A Shaft of Sun

A Shaft of Sun

My new collection of tanka, haiku, tanka sequences, haibun & tanka-prose

 September 1, 2026 

Walking Widdershins

 My new collaborative book of tanka sequences, Walking Widdershins,  is now available on Amazon:

Spellbound

 My new book, available on Amazon:

Spellbound: Tanka Spells & Blessings

The Wind Harp: Tanka Pentads

 My new book, The Wind Harp: Tanka Pentads

 is now available on Amazon.

My New Collaborative Book

 

A volume of 99 collaborative tanka triptychs,  now available on Amazon.

My new chapbook

 My new chapbook, Only the Dance, is now available on Amazon.

First Place, Sanford Goldstein International Tanka Contest

 

plague-year parsnips 

browned in butter—

the flavor

of my mother’s victory garden

in another sort of war

First Place, Sanford Goldstein International Tanka Contest 2020

The Judges' Comments:

In five concise lines, this tanka addresses the harshness of this plague year while resisting the temptation to be maudlin. The result is a poem that conveys the everydayness of the struggle to survive Covid-19 in a powerfully understated way. Comparing a contemporary pandemic garden to a World War II victory garden underscores the historical similarities and differences between both times, while sensory details summarized by “parsnips/browned in butter” and the use of alliteration point to a simple act of survival that, despite everything, imbues the poem with an underlying sense of hopefulness. —Margaret Dornaus

The use of the expression “plague-year” crystallizes the horror of this unprecedented crisis, juxtaposed with a seemingly everyday and homely experience. When the poet’s mother planted her victory garden, there would have been just as much uncertainty as we feel now—yet still there was hope—the stuff that binds us together. The parsnip’s extensive root system, which holds it in the sustaining earth, makes this an even stronger image. The fact that the “Forces Sweetheart” Vera Lynn died during the Covid-19 pandemic makes this tanka all the more bittersweet. —Claire Everett

Tanka in Under the Basho

I'm pleased to announce that I will be editing the new Tanka Section of the journal Under the Basho.
Submissions for the 2020 issue are open until Nov. 15. You can read the submission guidelines here. 

They Gave Us Life

 This new anthology, 
They Gave Us Life: Celebrating Mothers, 
Fathers & Others in Haiku, 
edited by Robert Epstein, 
includes five of my tanka:

a priest told her

no Jews allowed in heaven–

she raised me

under a white oak

and named it Paradise

    ~  Atlas Poetica 18, 2014

my mother’s voice

reciting The Highwayman

by moonlight

the gleam of a dark red love knot

the clatter of galloping years

    ~  Moonlight on Water, 2016

decades 

of advent calendars

my mother sent,

each marked with its year . . .

so many doors left open

    ~  A Hundred Gourds 4:2, 2015

long-ago

adventure rides

with my father . . . 

those sunlit roads

I thought could never end

    ~  Moonlight on Water, 2016

echoing 

across the river

the tune

my father used to whistle

on summer mornings

    ~  red lights 11:2, 2015

moonlight on water

Skylark is delighted to introduce Jenny Ward Angyal's debut collection of tanka,
tanka sequences and tanka prose:

moonlight on water

Jenny Ward Angyal’s long-awaited first collection of tanka, including sequences and tanka prose, represents a considerable body of work by an author for whom poetry is breath and blood. The opening section entitled ‘so many doors left open’ not only echoes the tanka written in memory of the poet’s mother and her gifts of advent calendars down the years, but hints at the mystery and otherworldliness that beckon the moment the reader steps over the threshold into Jenny’s unique story, as well as the questions that will re-main unanswered (and rightly so) when the journey is done . . . Every tanka is a miniature reflection of this beautiful soul, another tile in the mosaic of ephemera; another mirror-gem in Indra’s Net of which she, too, is a part: 

ripples
passing through 
each other 
in an ink-dark pool 
our mirrored faces 

But Jenny Angyal has found a way to tack herself to eternity: 

scribbling 
faint words to address 
the infinite— 
I pluck one thread 
in the harp of stars

(From the Foreword by Claire Everett, Founder and Editor of Skylark).

Jenny Ward Angyal is a fine guide on the tanka sequence trail. It probably helps that she seems to write from some primordial, archetypal forty-acre parcel the reader has rarely visited: "high in the arms/of a sugar maple" (heartwood); "the rough old floors/my mother speckled" (house); "born with a caul/the filly struggles" (mare's milk). In the sequences that took me the farthest, I traveled with her to a timeless place where people live near streams, play flutes, and "catch for a moment/time's powdered wings" (chrysalis). Her shifting often surprised me in ways that, after their initial unexpectedness, had me nodding: I see that.

(From 'Jenny Ward Angyal's Sequences', an Afterword by David Rice, Editor of Ribbons).


Cover design by Owen Smith

to order a copy, click here

TSA Anthology 2016

News from the Tanka Society of America:

~ 2016 Anthology:  

We are pleased to announce plans for TSA’s 2016 members’ anthology to be published in the fall. The book will be co-edited by Jenny Ward Angyal and Susan Constable. Ken Slaughter will be in charge of production.
 
Submissions for the anthology will be open July 15–August 15, 2016 for current (2016) members of the Tanka Society of America or those who join within the submission period. 
 
If you’re not a current member, you are invited to join or renew today at:  http://www.tankasocietyofamerica.org/how-to-join 
 
Submission Guidelines will be posted June 15.  Please begin to think about sending 5-10 tanka for consideration when the submission window opens.  Beginning this year, one copy of the anthology will be sent to each TSA member as a membership benefit.  Additional copies will be available for purchase on Lulu.com ($10 plus postage).


~  Contest Reminder:

We are accepting submissions for the 2016 Sanford Goldstein International Tanka Contestuntil June 30.  Please visit the TSA website for complete details on how to submit:

http://www.tankasocietyofamerica.org/tsa-contest/how-to-enter-the-tsa-international-tanka-contest
 
 

Eucalypt Distinctive Scribblings Awards

Eucalypt   The Distinctive Scribblings Awards

             

The Awards recognise two outstanding poems from each issue of Eucalypt,
selected and appraised by winners of the Awards in the previous issue.

Several species of eucalypts (gums) exhibit distinctive squiggles that result from moth larvae eating the live wood and leaving a scar that is revealed when the tree sheds its bark. This image of a gum with its insect-generated calligraphy, inspired the naming of the award.

AWARD RECIPIENTS 

Eucalypt  Issue 19, 2015 ancestral valley – the way prayer flags flicker light at dawn I carry this in my heart each time I leave home                 — Sonam Chhoki      appraisal horseshoe – the blacksmith’s hammer singing on the anvil beating out the rhythm of long-lost luck — Jenny Ward Angyal   appraisal

TSA Tanka-Prose Contest Winners

Special-event Tanka Prose Contest Winners

The Tanka Society of America is pleased to announce the winners of its first-ever tanka prose contest, held this 15th-anniversary year:

1st Place: Urszula Funnell (UK), "Checkmate"

2nd Place: J. Zimmerman (USA), "Ah Morelia" 

3rd Place: Claire Everett (UK), "The Window Poem"

Honorable Mentions: Jenny Ward Angyal (USA), "Gaps," and David Terelinck (Australia), "Carved in Stone"

Much appreciation goes to poet and editor Bob Lucky, who diligently served as judge for this blind-review contest. We're also very grateful to poet and TSA volunteer Susan Burch, who worked behind the scenes in helping us administer the contest, especially in building the judge's electronic file of anonymous entries. And a huge thanks, of course, to the sixty-nine poets from around the world who submitted entries.

To read the winning tanka prose pieces, please go to the TSA website. Note that the full judge's report, including contest commentary, will be published in the winter 2016 Ribbons. The judge's comments will be added after that to the website. 

—Janet Lynn Davis

TSA vice president & contest coordinator, 2014-2015

Tanka Sunday & Tanka Contest

The officers of the Tanka Society of America are pleased to share the following announcements: 

Save the Date: Tanka Sunday Is Back!

Join us on Sunday, October 18, 2015 (the last day of the Haiku North America conference), at the Desmond Hotel in Albany, New York, for another Tanka Sunday celebration. Tanka Sunday 2015 will have tanka readings, workshops, and presentations all afternoon and evening, plus a bookfair, group photo, and more.  Registration will be free  for everyone, including nonmembers (although donations will be welcome).  So mark the date on your calendar now, and watch for registration details later on our Facebook page and website and in member emails. Whether you attend the HNA conference or not, we hope to see you at Tanka Sunday 2015! Will you join us? 

Also, as a reminder, the submission window for the Sanford Goldstein International Tanka Contest opens tomorrow, May 1.

  

Skylark Reviews

I am happy to announce that as of the Winter 2014 issue of Skylark: A Tanka Journal, I will be the Reviews and Features Editor.   The submissions window for that issue is June 1 -- August 1.  For details on how to submit books for review or articles for consideration, please click here. 

E-mail subscription problems

Apparently my Feedburner email subscriptions are no longer working, so if you subscribe to this blog via email you probably have not received any notifications recently.  This seems to be a problem common to many blogs, but I have not been able to find out how to fix it.  However, I can suggest a possible work-around.   Go to www.feedspot.com , create an account if you don't have one, and enter the URLs for sites you want to follow.  They will send you an email notification of new posts. 

TSA Contest coming up

Be sure to mark your calendars for the 15th annual Tanka Society of America International Contest! 

You can find submission details at the TSA website and also in the forthcoming issue of Ribbons 

The submission window will open on May 1 and close on June 30, 2014.

Chinese translation

To see a Chinese translation of my award-winning  "harvest mouse" tanka, please visit NeverEnding Story, the first English-Chinese bilingual haiku and tanka blog, edited by Chen-ou Liu. (Chen-ou has previously translated six of my other tanka, which may be seen by clicking my name at the bottom of his "harvest mouse" post.)

TSA Anthology

Tanka Society of America to Publish 2014  Anthology—Free to Members

The Tanka Society of America (TSA) has announced plans for a 2014 members' anthology, scheduled for release this autumn. For this year only, current members will receive a complimentary copy.

M. Kei, widely known tanka poet and publisher of Keibooks, will edit the anthology.

The submission window opens on February 15 and closes on April 30. Details are posted at the TSA website and also will be published in the Winter issue of Ribbons, the official TSA journal.

If you're not a current (2014) TSA member, consider joining or renewing your membership today!

Chinese translation

To see a Chinese translation of my award-winning "sad ghost" tanka, please visit NeverEnding Story, the first English-Chinese bilingual haiku and tanka blog, edited and translated by Chen-ou Liu. (Chen-ou has previously translated five of my other tanka, which may be seen by clicking my name at the bottom of his "sad ghost" post.)