Cool Announcement: Celebrate Tanka Poetry Month with NeverEnding Story

My Dear Friends and Readers:

May is the month of wishes and expectations, a time born for tanka. Every verse should hold the essence of the season: singing in the lilies of the valley and laughing with the nightingales.

-- Chen-ou Liu

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.

Please help spread the word about this celebration via your poetry blogs, websites, Facebook pages, and X accounts. And NeverEnding Story seeks the tanka that can bite and bite hard. 

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

-- Chen-ou Liu, An Interview with Dimitar Anakiev

We read to know we're not alone. 

-- William Nicholson

seaside bow-windows

radiating the canopies

of sunlight ...

a cup of coffee and poetry

nothing more and nothing less

Gusts, 41, Spring/Summer 2025

The proper response to a poem is another poem. 

-- Phyllis Webb 

A cursor blinks in the white of my screen.

darkness pools around stars

words I never said

words I never sent

NeverEnding Story, March 11, 2026

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

-- Thomas Mann

The blank calendar; even thoughts paused like a frozen screen.

the cursor blinks ...

the weight of another

hazy day moon

coffee ring on ring ...

I type five lines, five lines

then delete all

start again as robins sing

sing up the morning sun

NeverEnding Story, January 30 2026

These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection.

George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, 2021.