Poet and Tanka: David Rice

I was born in New York City and grew up in the suburbs. I remember writing something at a young age (7?) and being proud of it. I remember writing a poem instead of a paragraph for a 7th grade homework assignment. I also remember 12 years of high-powered higher education (Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard University, University of California at Berkeley) when I did not write much except academic papers. I received a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at age 28. By my early thirties, I had a divorce, a seven year old daughter, my first full time job, and an undeveloped poetry life.

I started to write free verse poems and songs in my late twenties, most of them eminently forgettable, and did so until my early forties. Well, some of the songs were pretty good. At that point, I had a good second marriage kids (hers and mine) who were teenagers, a private practice, and another decade of an undeveloped poetry life. To deal with my mid-life crisis I worked with a sand tray therapist. I also read Blythe's haiku books. Slowly, I learned how to go down into myself, to stop thinking so much, and to let the creative process work. When I discovered tanka a few years later, I fell in love with the form.

I continue to enjoy reading and writing free verse poetry but, as many others have also noted, there's something about tanka's ability to capture the feeling moment that is unique. To read back over the tanka I have written during the past thirteen years is to read a record of my emotional life. Wonderful.

field after field
so sprinkled with poppies and lupine
it's impossible
to describe this feeling
  back home my friend is worse

Some tanka write themselve3s and some need a lot of labor support. This one had a difficult birth. for many years, I had gone birding up-and-down California with a married couple. (Alas, my wife is not a birder.) On spring trips, we loved the carpets of flowers we would pass if we were in the foothills. (On one of those trips, I wrote: walking ankle high/through a field of flowers/if I knew their names/I would apologize/to the ones I step on. That poem arrived fully formed as we walked through that field.)

The man got cancer, received treatment, went into remission, and then the cancer returned. The spring before he died, I went camping with my wife and some other friends. I took a morning bird walk. The Joshua trees were flowering and the black-throated sparrows were singing, but I felt sad and heavy with the fact that he was sick while I was healthy and drenched in this spring desert. In previous years, I had been at this same campground with him and his wife. I wanted to capture those feelings in five lines of no more than thirty-one syllables.

My first version had part of the last line. The initial opening lines, though, described my reactions to being with the spring flowers while my firend was back home (surrounded by flowers/I stop and sit on the path). I was trying to contrast where I was with where he was. But, as is often the case with me, my thoughts were getting in the way of the poem. the contrasting idea was accurate, of course, but too explicit, limiting the poem rather than opening it up. I couldn't articulate that then. I just knew the poem was not expressing my feelings.

I kept trying to describe my feelings yet knew each attempt was inadequate. After discarding many versions, I decided that my feelings were impossible to describe, at least in five lines, but when I noticed that thought, I knew the poem had a center. The rest was easy. I made the first two lines a description of what we had seen on so many bird trips, made the next two lines focus on what we had all said (and not said) about those spring flowers, and then shifted the poem in the last line so that "impossible" referred both outward to the flowers and inward to my feelings about my friend. I didn't do that consciously, but once the poem shifted from trying to say what I was feeling to the impossibility of saying what I was feeling, the poem came together and, mysteriously, did express my feelings.

To me, a tanka is a poetic sauce that has such an intense flavor because it has been so reduced and concentrated. I plan to sit that the tanka table for the rest of my life.

Return to the Tanka Society of America Main Page.