WD Poetic Form Challenge: Tanka Winner
Some of you may remember that I offered a challenge within the April PAD Challenge last month. I tasked poets with tackling the tanka poetic form, and many of you…
Some of you may remember that I offered a challenge within the April PAD Challenge last month. I tasked poets with tackling the tanka poetic form, and many of you responded with some great tanka poems. In fact, I had to read through hundreds of tanka to settle on a winner.
As usual, the quality was great. In fact, I'm trying to sneak in more than the usual one example for the Writer's Digest magazine. We'll see if the editors let me do that, but I do know the tanka winner will be in there at the very least.
The WD Poetic Form Challenge Tanka Poems Winner Is...
Jane Shlensky for the following tanka.
Street lamps make golden
ghosts on wet streets, fog smoking
pavement, settling on
cherry blossoms on your lawn;
my dark heart aches for morning.
Congratulations, Jane!
Top 10 Entries for the Tanka Form
Of course, Jane's tanka was first, but here is a list of which tanka rounded out the rest of the top 10.
- Street lamps make golden, by Jane Shlensky*
- tonight, by Rosemary Nissen-Wade*
- The day we kayaked, by Lori Desrosiers*
- There is no such thing, by flood
- "summer (l.a.)titudes," by honoluakane
- power boat floating, by Linda H.
- echoes rise and fall, by Tracy Davidson
- "Sway," by Mama Zen
- Little fluff of seed, by Kit Cooley
- "Clear Direction," by Kimiko Martinez
Congratulations to everyone in the Top 10! With hundreds of tanka submitted, it truly is something to be recognized in the Top 10. Also, thank you to everyone who shared their tanka. There were so many that resonated. In fact, I had to complete several passes before I even came close to having a "short list," which was actually still about 50 tanka long.
I hope to see everyone for the next WD Poetic Form Challenge, which should be any day now.
*****
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
