FREE Resources for learning about TANKA

The following resources are FREE online, and include ARTICLES and TANKA. Many of them have reading lists and link lists to direct you to further resources.

The Tanka Teachers Guide can be downloaded for free at

In addition, Modern English Tanka journal can be read free online. In addition to the many poems in it, you will find scholarly articles, explaining and analyzing different elements about tanka

Tanka Online has poetry and articles and a recommended reading list

The Tanka Society of America has a web page with some articles and some tanka

TankaCentral.com aims to be the megasite for tanka information. It has a Reading Room with reference material and poetry, including tanka being read aloud by poets (anyone can contribute sound files).

The Anglo-Japanese Tanka Society publishes both tanka poetry and articles about tanka

Happy studying!

~K~

Sportsmanship and Reviews

Recently I have been perusing articles on review writing. There are those who think that if the reviewer can't say something nice, they shouldn't say anything at all, while there are those that think the reviewer's job is to call a spade a spade. On the cheerleaders side, there is the arguments that we want to encourage people to read and you don't do that by being negative about the written word. On the curmudgeon's side is the retort that there is no point wasting people's time with things that aren't worth their attention.

I love to read and I love to write. And Heinlein's rule applies to poetry. He said, "Ninety percent of science fiction is crap. But then, ninety percent of everything is crap." The reviewer's job is to tell the reader what's what, and to do so in an informed and informing way. If he has done his job well, the reader can tell whether the book is something he is interested in even if he doesn't agree with the reviewer.

Fair play is the rule here: The reviewer must be fair in his or her analysis of the merits and demerits of a particular work. He must engage it on its own terms and make a distinction between his personal taste and the accomplishments (or failures) of the writer. This is very difficult work, made even more difficult by the prevailing notion that a 'good' review is one which praises the work (deserved or not) and a 'bad' review is one which points out its shortcomings.

As reading has been losing ground to more exciting media like movies, television, the Internet, and videogames, a sort of desperation has developed among writers and editors and other literary professionals -- it seems we must praise everything in order to convince somebody that all this literary work is really worth something. But effusive and undeserved praise only persuades the reader that we can't tell the difference between toilet paper and poetry.

But there is something else: Fear of retalation. Reviewers -- some of them, at least -- are afraid that writers (and editors and readers) won't like when they write what they really think, and so they say only nice things. This fear is real and warranted -- I have personally been campaigned against by a writer who didn't like my review and who did her damnedest to persuade my editor to kill the review or change as she specified. He didn't, for which I am grateful.

I admit, I wasn't so sure. It was the same editor, who, when giving me a review copy, told me if that if I was going to pan the book, he wouldn't print it. Reviews are a marketing tool. While I totally endorse the notion of effective marketing for a book (and have been criticized for it), I don't agree that a book review is a marketing tool. It's a tool for the buyer, not the seller. That it is useful (or not) to the seller is merely a side effect and not the intended purpose.

I walk an exquisite tight rope. My own integrity requires me to report what it is that I see, both good in bad in a work, and to analyze what the writer was attempting and whether s/he succeeded, and discover things that perhaps the writer didn't realize were there. I have to present my reasons for my statements and support them with quotations from the work, placing it in context of other relevant work. In short, it is a devilish amount of very difficult work, for which I receive no pay at all, rarely any praise, and which exposes me to the ire of unhappy poets who behave like they must have spent most of their school time in the principal's office.

It's enough to make a man throw up his hands and say, "I don't need this." Or, if he is made of weaker stuff, to write only nice things so that people will like him and continue sending him free books. Frankly, I place 'respecting myself' higher on the list of things that make me feel good than 'being popular,' so I've made my decision.

I have to say, I don't particularly like reviewing books. Of all the things I do, it's the least fun, the most work, the least reward, and which most exposes me to the bad behavior of people who claim to be grown ups. I do it because it helps me with my research, which I love. And because I think it needs doing because there are a lot of poorly written reviews and a definite lack of critical rigor in evaluating English-language tanka. Donning my hair shirt, I say, "tanka will be better for this."

Which brings me to sportsmanship: If you can't behave at least as well as a Little League player, go home. The world is overloaded with insecure, egotistical prima donnas of marginal talent and bad manners. We don't need any more. If you submit your work for publication, then it is your duty to do so with grace, accepting that some people will like it and some people won't, and listening carefully when reviewers, readers, editors, or anyone else make comments on your work.

Some of them will be airheads with nothing useful to say and can be ignored, but some of them have valid points that will make you wince. Take what you can use and ignore the rest. Don't argue about it. If necessary you can correct a factual error, but recognize that it is the reviewer's prerogative to say what he thinks. If you think a particular reviewer is incompetent, don't submit your books to that reviewer. Better yet, write reviews yourself. Good reviews, not laudatory reviews.

On the other hand, given the disincentives that exist, I don't foresee many new reviewers in the field. Thus, I propose that book reviews should be eligible for prizes, along with other non-fiction writing about tanka. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no prize given for tanka non-fiction. Perhaps if members of the various organizations demanded it, it would be though. Certainly we ought to recognize and promote our non-fiction writers who write about tanka as well as tanka poets themselves.

~K~

The Ever Expanding Obsession

As readers of this blog know by now, as do all my friends and relatives, there is nothing I like better than sailing wooden boats on the Chesapeake Bay. Yes, I even like it better than poetry, but don't ask me to choose between them! They can be accomplished simultaneously, one lived through the other.

Over the period of October 17 - 22 I once again crewed aboard the Martha Lewis, this time for a trip down the bay to the Crisfield Watermen's Festival. Crisfield is about as far south as you can go on the water and still be in Maryland. I also learned many new an interesting things, including how each and every one of us has a built in map of the Chesapeake Bay. To use it, raise your arm up straight, but put a slight crook in your elbow. The fingers tips are the head of the Bay with Havre de Grace. The elbow is an Annapolis. The armpit is Crisfield. Extending the anatomical metaphor, Norfolk is your rear end. Or to put it this way: If you were going to give the Chesapeake Bay an enema, Norfolk is where you would insert the nozzle. I'll spare you the rest of the watermen's humor I encountered.

Everywhere we go, we meet watermen who tell us about the time they served with Martha or some other skipjack. I have noticed a common thread. Speaking as they do in the common language, intent only on talking about things that matter to them, watermen are developing a peculiar figure of speech. More than once I have heard an older waterman describe himself as working on the Bay "back when winters were cold." Global warming may be a subject of debate to people who lived in climate controlled boxes in cities, but for the people who live and work the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, it is a manifest fact.

When I tell young people that a hundred years ago the Upper Bay used to freeze over and that ice cut from it was Maryland's second largest export, they are astonished. Their grandparents then chime in to tell about how when they were young and the Bay would freeze over, they would walk across the ice from one side to the other. More astonishment. When I ask them when that was, they say the 1950s. Indeed, as late as the 1950s, skipjacks were sometimes caught in the ice and had to be rescued by the Coast Guard. Wooden boats are no defense against the slow grinding crush of winter.

But while Crisfield was interesting for many reasons, that which most attracted my attention (aside from a few brief but exciting moments when my glove was pinned against the samson post and the skipjack was swinging out of control at Tilghmans Island), was the three log sailing canoe, Ruby. She belongs to Randy George who lives on Galen's Creek, or as it used to be known and still is known to oldtimers, Red Cap Creek. He kindly invited us to go out on it with him, and three of us accepted.

the magic trick
of dawn:
a slim white sailboat
materializes
from the mist

Arriving at night, the creek and sailboat were invisible. But as dawn rose, the slim white lines of the sailboat emerged from the mist. What a beautiful sight to behold! About thirty feet long, including her Roman-nosed bowsprit, and about six feet wide, she sported a single mast with a skipjack rig. She was built in 1895 and is an example of the working type of log sailing canoe. She had been used for oystering.

The log sailing canoe was evolved by the colonists from the Native American dugout canoe. In the case of the Ruby, three logs were affixed side by side and hollowed out with axe and adze to make the hull. Then her sides and coamings affixed and the whole lot rigged as it pleases. The result is an extremely shallow, narrow, and quick sailboat, so much so that they survive today in the sport of log canoe racing, which is unique to the Chesapeake Bay. The modern log canoe with its trapezoidal sails and hiking boards is a strange and unmistakeable sight. There aren't many of them left, and even fewer that are still rigged as workboats. The oldest canoes in the racing fleet are over a hundred years old.

The Ruby then was a sweet little boat and when I saw it I think I must have felt much as Mole felt when he first saw the Water Rat's little boat, and for much the same reason. As Kenneth Graham said in The Wind in the Willows , "There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

my hand on the tiller
like Water Rat and Mole
with no particular place to go
and no particular desire
to get there any time soon

Randy very kindly let us each have a turned at the tiller, so we sailed down Red Cap Creek to the Big Annemessex River. The marshes were all brown and sere, quite, and with few insects about. The waters were placid and a light breeze blew. The curves of the waters wended through the stands of tall marsh grass, and the higher ground ('high' is a relative term) with its trees and houses fell away. The sky overhead was the purest blue, fading into silver at the horizons.

How my heart went out to it! A skipjack is and always will be beyond my means, but wouldn't it be possible to some day perhaps have myself a log sailing canoe? It's not so very large, and the skills -- knocking out the rotten wood and replacing the Bondo and other makeshift repairs with something more solid -- requires no great skill. Mast hoops made of rope and a sail that I could probably stitch myself . . . why not?

Ah. The real difficulty is not with the boat but the shore. Where to keep it? It won't fit in the living room. Where to store it where it could live safely while I puttered with it for as long as it took my meager funds to slowly patch it back together and return it to the water? I'd live in a shack if it had a bit of creek for a boat. I have, at times in my life, been gifted with chocolate, plane tickets, medication, and old clothes, but never with a waterfront home.

Alas. Such is not be. I've got a job working at Walmart, running my legs off so that people who make as little as I do can have their DVDs and gaming consoles. How they spend, spend, spend on HDTV, the latest pop album, and gadgets for their gadgets. It feels a little strange to be selling people things I have no use for, and if they had any sense, they wouldn't have any use for them either. Once upon a time, little boys messed about in old wooden rowboats and explored the riverbanks and marshes. Nowadays their parents keep them away from those dangerous places and give them better entertainment, like 'Grand Theft Auto' and 'Hitman.'

~K~