Cool Announcement: Celebrate Tanka Poetry Month with NeverEnding Story

                     Poetry acts as a witness in, to, and most importantly, through troubled times.

                     Chen-ou Liu, An Interview with Dimitar Anakiev

My Dear Friends:

Please join NeverEnding Story to expand the readership base for tanka by tweeting at least one tanka a day throughout the month of May. The hashtags for Tanka Poetry Month are #MayTanka and #NaTankaMo.

on the windowsill

two canaries singing

to each other

I tweet and retweet

NeverEnding Story

Below is excerpted from Angela Leuck's article, titled "Tanka and the Literary Mainstream: Are we 'there' yet?" ("Book Review Editor's Message," Ribbons, 10:1, Winter 2014, p. 74):

An alternative approach is suggested by Chen-ou Liu, author of the blog, "NeverEnding Story." In his June 2012 Lynx interview with Jane Reichhold, Liu describes the current relationship between the haiku/tanka community and the literary mainstream in terms of "an asymmetric power relationship." He believes a "top down" approach will not work; i.e., trying to change the perceptions of those in the mainstream. Rather, Liu supports a "bottom up" approach, which for him means consolidating and expanding the readership base for tanka through online publishing and social networking sites. He argues:

If there are more people who love reading/writing haiku and tanka, the mainstream poetry world will eventually open their main gate to haiku and tanka poets. This approach to reversing the asymmetric power relationship has been demonstrated in the case of the power transfer from traditional media, such as news papers, TV, and books, to online and social media.

Please help spread the word about this celebration via your poetry blogs, websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts. And NeverEnding Story seeks tanka submissions. 

To conclude today's "Celebrate Tanka Poetry Month" post, share with you my interview excerpt and tanka selected for the upcoming Bulgarian-English Tanka Handbook written by NeverEnding Story contributor, Dimitar Anakiev. 

Red Moon Press's tanka 2020: poems from today’s world gives me a glimpse of what is possible when efforts are made to challenge the poets to write something new and relevant to the world we live in.  Poetry acts as a witness in, to, and most importantly, through troubled times. That's what this book does.

Here are five of my tanka for the handbook

a winter fog

smothers the winding road

to her mother's house

the bruises on her face

say everything & nothing

bits of gravel

embedded in blood

on his knuckles

my teenage son says nothing

and I'll do ... nothing

a wind

rattling the dry leaves

on eucalypti --

an ink-dark trace

of koalas

unshackled 

from my childhood beliefs

I'm a passing thought

in the mind of God

who forsook his son on the cross

we'reallinthistogether

            snow

              on

            snow

  onhomelessshelter

Happy Reading and Writing throughout the month of May

Chen-ou