Featured Writer: Jenny Ward Angyal

First-person reflections on the art of writing tanka prose

at age five
my first poem, an ode
to lampshades—
trying ever since to grasp
the nuances of light

It’s true. I still have that poem somewhere, penciled on brown paper in my brother’s hand because I hadn’t yet learned how to print. The last two lines are also true, and give as good an account as any of why I write. But it took me over half a century of exploring many kinds of poetry to discover the form that would become my preferred tool for the task.

I first learned about tanka from Jane Reichhold’s little book, Writing and Enjoying Haiku. I had dabbled in haiku, but I felt an instantaneous affinity for tanka because it combines the precision and concision of haiku with just enough room to explore the resonances between inner and outer worlds, between psyche and cosmos. And I immediately discovered the affinity that tanka have for each other—the ease and grace with which they join together into larger structures. In fact, my first published tanka comprised a prize-winning sequence in the last issue of Jane Reichhold’s Tanka Splendor. I proceeded to write many more tanka sets and sequences, as well as individual tanka, but it was another four or five years before I penned my first tanka prose:

Winter Starlight

The news from my son’s group home is not good. In a fit of manic rage, he has ripped the big toenail from his crippled foot. As if I weren’t baffled enough already, I read up on quantum mechanics—why not? I learn that if two particles interact even once, they remain forever connected in some paradoxical way. Even across great distances, their states change in tandem, faster than the speed of light.

prayer
for the unbeliever—
quantum entanglement
my only stay
against your distant misery

This was written over a decade ago, at a difficult time for my autistic son, who is now happy and stable. I wrote the tanka first. After it was rejected a couple of times, I realized that it needed more context to be intelligible, so I added the prose. That is one of the very few times I have written the tanka first and the prose second. Typically, I find that adding prose to an extant tanka doesn’t work, because it is so difficult to avoid repeating the content of the poem; the prose version of the idea demands a whole new tanka to complement it.

Although “Winter Starlight’s” method of composition may have been anomalous, its content is not. I have always been interested in the intersection of science and poetry as complementary ways of knowing, different but equally valid ways of exploring the wonder, awe and mystery of the world. However, many of my tanka prose, especially the early ones, are drawn directly from memory—stories I always wanted to tell, and which seemed to need the stronger narrative structure afforded by prose. Tanka sequences can hint at narrative, but they are typically more impressionistic, more like collage.

The Filly

Free for the first time in her life, the mare tears up and down the hilly paddock, sweat and sunlight shining on her burnished chestnut flanks. The girl watches for a moment, feeling the horse’s joy in her own bones. Then she takes up the pitchfork and returns to the sweet scent of hay.

the dance
of dust motes
in a shaft of light
all the selves
I’ve ever been

The wild tattoo of hoofbeats stops with a thud. The girl jumps lightly from the hayloft’s wide door. The mare has slipped and fallen in her careening flight and lies at the top of a stone retaining wall, her legs uphill from her body. Her head is flung back, barbed wire taut across her throat. Shouting to her friend to run for help, the girl drops to her knees and clasps the mare’s chin in both hands, pulling her head back to relieve the pressure of wire across the windpipe.

diving deeper
into the dark pool 
of an eye—
currents of trust
sweep us together

A backhoe, men with wire-cutters. They take forever to arrive. A makeshift sling under the horse’s belly. The yellow machine straining and bucking. At last she’s on her feet, trembling.

seventy years on
and still the halter chafes—
I leap 
astride the bare back 
of a fast-running dream

In this piece, as in almost every tanka prose after my first attempt, I wrote the prose first, the tanka second, and the title last. I rarely know what the title will be until I see what I’ve said. The horse in question is an adult mare, yet I chose as my title “The Filly,” in reference to the young human female in the story, for whom this was a seminal growing-up experience.

In composing the prose, I made multiple false starts that included extensive background information, all of which proved to be merely scaffolding to be cut away once I figured out where my story really begins. It’s an old memory, so I chose to write the prose in the third person (“the girl” being my 15-year-old self) to reflect that distance. The first tanka explores the paradox that the writer and the girl are and are not the same person. All of the tanka, being equally true of past and present selves, are cast in the first person—and all three delve into metaphor.

Which brings up the most significant difference between tanka prose and haibun (which I also write). Tanka, being more lyrical than haiku and also freer in the use of metaphor and other figurative language, affords the writer more ways of expressing both emotion and interconnection than are possible in haiku. I probably could have written “The Filly” as haibun, but I do not think I would have found it as satisfying. I do not personally find much difference between the prose of haibun and the prose of tanka prose, but tanka and haiku create very different resonances with that prose.

From telling personal stories I felt drawn to tell the stories of some of our fellow travelers on this planet. I have an abiding love for the Earth and for the wondrous diversity of life forms who share it with us—and a deep grief at their destruction.

Renascence

No cougars are supposed to roam the Appalachian mountains. They’re supposed to be extinct here, killed off or driven out by logging half a century ago. And yet … here and there a single footprint lingers in damp earth, a wisp of hair clings to rusted wire, a blurred snapshot betrays the image of a ghost-cat slipping through shadows.

And once, echoing down the mountainside where I stumbled mile after mile over rain-slicked rocks in gathering dusk—once, a long, unearthly scream to pierce the heart.

I utter a prayer 
into the darkness
that enfolds me—
may all the vanished ones return 
when at long last we’re gone

This piece grew from the haunting incident recounted in the second paragraph. What did I hear? I still don’t know. I know only what I’m told … and what I hope. I added those two elements to flesh out the piece. And I wrote the tanka to express the metaphorical darkness in which we are indeed lost.

“Renascence” is one of the 23 tanka prose and 6 haibun that appear in my book Earthbound (2022), an environmentally themed volume which is, so far, my only collection composed exclusively of tanka prose and haibun. Many of those pieces had their genesis in news stories about endangered beings whose lives and deaths I wanted to celebrate and grieve. Doing so changes nothing, but I feel compelled to bear witness. I feel that interweaving tanka into these stories helps to elevate the writing beyond mere reportage and to interject an essential personal element—and also, I hope, may lead the reader to share my own wonder and sorrow. One such piece is the closest I’ve yet come to writing fiction, although it, too, is based on a true story.

A Fearful Symmetry

Back and forth across the restroom floor the man sweeps his mop.
Back and forth along the fence the big cat paces.

The man stops. The tiles gleam under the fluorescent lights. He leans his mop in a corner and steps out into the warmth of a Florida winter night. The old year is drawing to a close but there is nothing new in the man’s life.

The zoo is closed, the mobs of visitors long gone. No one is about. It can’t hurt to take a break, to slip away to where the animals are. The man longs for the scent of wildness, the scent of a freedom caged like his own.

Back and forth along the fence the big cat paces. Even in the darkness he sees the human figure approaching. The scent is unfamiliar—not one of those who bring him meat and speak to him in low voices rumbling like a purr.

The outer fence is only as high as the man’s heart. Impulsively, he scrambles over it, sensing the wild thing moving in the darkness beyond the second barrier. His hands find the cold metal of the inner fence. He craves the warm touch of fur and breath.

He thrusts his hand through the mesh.

Later, the man lies in a hospital bed, swathed in bandages. A human swarm surrounds him, ministering to his needs.

The wild one lies dead at the back of a cage. Only a handful of his own kind are left on Earth.

tyger, tyger—
in a mirror crazed 
with cracks
I can no longer find 
your face in my reflection

Somewhere I had read the bare facts of this episode, which took place at a zoo in Florida. I wanted to imagine my way into the minds of both man and tiger, to try to understand how this tragic encounter might have unfolded. I perceived a sad parallel between the caged life of the tiger and the restricted life of the man, a parallel I expressed by borrowing a phrase from Blake’s poem “The Tyger” for my title. And I used the tanka to explore the way in which, I believe, modern life has divorced most of us from seeing our deep kinship with other Beings.

As indicated in “Winter Starlight,” my desire to explore and understand the world I live in extends far beyond this lovely little planet where I dwell. The following piece was inspired by my grief at observing the ravages of dementia, leading me to ponder the ultimate nature of mind and brain, self and cosmos.

Stardust

Where does poetry go when the shimmering web of 86 billion neurons begins to lose its shine? Do words slip down the silver threads of axons into oblivion as 500 trillion connections disconnect? What becomes of poems as yet unwritten when three pounds of matter starts to shrivel? The doctors only shrug.

And how did poems arise from that blubbery blob of jelly in the first place?

Maybe when the jelly melts they return to their origin in the vast net of Indra—that jeweled tapestry whose every juncture bears a multifaceted gem; whose every gem is reflected in every other. A glittering singularity impossible to pick apart or grasp or measure, the warp and weft of all that is.

the tidal pull
of the Milky Way
on comets
	and on fireflies...
this flickering in my mind

For me, the genesis of a poem lies in just such a “flickering in the mind.” But what to do with that flicker before it is snuffed out? In presenting here a few of my own tanka prose pieces and their origins, I hope to give the reader an inkling of how I go about molding that first, unformed idea. My practical advice for those aspiring to write tanka prose would include the following:

First, follow your passion. Tanka has always been a vehicle for the expression of human emotion, and tanka prose needs to follow suit. Write what you care about most deeply, and show the reader why, so that they can feel and share that passion. E.M. Forster has written, “Only connect! … Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted…” Infusing your prose with tanka, and with the spirit of tanka, is a way to forge those connections—between fact and feeling, between abstract ideas and concrete images, between poetry and science, between writer and reader.

Second, the common advice to “write what you know” is sound enough, but I suggest you also write what you don’t know. Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, advised his friend to “love the questions.” Write what fascinates, baffles, and amazes you. Use tanka prose to explore what you don’t understand. Don’t expect tidy answers, only more questions. You’ll never come to the end of it.

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Notes

• “at age five” first appeared in A Hundred Gourds 3:2, March 2014.

• “Winter Starlight” first appeared in Haibun Today 7:2, June 2013.

• “The Filly” first appeared in contemporary haibun online 16:3, December 2020, where it was the Featured Tanka Prose. It was reprinted in contemporary haibun 16, Red Moon Press, 2021.

• “Renascence” first appeared in contemporary haibun online 18:1, April 2022, and was
reprinted in contemporary haibun 18, Red Moon Press, 2023.

• “A Fearful Symmetry” first appeared in Drifting Sands Haibun #14, March 2022. The background story can be found here. William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” can be found here.

• “Stardust” first appeared in contemporary haibun online 21:2, August, 2025.

• The E. M. Forster quote “Only connect!” may be found near the beginning of Chapter XXII of his novel Howards End.

• The relevant passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet can be found here.

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About the Author

Jenny Ward Angyal has written poetry since the age of five and Japanese short-form verse since 2008. The author or co-author of seven books of tanka, tanka sequences, and tanka-prose and haibun, she’s a global moderator of the Inkstone Poetry Forum. She lives with her husband and one Abyssinian cat on a small organic farm in central North Carolina.

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