Review Article
This Tanka Whirl: Sanford Goldstein
This Tanka Whirl: Sanford Goldstein ISBN 0-9702457-3-4 US$ 10 Clinging Vine Press, PO Box 231, Coinjock NC27923 USA
The history of tanka writing in the west is very short. Most of the journals devoted to the form, and many of the contemporary writers interested in it, can claim an enthusiasm going back barely ten years or so. Sanford Goldstein, however, as this book points out, ‘has been writing tanka for thirty-eight years’. He was also the first to translate Yosano Akiko’s Tangled Hair: Selected Tanka from Midaregami which was published in 1971 and was no doubt one of the means by which the form was introduced more widely.
He, if anyone therefore, has a right to include as his aim the desire to ‘broaden the content of tanka’. The contents page of This Tanka Whirl is indeed broad. Loosely grouped into nine sections, the subjects covered range from children’s games to poems invoking Ahab and Moby Dick, and poems on the writing of tanka itself.
Sex is not left out either and the substitutions section delights with its sly sublimations and humour:-
the handle of this racket these green balls, and this celibate me! |
trying to burn up calories and something else this June day |
Goldstein quotes Takuboku saying that ‘tanka is a diary of the emotional life of the poet’ and there is certainly more concern here with the writer’s own thoughts and experiences than with the natural world. At times, as with the Tanka Gyrations section, I found the concerns with writing a little too self-absorbed:-
my output of poems lessened day by day reduced by life-length and still still how wide my tanka world |
it’s on paper I live my other life the life that has no causes to uphold no core to suck |
And some of the more enquiring pieces are not averse to rhetorical questions of the odd declamatory tone as in these two from Moby Dick:-
Ishmael where did you learn to record as if even tanka were meant to hurl away worlds? |
lift me, muse, into Ahab’s language, dark peripheries surrounded by white |
Above all, these are engaged poems - pieces trying to push the boundaries of what tanka can be used to express. Sometimes, too, they can be moving, as with:-
at times, mother,
with your peripheral vision
you called me by some other name
as if you wanted
twice the love
Diversity rather than consistency is the merit of this book. The intention to bring a design and structure to a very free-ranging, left-field, collection is reflected in the typographical play of the section titles which adds life and style to the book but also seems rather arbitrary and twitchy.
The poems are interspersed with dry-point etchings by Kazuaki Wakui and a mention must be made of the beautiful image on the cover by the same artist, though again, the art-work seems a bit divergent from the tone of the poems.
Lively and engaging in presentation, This Tanka Whirl is energetic and attention-grabbing. I enjoyed most of the poems very much despite a minor accident at the middle page...
staple bound chap book
blood
on the centre fold
Page(s) 67-68
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