’ Sounds from the Unknown : A Collection of Japanese American Tanka. 25 Bob Lucky. In Modern English Tanka 1:4. Baltimore, Denver, CO: Alan Swallow, 1963, p xvi–xvii. MD: MET Press, Spring, 2007, p 109. 39 Burgh, Mark. In Atlas Poetica 10. Perryville, MD: 26 Lawrence, Father Neal, quote by Sanford Goldstein Keibooks, Autumn, 2011, p 34. in ‘From This Side of Five Lines Down.’ Five Lines Down : A Landmark of English Tanka, a Compilation of 40 Aizu, Taro. ‘Our Hometown : Fukushima, A All Issues 1994–1996. Denis M. Garrison, ed. Gogyoshibun.’ Atlas Poetica 12. Perryville, MD: Baltimore, MD: Modern English Tanka Press, 2007, Keibooks, Summer, 2012, p 9. p 20. 41 Nixon, Lucille. ‘Introduction.’ Sounds from the 27 Tuttle, Charles E. ‘Publisher’s Foreword.’ Japan : Unknown : A Collection of Japanese American Tanka. Theme and Variations. Rutland, VT & Tokyo, JP: Denver, CO: Alan Swallow, 1963, p xix. Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1957, p. xi. 42 Garrison, Denis M., ed. “I’ll Tell You About 28 Smyth, Florida Watts. ‘Festival of Spring.’ Tuttle, Onions.” Modern English Tanka 1:1. Baltimore, MD: Charles E., ed. Japan : Theme and Variations. Rutland, MET Press, Autumn, 2006, p. 1–3. VT & Tokyo, JP: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1957, p. 33. 43 Kei, M. ‘List of Tanka Anthologies.’ Atlas Poetica. Perryville, MD: Keibooks, 2013. Accessed 5 July 2013. Moon Tide : The Best of Tanka Splendor 1990–1999. Coinjock, NC: Clinging Vine Press, p. 55. 44 Goldstein, Sanford. At the Hut of the Small Mind. Gualala, CA: AHA Books, 1992. Accessed 30 Masterpieces of the Human Heart. Perryville, MD: June 2013. Keibooks, 2006, p. 131. 45 Rotella, Alexis. ‘Editor’s Note.’ Prune Juice : A Journal 31 Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage of Senryu and Kyoka 1. Baltimore, MD: MET Press, Books, 1979, pp 1–6. Winter, 2009. Accessed 20 October 2011. 32 Lucky, Bob. In Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 3. Perryville, MD: Keibooks, 2011, p. 49. 46 Fielden, Amelia; Denis M. Garrison, & Robert Wilson. “A Deﬁnition of the ideal form of 33 Saigyō. In ‘Snipe Rising from a Marsh.’ Rodney traditional tanka written in English.” Simply Haiku : Williams, ed. and trans. Atlas Poetica Special Features. A Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry 7:2. 2012. Summer, 2009. Accessed 20 October 2011. 34 Marcoff, A. A. In Kei, M. et al, eds. Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka, Vol. 2. Baltimore, MD: MET 47 Ibid. Press, p 121. 48 Uzawa, Kozue. ‘What is Tanka?’ Tanka Canada. 35 Ogawa, Fumiko. In Nixon, Lucille. Sounds from the Accessed 17 September 2012. Denver, CO: Alan Swallow, 1963, p 118. 49 In Gusts : Contemporary Tanka 13. Burnaby, BC: 36 McClintock, Michael. In Atlas Poetica, Vol. 1. Tanka Canada, Spring/Summer, 2012, p 15. Baltimore, MD: MET Press, p 58.

37 Matsuoka, Hagino. In Nixon, Lucille. ‘Introduction.’ Sounds from the Unknown : A Collection of Japanese American Tanka. Denver, CO: Alan Swallow, 1963, p 43.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 93 50 Ogi, Saeko. An Interview with Saeko Ogi, tanka poet and 61 ‘Mr. Enta Kusakabe, Founder.’ The Gogyohka Society. translator in Australia. Guy Simser, interviewer. Simply 14 April 2011. Accessed 14T06:58:34&ﬁrstName=Enta&lastName=Kusaka 17 September 2012. be>. Accessed 17 September 2012.

51 Ishikawa, Takuboku. Quoted in Goldstein, Sanford. 62 Kei, M. ‘The Topsy Turvy World of Micropoetry ‘From This Side of Five Lines Down.’ Five Lines on Twitter.’ Atlas Poetica 9. Summer, 2011, p 56. Down : A Landmark in English Tanka. Denis M. Garrison, ed. Baltimore, MD: MET Press, 2007, p 63 Aizu, Taro. ‘Declaration of Gogyoshi.’ Atlas Poetica 20. 10. Perryville, MD: Keibooks, Autumn, 2011, p 78.

52 Wilson, Robert D. A Lousy Mirror. 31 March 2012. 64 Aizu, Taro. The Lovely Earth. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Accessed 17 Enterprises, 2011, p 6. September 2012. 65 Carter, Stephen, ed. Unforgotten Dreams : Poems by the 53 Wilson, Robert. ‘Introduction to A Deﬁnition of the Zen Monk Shōtetsu. New York, NY: Columbia ideal form of traditional tanka written in English.’ University Press, 1997. Simply Haiku : A Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry 7:2. Summer, 2009. Lines Down: A Landmark in English Tanka. Baltimore, Accessed 20 October 2011. MD: MET Press, 2007, p 95.

54 MacRury, Carole. In Wilson, Robert. ‘Introduction 67 Kei, M. et al, eds. Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka, to A Deﬁnition of the ideal form of traditional Volume 4. Perryville, MD: Keibooks, 2012, p 10. tanka written in English.’ Simply Haiku : A Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry 7:2. Summer, 2009. Accessed 17 September 2012.

55 Fielden, Amelia. Gusts : Contemporary Tanka 5. Burnaby, BC: Tanka Canada, Spring/Summer, 2007, p 1.

56 Gill, Robin, trans. and ed. Mad in Translation. Key Biscayne, FL: Paraverse Press, 2009, p 455.

57 Ibid.

58 Konoshima, Kisaburo. David Callner, trans. Simply Haiku : A Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry, 7:1. Spring, 2009. Accessed 17 September 2012.

59 Enta, Kusakabe, ed. Gogyohka. (Second Edition) Matthew Lane & Elizabeth Phaire, trans. Tokyo, JP: Shisei-sha, 2009 [2006], p 20.

60 Ibid, p 21.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 94 1

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Atlas Poetica will publish short announcements in any the internees (she was herself interned during language up to 300 words in length on a space available basis. WW2), such as how Tomari Yoshihiko (her Announcements may be edited for brevity, clarity, grammar, or sensei), cut stencils by hand in order to publish any other reason. Send announcements in the body of an email to: [email protected]—do not send attachments. not just newsletters, but entire books of tanka while interned. * * * In addition to the history, Tana includes appendices of useful information, including a listing of American winners of the Imperial Tomoe Tana’s Poetry Contest from 1949 to 1984 with “History of Japanese translations of their poems, and Zaibei dōbō haykunin isshu / One Hundred Tanka by our Countrymen Tanka Poetry in America” in America, which had previously only been Published published in fragments in Japan. The anthology was the result of a poetry contest with 5000 (five Tomoe Tana (1913–1991) was an American thousand) tanka submitted. It was judged by a tanka poet, editor, and translator. Best known for trio of Japanese judges: Kubota Utsubo, Saitō editing and translating Sounds from the Unknown Mokichi, and Shaku Chakū. Readers of tanka with Lucille Nixon (1963), she had numerous will recognize Mokichi as one of the great accomplishments in the field of tanka poetry. A Japanese tanka poets of the modern era. member of the “Totsukuni” tanka circle of We thank Shibun Tana, Mrs. Tana’s son, California, she was also a winner of the Imperial who has granted permission to publish his Poetry Contest (1949), an editor, translator, mother’s master’s thesis online. Scanned and publisher, and scholar of tanka in America. In photocopied by Tina Nguyen, with an 1985 she obtained her master’s degree at San introduction by M. Kei, it is now available in the Jose State University. Resources section of the Atlas Poetica website. It Tana’s history covers the United States, can be accessed at: http://atlaspoetica.org/? Canada, and to a lesser extent, Brazil and South page_id=705 (Scroll down to ‘Tanka Articles.’) America. Pouring over tanka publications and Previously this extremely rare document Japanese language newspapers, Tana existed only in one official copy in the San Jose documented a large segment of tanka published State University Library, and in a handful of by people of Japanese descent in North America, photocopies and scans. Keibooks is proud to and to a lesser extent, non-Japanese poets. make this important document available to any Particularly compelling are her details of life for one interested in tanka in America.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 95 publier sur le site web de la revue les tankas qui Skyline Journal seront acceptés. Les tankas soumis ne doivent en Experimental Tanka aucun cas avoir été déjà publiés. Ils doivent être inédits et ne peuvent pas être soumis ailleurs. Established Les tankas écrits dans une langue autre que le français seront acceptés s’ils sont accompagnés Skyline is a bi-annual tanka publication with a par une traduction française. Les directeurs se focus on work with bold and experimental réservent le droit de faire des modifications des content, which might not be accepted in other poèmes traduits. Les soumissions devront être tanka publications. Some of the themes we like expédiées par courriel, et uniquement pendant la involve references to myths or the unreal, bold période de soumission qui s’étendra entre le 1er erotica, personification, religion, poems with et le 30 novembre 2013 pour une publication à la strong language, and even tanka that follow fin de janvier 2014. (Les soumissions reçues avant structural differences, such as three line tanka ou après cette date ne seront pas lues.) and one image tanka. À: [email protected] Objet: soumission tanka 2013 Main site: http://skylinetanka.webs.com/ Tous les tankas devront paraître dans le courriel même et non en pièce-jointe. * * * * * * Soumettre à Cirrus

APPEL À TANKA POUR LA REVUE A Solitary Woman Électronique CIRRUS: tankas de nos jours Published by

Maxianne Berger de Montréal, Canada et Pamela A. Babusci Mike Montreuil d’Ottawa, Canada lancent un appel à tanka, en vue de la publication d’une I am happy to announce that my second nouvelle revue électronique dédiée au tankas tanka book: A Solitary Woman has been contemporains. Le lancement du premier published. If you would like a signed copy, please numéro est prévu pour la ﬁn janvier 2014. send your request to me. The price for the US is Notre vision esthétique repose sur l’essence $15 plus $3 S&H; Canada $15 plus $3.50 S&H, du tanka – sa brièveté, sa légèreté et sa subtilité. Aust., NZ, England, Japan $15 plus 6.50 S&H. Nous cherchons des poèmes qui par leur simple Anybody can use Paypal if they desire, please just expression vont évoquer une réaction émotive add $1 extra to cover Paypal fees. I will have chez les lecteurs, et non des poèmes qui copies of my tanka book by Jan. 7th, but, copies expriment une émotion ou un sentiment en can be purchased now on Createspace. utilisant son nom abstrait. Nous préférons des Checks or International money orders made tankas où les liens entre les fragments qui out to: Pamela A. Babusci forment les vers restent ﬂuides: tout en évitant des listes d’épicerie, il n’est pas nécessaire de lier Pamela A. Babusci tous les vers de façon explicite quand la 244 Susan Lane Apt. B juxtaposition de fragments à elle seule peut en Rochester, NY 14616 USA établir le lien. Jusqu’à 5 tankas par poète peuvent être You can also, purchase my book at once at soumis. Pour chaque tanka, il est sous-entendu . que le/la poète en est l’auteur, qu’il ou elle détient tous les droits, et nous accorde le droit de

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 96 2014 One Man’s Maple Bright Stars, An Organic Moon: Call for Tanka Tanka Anthology, Submissions Call for Submissions

Send your best published tanka (please Complete Guidelines at: http:// provide publication credits) or new work and a atlaspoetica.org/?p=952 bio sketch (50 words max.) with the subject heading “Published or Unpublished Tanka, Your Bright Stars is an experimental project from Name, Submitted Date” to Chen-ou Liu, Blog Keibooks that will run for one calendar year Editor and Translator via email at (2014). As an anthology, it will publish both new [email protected] And place and socially published tanka (within certain your tanka directly in the body of the email. DO parameters) in as many volumes as can be filled NOT SEND ATTACHMENTS. with intriguing work. All volumes will be No more than 20 tanka per submission and published in 2014. As each volume fills, it will go no simultaneous submissions. And please wait for to press and subsequent submissions will be at least three months for another new submission. considered for the next volume. There is no Deadline: November 1, 2014. planned number of volumes: it will depend Please note that only those whose tanka are entirely on the quantity and quality of selected for publication will be notified within submissions. It will not follow a fixed schedule. three weeks, and that no other notification will be The content of the anthology and the press of sent out, so your works are automatically freed up other business will determine the schedule. after three weeks to submit elsewhere. Bright Stars focuses on the Japanese aesthetic The accepted tanka will be translated into of ‘akarui’—bright, light, illuminated, brilliant, Chinese and posted on NeverEnding Story and shiny, brassy, active, energetic, noisy, loud, happy, Twitter. Of them, the best 66 tanka will be drunk, passionate, wild, playful, vivid, and included in the anthology, which is scheduled to boundless. That doesn’t mean you can’t send us be published in June of 2015, and the poet whose dark poems—black is a color too—but it should tanka is chosen as the best tanka of the year will be an active darkness, not a hand wringing, be given a 3-page space to feature the tanka of genteelly sighing darkness. his/her choice. For those whose tanka are Experiments are welcome here. If you’ve included in the anthology, each will receive a written something and you’re afraid the standard copy of its e-book edition. tanka venues won’t consider it, send it here. We make no promises, but we’re open to new ideas. * * * To Submit Toolbox Passes Away Send up to 40 unpublished or socially published tanka to BrightStarsTanka@ gmail dot 21 March 2014, Newark, DE, USA. com. Toolbox, senior ship’s cat of the tall ship Kalmar Reading window: November 10, 2013 thru Nyckel, went to Fiddler’s Green. She frequently September 30, 2014. appeared in the tanka of M. Kei, including: Guidelines at: http://atlaspoetica.org/? p=952 do sailor cats dream of Fiddler’s Green Addendum: sedoka, mondo, and cherita where every day welcome. brings bowls of cream and slow-flying sparrows?

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 97 BIOGRAPHIES

Alenka Zorman is the former president of the C. William Hinderliter was born and raised in Haiku Club of Slovenia and editor of its journal Letni Phoenix, AZ. Though he is a Registered Hypnotist, he časi / Seasons. Her two haiku books Metulj na rami / prefers to spend his time writing poetry. His latest Butterﬂy on the Shoulder (2004) and Notranja osvoboditev / work can be seen in Frogpond, Prune Juice and Star*Line, Inner Liberation (2006) have been published in Slovenia to Kamesan’s World Haiku Anthology on War, Violence and and Macedonia. Her haiku and tanka also appear in Human Rights Violation. Slovenian literary journals and on-line journals. Carole Harrison combines her love of Alexander Jankiewicz was born and raised in photography, long distance walking and short form Chicago, IL, USA and currently lives in the United poetry. Her work has been published in Eucalypt, Atlas Arab Emirates with his wife and two daughters. Poetica, plus other anthologies and on-line pages. She lives in country Australia with her husband, Alexis Rotella has been writing haiku, senryu and surrounded by rainforest, a dairy farm and lots of tanka for 30 years. Her work has appeared local birds. internationally in hundreds of publications. Her books include Lip Prints (tanka 1979–2007), Ouch (senryu Carole Johnston lives in Lexington, Kentucky, but 1979–2007) and Eavesdropping (haiku 2007). her heart still wanders the Jersey Shore. Recently retired from teaching creative writing in a high school Amada Burgard lives with her quirky family in arts program, she is free to pursue her passion for beautiful central Michigan, USA. She is a poet, writer writing tanka and haiku. She is now ‘cloud hidden’ and lover of tanka, with several upcoming alone all day with her dog, working on a novel. publications. Charles Tarlton is a retired university professor Autumn Noelle Hall lives in Green Mountain currently living in Oakland, California with his wife. Falls, Colorado, shadowed by mountain lions, ravens, After a long career writing about the history of and a predatory urge to write. Her Asian Short Form political theory, his interests now are focused entirely poetry and nature photography have been featured on tanka, particularly the mixtures of verse and online and in journals worldwide. Whether snapping a discourse in tanka prose. hummingbird’s dance with her camera, hiking the pine needled slopes of Pikes Peak, or throwing found Chen-ou Liu lives in Ajax, Ontario, Canada. He fossils to read the I Ching, Autumn is ever gathering is the author of four books, including Following the the stuff of tanka. Moon to the Maple Land (First Prize Winner of the 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest). His tanka and haiku Bernice Yap is an aspiring writer who currently have been honored with many awards. dabbles in poetry and short stories. Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Constantine E. Fourakis was born in Chania, Crete, Greece. He studied Law as well as Economic Having graduated and worked as an economist, and Political Sciences and followed post-graduation Brane Grgurovič has been a ﬁsherman for 23 years. studies in Linguistics at the University of Oxford, UK. His haiku were published in the Slovenian journals Settled in Athens, Greece, he became an educationalist with British and Greek Colleges as well Apokalipsa and Primorska srečanja, and also in two as a translator and simultaneous interpreter in the Croatian miscellanies, in the Romanian cultural early 80’s and been awarded by international journal Cronica, in Ardea and Slovenska tanka. distinctions and praises.

Brian Zimmer lives in St. Louis Missouri within Christina Nguyen is a Minnesota copywriter, walking distance of the great Mississippi River. His poet, and mom. She likes to play around in Facebook work has appeared in various publications & journals groups, especially Tanka Poets on Site, NaHaiWriMo, both online and in print, including Modern Tanka Today, and Senryu & Kyoka. She is also fond of tweeting as red lights, The Tanka Journal (Japan), Gusts & Skylark. He @TinaNguyen. has been writing both micro and longer poetry for over forty years, devoting most of his efforts today to Debbie Strange is a member of the Writers’ tanka and other Japanese short forms. Collective of Manitoba and the United Haiku and

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 98 Tanka Society. Her writing has received awards, and leads occasional workshops, currently promoting has been published in print and online by numerous Contemporary Tanka and their kin forms. He is journals. Her photographs have been published, and hopeful that his new collection Alchemy of Vision will be were recently featured in an exhibition. Debbie is published before the end of 2014. currently assembling a collection of haiga and tankart. She can be found on Twitter @Debbie_Strange. Gerry Jacobson lives in Canberra, Australia. He was a geologist in a past life and wrote scientific Deborah P Kolodji is the moderator of the papers. But nothing beats the thrill of having tanka Southern California Haiku Study Group and the published in Atlas Poetica. Gerry’s tanka and tanka former president of the Science Fiction Poetry prose also appear currently in Ribbons, GUSTS and Association. In addition to Atlas Poetica, her work can Haibun Today. be found in Modern Haiku, Ribbons, Red Lights, Frogpond, bottle rockets, Strange Horizons, Chicken Soup for the Dieter’s Ivanka Kostantino writes prose and poetry; since Soul, and other places. 2006 haiku and tanka have been her favourite. Her haiku have been published in the Slovenian journal Diana Teneva is a Bulgarian writer. She has Apokalipsa, in two Croatian miscellanies, in the appeared in Sketchbook, World Haiku Review, The Heron’s Romanian cultural journal Cronica, in the on-line Nest, The Mainichi, Asahi Haikuist Network by The Asahi journals Locutio, pesem.si and Slovenska tanka. Shimbun, A hundred gourds, Shamrock, Chrysanthemum. Some are translated to Russian, French, English, Janet Lynn Davis lives in a rustic area north of Italian, Spanish and Croatian. Houston, Texas. Her work has been published in numerous online and print venues. Many of her Eamonn O’Neill is retired after working for thirty poems can be found at her blog, twigs&stones, . has travelled widely, both in America and Europe. While recovering from surgery he was introduced to Jeffrey Harpeng’s most recent writing online is the many facets of early Japanese poetry. Tanka has “Hope” and “Finding Hope” at Haibun Today and become his favorite style. Still a novice, these are his “And the Soil” at CHO. first Tanka poems accepted for publication. Jenny Ward Angyal lives with her husband and Elizabeth Howard lives in Crossville, Tennessee. one Abyssinian cat on a small organic farm in Her tanka have been published in American Tanka, Gibsonville, NC, USA. She has written poetry since Lynx, Eucalypt, red lights, Mariposa, Ribbons, Gusts, and the age of five and tanka since 2008. Her tanka have other journals. appeared in at least eighteen of the short-form journals and may also be found online at her blog, Ernesto P. Santiago is a Filipino who lives in The Grass Minstrel. Greece, where he enjoys exploring the poetic myth of his senses. Joanne Morcom is a social worker and poet who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She’s a founding Genie Nakano has an MFA in Dance from member of The Magpie Haiku & Tanka Poets, as well UCLA. She performs, choreographs dance and as Haiku Canada and Tanka Canada. For more teaches Gentle Yoga, Meditation, and Tanoshii Tanka information on her published poetry, including two at the Japanese Cultural Center in Gardena, CA. She poetry collections, please visit www.joannemorcom.ca. was a journalist for the Gardena Valley Newspaper before she discovered tanka and haibun and was Joy McCall (Murasame) is 68 years old and has hooked. written poetry, mostly tanka, for 50 years. She lives on the edge of the old walled city of Norwich, UK. The gennepher began writing micropoetry on Twitter poets she reads most often are Ryokan, Langston in 2010, and mostly writes haiku and tanka. She lives Hughes, M. Kei, Frances Cornford, TuFu, Sanford in North Wales, UK, with 3 cats and a Hearing Dog Goldstein, and Rumi. for Deaf People. Kate Franks is grateful every day for the Geoffrey Winch resides in Felpham, West Sussex, opportunity to teach middle school in Calgary, England. His poetry has appeared in numerous UK- Alberta, Canada. Conversations with her students and based magazines over the years, and more recently in the poetry of her mother, Joy McCall, inspire her to various US-based journals including Atlas Poetica 9 and write when she can. She treasures the support and 15. He is active in his local poetry scene where he perspective of her wonderful companion, Paul.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 99 An 8-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National miscellanies, in the Romanian cultural journal Cronica, Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has in the on-line journals Ardea and Slovenska tanka. newest books are Lithic Scatter and Other Poems and Attaining Canopy: Amazon Poems. Visit her Vagabond Matsukaze discovered haiku and tanka 8 years Poet blog at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com. She ago. At that time haiku captured much of his attention resides in Kent, NY/ North Fort Myers, FL. so he solely focused on haiku. As of March 13th, he ‘re-discovered’ tanka. After reconnecting with an old Kath Abela Wilson is the creator and leader of friend who is very much a tanka guru, he decided to Poets on Site in Pasadena, California. Closely related focus solely on tanka since then. to poetry of place, this group performs on the sites of their common inspiration. She loves the vitality and Matthew Caretti is influenced in equal parts by experimental micropoetic qualities of Twitter his study of German language and literature, by his (@kathabela) and publishes in many print and online Zen training in the East, and by the approach of the journals, as well as anthologies by Poets on Site. Beat writers. He currently teaches English and directs the Writing Center at a college preparatory school in LeRoy Gorman’s poetry has appeared in print Pennsylvania. since 1976. Since 1996, he has been editor of Haiku Canada Newsletter 1996–2006, Haiku Canada Review Michael Dunwoody is a retired Canadian teacher beginning in 2007, annual anthologies, broadsides. In from Windsor, Ontario, Canada, with a fondness for 1998, he began to publish poetry leaflets and poetic forms. His publications in various magazines postcards under his pawEpress imprint. include numerous sonnets. This is his first attempt to publish tanka poems. Fond of music and photography, Leslie Ihde lives in upstate New York with her his work likes to express a particular eye in sensuous husband and their golden retriever. She works as a language. His garden often serves as a favourite psychotherapist and as an artist, writing poetry to setting. mark moments of insight and gratitude. She is the editor of Inner Art Journal, an online journal devoted to Michael Dylan Welch founded the Tanka Society using tanka writing as a practice for self-discovery. of America in 2000, and served as its president for five years. His haiku, tanka, and longer poetry have M. Kei is the editor of Atlas Poetica and editor-in- appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, chief of Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka. He is a tall and in 2012 one of his waka translations appeared on ship sailor in real life and has published nautical the back of 150,000,000 United States postage novels featuring a gay protagonist, Pirates of the Narrow stamps. Michael lives in Sammamish, Washington, Seas. His recently published a collection of poetry, and his personal website is graceguts.com. January, A Tanka Diary. Nu Quang grew up in an ethnic Chinese society Margaret Van Every resides in San Antonio in Vietnam during the war and lived under the Tlayacapan, a village on Lake Chapala near Communist rule after Saigon fell. Now a naturalized Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. She is the author of a US citizen, she writes from her background consisting book of tanka entitled A Pillow Stuffed with Diamonds of three cultures. Her haiku, haibun, and tanka have (Librophilia Press, 2010). been published in Notes from the Gean, A Hundred Gourds, The Heron’s Nest, Haiku News, Multiverses, Moonbathing, Marilyn Humbert lives in the outer Northern Red Lights, Lynx. suburbs of Sydney surrounded by bush. Her work appears in Eucalypt, Kokako, Moonbathing, Simply Haiku Nilufer Y. Mistry was born and brought up in and Atlas Poetica. Calcutta, India. She now resides in British Columbia, Canada, along with her family. She is an artist. She Marilyn Shoemake Hazelton is a poet and essayist discovered micropoetry on Twitter in 2011 and is an in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She is the editor and avid member of this virtual community ever since publisher of red lights, an international tanka journal. @NiluferYM. Her micropoems usually reflect Nature but also document everyday-life. Matjaž Tevž Potočnik is an economist. He has been working in the charitable organisations over 20 Pat Geyer lives in East Brunswick, NJ, USA. A years. Since 1989 he has published six books of lyrics; photographer and nature lover, her Haiku and Tanka in the last few years he has also been writing haiku have appeared in Mijikai Haiku, Moonbathing and The and tanka. His haiku have been published in the Bamboo Hut. Slovenian journal Apokalipsa, in two Croatian

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 100 Patricia Prime has spent her working life as an journal of contemporary English language tanka http:// early childhood teacher and now works part-time in thebamboohut.weebly.com/index.html this ﬁeld. She is co-editor of Kokako, reviews/ interviews editor of Haibun Today and writes reviews Susan Burch resides in Hagerstown, MD, USA, for the NZ journal Takahe and for Atlas Poetica. with her husband, 2 kids, and warped sense of humor. Currently she is one of the guest editors for the World She loves reading, doing puzzles, and Coca-Cola Haiku Anthology, edited by Dr. Bruce Ross. slurpees.

Paul Mercken, Belgian philosopher and Tim Lenton has been concentrating on his poetry medievalist (1934), former treasurer and/or secretary since retiring early from journalism in 2002. He lives of the Haiku Kring Nederland. He likes participating in Norwich, the city of his birth, with his wife and has in international renga by e-mail and is learning an adult son and two grandchildren. Among his Chinese. favourite poets are Eliot, Yeats, Rilke, Dylan Thomas and Leonard Cohen. He is a trustee of the Paston Pravat Kumar Padhy hails from Odisha, India. Heritage Society. Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad. His haiku, tanka and haibun have appeared in Lynx, The Notes from the Tish Davis lives in Dublin, Ohio, USA. Her work Gean, Atlas Poetica, Simply Haiku, The Mainichi Daily has appeared in numerous journals including Modern News, Red lights, Shamrock, A Hundred Gourds, Haibun and Tanka Prose, Atlas Poetica, Haibun Today, red Chrysanthemum, Magnapoets, Bottle Rockets, Ribbons, Lilliput lights, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Presence, bottle rockets, Review, etc. Contemporary Haibun Online, and Simply Haiku.

Radhey Shiam was born a citizen of India in Toki is a native of the Pacific Northwest and a 1922. He contributes haiku, tanka, articles and poems writer of poetry, fiction, and occasional nonfiction, in English, Hindi and Urdu to Indian and foreign with works appearing online and in print. Toki likes magazines. He published Song of Life and contributed listening to the music of the spheres, pondering the to the First Hindi Haiku Anthology, India, 1989 and the interstices of the universe and taking long walks in First HayNaku Anthology, USA, 2005. liminal spaces. To find out more, follow @tokidokizenzen on Twitter. Robert Annis is a Florida born Tampa resident who teaches at the University of South Florida. His Vasile Moldovan was born in a Transylvanian work has been nominated for the 2013 and 2014 AWP village on 20 June 1949. He was cofounder (1991) Intro Journals Project. His poetry has appeared in chairman of the Romanian Society of Haiku (2009). Lingerpost, Lynx, Gusts, and Ribbons. Vasile Moldovan published five haiku books—Via Dolorosa (1998), The moon’s unseen face (2001), Noah’s Ark Sergio Ortiz is a retired educator, poet, painter, (2003), Ikebana (2005) and On a summer day (2010). Also and photographer. Flutter Press released his debut he published together with Magdalena Dale the renku chapbook, At the Tail End of Dusk, in October of 2009. book Fragrance of Lime. Ronin Press released his second chapbook: topography of a desire, in May of 2010. He lives in San Juan, Puerto Yancy Carpentier is a student of the 18th & 19th Rico. centuries. Her interests include military and maritime history, and poetry of all flavors. The Mediterranean Sonam Chhoki was born and raised in the eastern and the Ottoman Empire are her keenest attractions. Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. She has been writing She loves to read and garden. Yancy lives in the Deep Japanese short forms of haiku, tanka and haibun for South with her best friend/husband. about 5 years. Her works have been published in poetry journals and anthologies in Australia, Canada, Zoe Savina-Greece was born in Athens and writes Japan, UK and US and included in the Cultural haikus, tankas, minicuentos, short essays and critiques, Olympics 2012 Poetry Parnassus and BBC Radio awarded by international prizes, appearing in poetry Scotland Written Word programme. journals. She is currently preparing a haiku book dedicated to Lafcadio Hearn. She is member of the Steve Wilkinson is from County Durham, National Association of Greek Writers, Coordinating England and has been writing tanka, haiku, senryu Centre of Hellenism, World Haiku Association-Fujimi and gogyoshi for several years. He has been published Saitama – Japan, and an Honorary Member of the in various on-line and print editions of Japanese short Yugoslav Haiku Association. form poetry journals. He now edits The Bamboo Hut

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 101 Publications by Keibooks

Edited by M. Kei

This Short Life, Minimalist Tanka, by Sanford Goldstein

Hedgerows : Tanka Pentaptychs, by Joy McCall

circling smoke, scattered bones, by Joy McCall

Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka (Vol.4)

Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka

Bright Stars, An Organic Tanka Anthology

M. Kei’s Poetry Collections

January, A Tanka Diary

Slow Motion : The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack tanka and short forms

Heron Sea : Short Poems of the Chesapeake Bay tanka and short forms

M. Kei’s Novels

Pirates of the Narrow Seas 1 : The Sallee Rovers Pirates of the Narrow Seas 2 : Men of Honor Pirates of the Narrow Seas 3 : Iron Men Pirates of the Narrow Seas 4 : Heart of Oak

Man in the Crescent Moon : A Pirates of the Narrow Seas Adventure

The Sea Leopard : A Pirates of the Narrow Seas Adventure (forthcoming 2014)

Fire Dragon

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 102 INDEX

Alenka Zorma, 40, 41 Kath Abela Wilson, 10, 44 Alexander Jankiewicz, 7, 57 Kate Franks, 15 Alexis Rotella, 61 LeRoy Gorman, 47 Amada Burgard, 49 Leslie Ihde, 14 Autumn Noelle Hall, 19, 52 M. Kei, 5, 8, 77 Bernice Yap, 31 Margaret Van Every, 43 Brane Grgurovič, 40 Marilyn Humbert, 32, 33 Brian Zimmer, 10, 32 Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton, 17 C. William Hinderliter, 55 Matjaž Tevž Potočnik, 40 Carole Harrison, 20 Matsukaze, 28, 29, 30, 56, 74 Carole Johnston, 30 Matthew Caretti, 47 Charles Tarlton, 36, 37, 63 Michael Dunwoody, 22 Chen-ou Liu, 38 Michael Dylan Welch, 61 Christina Nguyen, 46 Murasame, 28, 29, 30 Claire Everett, 19 Natsuko Wilson, 18, 53 Constantine Fourakis, 60 Nilufer Y. Mistry, 53 Debbie Johnson, 46 Nu Quang, 50 Debbie Strange, 16, 17, Pat Geyer, 61 Deborah P. Kolodji, 57 Patricia Prime, 46, 69 Diana Teneva, 42 Paul Mercken, 49 Eamonn O’Neill, 62 Pravat Kumar Padhy, 55 Elizabeth Howard, 42 Radhey Shiam, 48 Ernesto P. Santiago, 59 Robert Annis, 58 Genie Nakano, 17, 34 Sergio Ortiz, 12, 31 gennepher, 53 Sonam Chhoki, 12, 23 Geoffrey Winch, 34, 60 Steve Wilkinson, 73 Gerry Jacobson, 35, 50 Susan Burch, 51 Ivanka Kostantino, 41 Tim Lenton, 26, 27 Janet Lynn Davis, 57 Tish Davis, 7, 49 Joanne Morcom, 54 Toki, 45 Jeffrey Harpeng, 71 Vasile Moldovan, 44 Jenny Ward Angyal, 35, 54 Zoe Savina, 60 Joy McCall, 9, 11, 15, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 51, 73 Karla Linn Merriﬁeld, 46

Our ‘butterﬂy’ is actually an Atlas moth (Attacus atlas), the largest butterﬂy/moth in the world. It comes from the tropical regions of Asia. Image from the 1921 Les insectes agricoles d’époque.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 18 • Page 103