About This Issue’s Guest Tanka Prose Editor: Margi Abraham
Margi Abraham is a free-verse and tanka poet, living with blue gum trees, kookaburras, and rainbow lorikeets on the northern edge of Sydney, Australia. A retired urban and transport planner, she has a Master of Arts in English Literature from the University of Sydney and a passion for reading and writing poetry.
Her tanka and tanka prose have been published in print and online journals in Australia, New Zealand, USA, United Kingdom and Japan. Her free verse has been published in various anthologies and the Canberra Times. A member of the Bottlebrush Tanka Group, she is also a book addict and a long-term member of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, giving lectures and writing articles and reviews for its publications.
She writes:
Poetry has always been a part of me from about the age of ten. I wrote poems throughout the years of my childhood and prolifically as an angsty teenager. Later, I wooed my husband with verse! The busy years of university study (in urban planning), work, and child-raising left me little time, but you could still find me scribbling poems at the kitchen table at odd hours. Studying English literature was unfinished business, so I somehow managed to slowly complete my master’s degree, focusing on poetry, life stories, and storytelling. I rarely sent poems out into the world—something I’m still not very good at.Decades later, tanka found me by surprise not long after I retired from paid work. I had joined a small, online poetry group of women, Muse, which continues to write and review each other’s free-verse poetry. During the Covid lockdowns in 2021, fellow Muser and well known haibun poet Marilyn Humbert gave the group a Zoom tutorial on the art of tanka. I had heard of haiku, but tanka was new to me. I took to it like breathing fresh air. Once my first-ever submitted tanka was published in Eucalypt, I was hooked. I have also loved exploring and writing tanka prose—more story space to weave threads of ideas, emotions, and connections. I will always be grateful to my mentor, Marilyn, and my other tanka friends for encouraging my practice and extending my understanding.
Australian journalist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks (who doesn’t write poetry) recently said that she thinks “poets are the Olympic champions of literature.” I am always training for the marathon and cherish the international connections made with the work of tanka and haibun poets and editors through journals such as cho.