About This Issue’s Guest Tanka Prose Editor: Jenny Ward Angyal

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.

She was the Featured Writer in contemporary haibun online 21.3, where she wrote:

 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.

To read the full Featured Writer essay, click here.

---