Saigyo Awards for Tanka 2008

The Saigyo Awards for Tanka is a new contest sponsored by Carolyn Thomas. I sent my entry fee and contest entry, wondering what it would be like. Well, the results arrived in the mail today. Thomas has produced a simple but elegant broadside of several pages featuring the winners and a number of Honorable Mentions. One of my poems received an Honorable Mention:

a white sail
skimming through
my dreams
teaches me the meaning
of everything

I received a bookmark with my poem printed on it, plus a certificate of achievement along with the broadside of winning poems. I saw a number of familiar names among the winners, as well as poets who are strangers to me. Generally speaking, they are the highly romanticized poems that have long been a staple of the genre in English. There were also a number of poems with explicit Japanese or Oriental references. While the quality of most of the poems is obvious, there were a couple of Honorable Mentions that puzzled me because they seem jejune to me.

No information was provided about how the winners will be disseminated (if at all). If you want to find out how to read them, you'll have to contact Carolyn Thomas herself, but she didn't provide email contact. You'll have to send an SASE via snail mail to make your query.

~K~