2007 International Tanka Contest
                  Winners and Judges' Comments

 

Contest Judges, Denis M. Garrison and Marjorie A. Buettner
 

First Place ($100)

spiraling
a winged seed makes its way
to the ground
the strange beauty
of my own crooked path

Cherie Hunter Day
San Diego, California

The single word in the opening line is a keynote. this tanka spirals slowly from natural observation through its turn to introspection. It has the gentle touch of the nearly weightless seed as it beckons the reader to likewise look inwardly to regard the unique path of his or her own life lovely in its very singularity, in its personality. In every age, people have felt their smallness, their facelessness, in the midst of multitudes. Still, like the seed making its once-in-a-lifetime journey to the ground littered with millions like it, for our moment in time, we spiral, we dance, we are beautiful in someone's eyes―we are someone. Line 2 is remarkable for its evocation of the back and forth movement; it makes the reader take time with the line only to slide home on the smooth diction of the closing couplet. This tanka is a joy to read and to contemplate.

Second Place ($50)

because
it's what he would've done
for me
I light the cigarette
someone left on his grave

Andrew Riutta
Travers City, Michigan

This tanka is remarkable for its laconic display of noblesse oblige in a modern idiom. If it weren't made clear by the word "cigarette" that this is recent, it could be an elegy of one knight at another's grave. This deceptively plain tanka is eloquent in its evocation of the male predilection for actions rather than words. The dept of feeling hits the reader like a wave in the strong final line of the poem, a line that colors everything before it. It puts a lump in one's throat. The iambic meter of lines 1 through 4 slams into the opening trochee of the more complex final line, making us feel the shock as we finally see the whole scene. A deeply moving tanka, this; and a memorable one.

Third Place ($25)

on the last day of summer
we watch blood pump
through a shrimp's translucent skin
. . . how I missed all the signs
      you were ready to leave

Linda Jeannette Ward
Coinjack, North Carolina

The image of watching the blood pump through the skin of a shrimp is a very unique and disturbing image. The first line tells the reader all: it is the last of the last times to watch, to enjoy summer, to be with a friend or lover, to feel. The concluding lines tell the reader a bit more but not too much. This is when the image of the blood through the skin transcends the moment and becomes a universal symbol for human frailty and finality. We never know when it will be time to leave and already it may be too late―this last day of summer. Wonderful!

Honorable Mentions (in no special order)

does any direction
ever lead to home?
I sit and watch
as skeins of wild geese
unwind across the sky

John Barlow
Liverpool, United Kingdom

This is a fine tanka in the interrogatory style. The wonderful central image is spun out in a delicious final couplet with a marvelously open-ended sense. One loves to hear beautiful diction like this in tanka; it is even more precious in such brevity.

the long, long climb
to the mountain's summit
just to see
how glorious
the valley below

Zane Parks
Livermore, California

Here is a lovely wisdom tanka that has unified imagery and makes its turn in the realization of the significance of perspective. The paucity of details allows the reader dreaming room, to make this about his or her own ideal valley.

Having decided
to be cremated
someday somewhere
I watch applewood logs
give themselves to flame

Carol Purington
Colrain, Massachusetts

There is a sense of mystery in this tanka: there is another dimension to this to which we have not been invited. The reader is free to speculate; free to gaze into the blaze and see his or her own vision in the flames.

sometimes,
when no one is around,
my heart changes
into a heron
and flies

M. Kei
Perryville, Maryland

The surreality of this tanka carries the emotional freight of the poem. That ineffable feeling of bursting with beauty that one gets from time to time is approachable only in these dream terms.

turned twenty last month
sixty the week after―
in the curtain's sheer lining
just a single flash
of firefly

Linda Jeannette Ward
Coinjack, North Carolina

A most ingenious dichotomy in this tanka! Going from hyperbole in the opening lines and into minimalist understatement in the closing lines―separated only by a filmy curtain lining. The last line is very short, yet very powerful. The whole mystery of evanescence appears a firefly's flash. This is a classic epiphanic tanka with an amazing shift in tone.

Denis M. Garrison
Marjorie A. Buettner
Contest Judges 

Contest Coordinator: Kirsty Karkow

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