2003 International Tanka Contest
                   Winners and Judges' Comments

First Place ($100)

from my hospital window
I see across a bare field
in the morning rain
a yellow silk umbrella
on its solitary way

   Sanford Goldstein
   Nigata, Japan

Second Place ($50)

I chased the moon
across the Red River
for your borning cry
   all these times around the sun
   and you still call me "Daddy"

   Dan Schwerin
   Greendale, Wisconsin

Third Place ($25)

rungs of a fire escape
shadowed on the moonlit wall
--a switch clicks
in the rented room
next to mine

   Linda Jeannette Ward
   Coinjock, North Carolina

Honorable Mentions (listed alphabetically)

far above
the high tide mark
a bleached dinghy
colourless as I feel
in my old age

   Janice Bostok
   Dungay, NSW, Australia

the carpenter
stops his saw
to ask if I see the sun
setting through the leaves
of dark bamboo beyond

   Sanford Goldstein
   Nigata, Japan

I wake to the sound
of December rain.
Early each morning
my father quietly
closed my window

   Peggy Heinrich
   Bridgeport, Connecticut

these branches
laden with snow
in early spring
   our troubles
   far from gone

   Laura Maffei
   Staten Island, New York

tight buds
against a gray sky
this spring
you might, I tell them,
want to wait awhile

   Laura Maffei
   Staten Island, New York

from her swing
my friend's daughter
dispenses
wisdom from her small world
and I learn some things

   Art Stein
   Northfield, Massachusetts

Judges' Comments

All fine tanka are lyric poems characterized by their formal structure, and by the immediacy and intensity of one particular moment. They tell us where a body is in the world, and what is going on in the poet's heart and mind. And then, by the force of the image(s) and by the clarity of both perception and language, the reader is transported from those very particulars to some kind of transcendence. If the tanka poet is gifted, a sense of awe and privilege arises from being drawn into communion with this other life, this other world.

Note too that all fine tanka have an unmistakable freshness about them. They are not obscured with thick imaginings or overlaid with vague, grey thought.

Every one of these poems achieves "tanka splendor," that lift-off into truth and loveliness that brings the reader solace and joy, however sad the subject matter. In each case, we get a feel right away for who the poet is, we sense and love the authentic 'voice.' Tanka poems are naked poetry. The soul is bare, somehow. There are minor flaws in some of these poems, but in reading each of them you will experience a deep moment with a fine poet.

None of these poems is marred by sentimentality, none trades in cliches, none is overwritten and none is merely a one-sided report of either a natural setting, or else an inner event. All are balanced, and all read well. For at the end of the day a real tanka must be a poem and must read like poetry. There must be a natural ease and genuine rightness to the words chosen to express what is deep and what is present in the outer and inner things.

We thank you for according us the honor of judging this contest and we commend these poems to you as excellent models of the art of tanka.

   Respectfully submitted,
   Marianne Bluger
   Tom Clausen

About the Judges

Marianne Bluger is a Canadian lyric poet. She wrote Gusts, a much praised, book-length tanka collection. Her eighth book, Early Evening Pieces, has just been published by Buschek Books. To read some of her prize winning tanka, go to www.mariannebluger.com.

Tom Clausen is a lifelong resident of Ithaca, a college town in upstate New York. He works in a library at Cornell University. Tom has had his tanka published nationally and internationally in anthologies and serials. He has one tanka collection, A Work of Love, and his most recent chapbook, Homework, published by Snapshot Press in England, features tanka with haiku.

A Note from the Contest Coordinator: Having read all the tanka submitted to this contest, I was struck by their variety and high quality. I certainly hope those who did not win commendation will do something with their work as much of it certainly deserves publication. Paul O. Williams

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