Category Archives: Tanka Prose

A Nomination is Announced

16 Replies

Leaves and frost – Wilford, Nottingham

I’ve just had a newsletter through from the Tanka Society of America, and in it they have a list of the people they have put through as nominees for the Pushcart Prize. Those of you who think I am called Quercus (which was a name I go by the accident of working for Quercus Community when I started the blog) will wonder why I’m bothering to tell you this. Those of you who know my real name will note that it appears on the list, and all will become clear.

Although I am quite pleased with it, it’s important to remember that it’s only a nomination. I have won nothing.  On the other hand, an editor (or in this case two editors) have picked me out as being the writer of one of the six best things they have published this year. Pleasing as that is, there’s a big difference between a nomination and winning a prize. However, like the Oscars, people do note in their biographical notes that they are nominees. This is handy, as I’ve never yet won anything for writing. In fact I’ve never been a runner-up either – just “highly commended”. Twice in twenty years. You will not find me mentioned anywhere as an overnight success.

Heron at Clumber Park

I did get into the Red Moon Anthology a couple of times, I also slipped out again, as you are only as good as your last poem.  The first year I was in, I worried about never making it again. The next time, I worried less, but it wasn’t a great year and I didn’t write anything good enough to be chosen. That was depressing, but also made me concentrate a bit more, so I have bounced back. Of course, the trick is making sure I keep the quality coming.

Pushcart Prize Nominations for 2025

November 25, 2025

The Tanka Society of America is pleased to announce the following nominations for The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses LI anthology, as selected by Ribbons editors Liz Lanigan and Susan Weaver.

For those of you who are interested, this poem was turned down three times before it was accepted and became my most “successful” poem to date.  I actually think I may have written better poems last year, but that is how it goes. I certainly wrote worse ones!

Robin at Clumber, Nottinghamshire

 

The Dog-Eared Page 

Stumbling, after treading on my trouser cuffs, I fall against the wall. I have grown portly, and my waist has dropped, making my trouser legs too long. It is a hazard of old age I had not anticipated and I, like Prufrock, must wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Balding, sniggered at, ignored by singing sirens, I stagger on a one-way trip through the strange country that is old age. I never thought, when I first read Eliot as a teen, that I was looking at a route map of my life.

the road ahead
is shorter than the one
behind
crowded with regrets
and tests I did not pass

 

Two Acceptances and Plans for Writing and a Conservatory Roof

14 Replies

Tree cutting on the island.

It happened again. It’s now January 3 and I have only published one post. I am now sitting up in the middle of the night trying not to fall too far behind.

I slept in late as a result of my nocturnal writing last night, allied to a late night for New Year. Then I watched antiques on TV, fell asleep in my chair, woke just before Julia returned from the cafe, did enough typing to make it look like I had been working and stopped for tea and cake, a visit from my sister with tarpaulins for tomorrow and watched quizzes. All in all, I did not distinguish myself with industry. Tomorrow? You are probably asking. Tomorrow we are emptying the conservatory and as long as the snow holds off we should have a new conservatory roof by the end of next week.

Black Headed Gull

Finally, 12 months after taking possession, we should be water-tight and fully repaired. We would be 100% functional if it wasn’t for the fault on the light switches in the hallway that started over Christmas and the back gate which is starting to fall apart. Annoyingly, in the old days, although I never meddled with electrics, I could have built a new gate in a day. Now I will have to pay someone to do it. Is there no end to household repairs?

Meanwhile, back with the writing, I have heard back from one of the editors I submitted to on 30th December. That’s fine service, and two more acceptances to add to my 2025 tally. That takes me to 53 for the year. It’s also means I have a number of rejects to form the basis for my submissions this month. I may well junk my haiku, as I very rarely manage to sneak one in but the returned haibun and tanka will all do for resubmission.

Mandarin drake at Arnot Hill Park, Nottinghamshire

Little and Large!

I have started a couple of new haibun too, having listed my work for the month ahead. It’s on an archaic spreadsheet – or “written on a piece of paper” as we used to call it, and I am feeling more organised. When I feel organised I always seem able to do more work. I won’t list my calculations, but I’m going to need to be organised if I have any chance of improving on last year, particularly as I want to improve my quality and increase my range.

The Heron is back again. Arnot Hill Park

 

 

Reading About Myself in Google

16 Replies

Robin

I’ve just been checking myself on Google. It’s not a pursuit for the faint-hearted or the modest.

I am, it seems,  a prominent British haibun poet and my work is frequently published in leading haiku and haibun journals where it is a regular fixture in journals like Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands Haibun, and the Wales Haiku Journal. Another entry records that I am a contemporary writer known for my haibun, often featured in journals like Contemporary Haibun Online, where my works explore everyday observations, life changes, and poignant reflections on subjects like old mills, cormorants, funerals, and war-torn landscapes, showcasing my keen eye for detail and emotional depth within short, evocative pieces. 

It then cites a  Guardian article about me and has a line that says “AI responses may include mistakes”

They are not wrong about that.

Robin

The Simon Wilson in the Guardian is younger than me, better groomed, more successful and, above all, Australian.

There are many Simon Wilsons spread around the place, including several who are poets or journalists, so there is plenty of room for confusion. However, much of what they say is factually accurate even though it has been fashioned into something capable of giving a misleading picture of me and my work. “Prominent” and “fixture” are both pushing the boundaries of accuracy, to be fair, and some of the other stuff is rather flattering too. However it’s nice to see AI in action. I am now aware that it has been programmed to add a veneer of sophistication and success to our achievements and, as such will definitely be taking over the world. It’s easy to resist an evil genius, but far harder to be cynical about flattery. Who doesn’t like to be described as “prominent” and “a regular fixture”? I can already feel myself beginning to admire AI for its good taste.

Robin in the Garden Centre cafe

 

 

 

A Plan is Born

8 Replies

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Plans for next year include writing more, writing better, managing my time and, most importantly, finding new markets. I’ve done over 80 articles on coins and related subjects but they have all been published in the lower levels of society journals.  I don’t want to be rude about them, but it’s not really a challenge getting into something where you are one of two regular contributors and they are read by about six people.

The situation with the articles is that I am either going to have to up my game or stop writing them and use the time for something else. In my first stint as a poet I wrote for new magazines and those known to be easier to get into. It produced results, but when I restarted a few years ago I aimed for the better quality magazines. It has gone quite well and I feel like I have produced something worth doing.

Next year, instead of producing 85+ articles for society Facebook pages and the like, I want to appear at least 12 times in magazines which pay and the journals of the more serious  kind. I think 12 is realistic, just as 50 (again) is realistic for poetry.  That’s why the target is now set at 60 and 15 – there’s no point in sitting back and feeling complacent. At the same time, I still want to support the societies I’m in but I’m going to reduce my output to around 50. I’ve asked other people to help but they haven’t responded, or have made excuses, and they can’t complain if I do other things.

Photo by Roman Koval on Pexels.com

That, of course, is the easy bit. I now have to work out how I’m going to manage my time and actually achieve the targets. That’s the trouble with planning to write more – the first day or two will be taken up with planning. And I just remembered that one of the regular magazines has pulled out.  That will be six fewer slots to aim for.

I will, to be honest, simply send more poetry out and develop a new range of work. I’ve never done a haiga, for instance, which is a photograph with a haiku. Nor have I ever tried any of the linked forms where you put haiku or tanka together to form longer poems. It also feels like time to get back into free verse. And there you go – a plan is born.

Orange Parker Pen

Using the pen pictures reminds me once again that my efforts at product placement have not met with much success. Either that or my complimentary Parker pen has been lost in the post.

Next year I may lower my sights a bit and use pictures of snack food.

 

Thirty! Forty six!

10 Replies

Something strange happened this afternoon. The day, having started as Friday (I even wrote about it being Friday) but by lunchtime it had become Saturday. I even started planning for “tomorrow” thinking it was Sunday. This has never happened before. I have sometimes struggled with what day it is, and have needed to gather my thoughts, but I do not remember changing days in mid flow.

This would be just another amusing anecdote, but after the cabbage episode I am beginning to have some serious doubts regarding my mental capacity. The advantage is that after having one “Saturday” I am now able to have an extra day at the weekend. The disadvantage is that, being retired, the concepts of “weekend” and “extra day” now have little meaning.

On a more fun note, I tried a pickled egg today. They have been in the fridge for two weeks now, which is the minimum time suggested by the Hairy Bikers in the recipe. They are OK. I will check again in two more weeks, as they did say a month was better. The vinegar is diluted with water in the recipe, and has some sugar in it. Currently, the taste is slightly sweet and the vinegar lacks bite. I will do another lot without water or sugar and see how they go. After that I may need to look at the quality of vinegar. I’m currently using the cheapest, and it may be false economy. However, it does cut the grease effectively when wiping down the hob.

I’ve had two acceptances today, so I’m quite cheerful. One needed a minor edit and a discussion on quotation marks. I was cheery and cooperative and pretended to care about punctuation. This brings the number of acceptances up to 46 for the year and I’m happy that I will probably make it to 50. In artistic terms this doesn’t matter. Forty nine or 51 are much of a muchness, but 60 has a psychological value. Total submissions are 70 so far with another 10 planned. It is significantly short of my  target of 100 submissions. There are several reasons for this, including a patchy work rate, a number of magazines cutting back on publication frequency and the fact that I haven’t written any non-Japanese style poetry this year. I may not make it next year either, as I am doing more numismatic writing. If you take them into consideration I’m on target to do about 70 more, but as they are all for societies there is actually no quality threshold and I have a 100% acceptance rate – that’s not really proper writing.

Finally – food. I made a mushroom biriyani tonight. Well, I used a spice kit for biriyani. The actual ingredients and outcome were non-traditional. However, I used sweet potato, onions, peas, rice and mushrooms, so it was healthy. Of those, the red onions, sweet potato and peas were making their first appearance this week. That makes 30. I have the veg prepared for tomorrow, with swede and cabbage, so look likely to manage 32, possibly more if I eat some nuts.  I am happy with that, and happy I was able to source over 30 plant-based ingredients in the house without doing any special shopping.

And that is that for today. Pictures will be from October 2018. Many are from Clumber park in the days when they weren’t charging fro entry and I could actually walk.

 

It’s a Haibun

14 Replies

Here’s a poem for you. It was first published in The Haibun Journal in April 2025. I could say it’s a comment on art and the people who think that four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence is music. If I had a Masters Degree, as many poets seem to have, I could probably get away with that.

But I don’t. I have a City & Guilds in Poultry Production, so I settled for writing a piece about being desperate for inspiration. I’m told that writing poems about writing poetry is almost guaranteed to get you turned down because editors see so much of it, so I got lucky here. Well, I got lucky the third time I submitted it, which would make a good case study on persistence.

Originally it was a tanka prose but it became a haibun, removing the tanka and using a haiku that I’d previously had rejected when it was sent to a haiku magazine. “Three Minutes Thirty Three” was originally “Six Minutes Sixteen”, I added the bit about alliteration making it poetry and substituted “watching birds” for “watching daytime TV”. Whether those qualify as improvements I’m sure. There are probably a couple of tweaks I would make if I ever get round to that poetry book, but otherwise I’m happy with it, which is not something I say about all my published poems.

Anyway, this is the finished version. For now . . .

Two Hours Twenty Two

An hour and forty eight minutes pass before I dredge inspiration from the depths. I know this because I set a timer to put myself under pressure to produce. If John Cage can do 4′ 33”, I thought, I can do Two Hours Twenty Two. It’s not accurate, but it is alliterative, which makes it poetry. If I’d set off with Cage’s piece in mind, I would have settled for Three Minutes Thirty Three and passed the rest of the morning drinking tea and watching birds feed in the garden.

a blackcap
sings from tangled thorns
—the stalking cat

 

 

 

 

Poetry and Robins

11 Replies

 

Robin - singing

Robin – singing

a robin
sings to its mate
when was the last time
I sang
for you?

That is my latest publication. It was a surprise, because I hadn’t ben told it was accepted. Fortunately I always check before sending things again, as editors don’t like simultaneous submissions. It’s in a German publication called Chrysanthemum. After waiting a while, I went to check on the website, assuming I’d been rejected but wanting to double check, and found the magazine had already been published and I am on pages 226 and 227.. It was a pleasant surprise. They also translated it into German. I knew this was going to happen, but hadn’t anticipated the different look (using capital letters) or the different dynamic that would come from what seemed to be a reordering of words.

Here’s the German translation.

ein Rotkehlchen
singt für seine Gefährtin
wann habe ich
das letzte Mal
für dich gesungen?

Robin, Arnot Hill Park

I just fed it into an internet translator and it put it into English in almost exactly my words. This was a surprise, and a superb effort by the human translator. I have to admit I was expecting it to come back seriously scrambled due to the changes in word order I could see and because of previous experience with internet translations.

I also had a haibun published.

Lesson not learned
Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once
a Roman town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then
rose again. So many empires, so many layers of dust telling one and the same story

dreams of
a second chance
— one more grey dawn

I’m not quite sure what happened in the edit as the title and last line have been altered in the published version. Altered but possibly not improved. What do you think? The original version is shown below.

Lessons we have not learned

Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once a Romans town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then rose again. So many layers, so many stories they could tell. So many men forget all empires turn to dust.

dreams of
a second chance
—one more grey dawn

Robin at Rufford Abbey

That means that in the first four months of the year I have made 30 submissions and 22 have resulted in acceptance. However, before congratulating myself, I have to remember that the 30 submissions contained 151 poems. Normally a submission contains three haibun or tanka prose and the submissions of shorter poems at often 10-15 poems. So when I say I made 30 submissions and had 22 acceptances this 77% success record could also be calculated as also only 15%. It all depends on how you look at it.

Robin

 

 

 

 

My Theory of Timing Submissions

10 Replies

REsettling the plough

As it turned out, yesterday’s grand plan ground to a halt. With just sixteen days until the end of the month I need to start looking at haibun and tanka prose. I have, as usual, plenty of prose sections, but finding the right words for the haiku and tanka can be tricky. I have just about got enough for four submissions but |I need to get on with it as the final few short lines can end up taking a long time.

Just as I thought it was all coming back the hard facts indicate that I don’t have enough poems, and the ones I have, aren’t far enough advanced. There was a time when I used to have all my submissions queued up at the end of a month, waiting like caged greyhounds to hit the ground running as the new month  My theory was that if I was borderline but got in first, the later poems would have to be better than me to displace me and just being equally good would not be enough. Better, I thought, to be the first poem about getting old than the second, third or fourth. Poets are notorious for churning over the same few subjects, so if you can’t be original, or best, try being first.

Detail of the mouse

Now, as my energy declines, I find it hard enough just to scrape a few poems together by the end of the month. There is an advantage to this – the decisions seem to be faster and you have the rejects back in time to use them again in a timely manner. Using this system I have sometimes had a decision within hours, and the poems have been out again in a similar time span. I once had a poem that was rejected, submitted elsewhere and accepted within a space of days.

However, as things stand, I need twelve poems of usable quality. Time moves on, and those twelve are now my priority. The great recycling project will have to wait. editors often remark on the number of submissions they receive, but it’s also true that there are more editors out there than I can submit to. I just can’t write fast enough. October is a month with no haibun submissions planned, so the recycling can start then, as can the production of the next batch of haibun.

Two sizes of wheatsheaf loaf

Pictures are from September 2016 this time.

An Answer to a Haibun Question

8 Replies

For Paol Soren, who asked, and for anyone else who wants to know.

This is an explanation of Haibun.

This is someone else’s explanation of a Haibun.

And this is an example.

Pigs and cornflowers

The Thoughtful Pig

When I tell the pig that my latest scan is clear, it grunts and stretches out a bit more neck
for me to scratch.

My wife, when I gave her the same news, said: “What does that mean?”

How do I know? I’m not medically qualified. I assume it means they can’t find anything of
concern, and apart from regular monitoring, don’t intend doing anything else. When I point
this out, she tells me that being sarcastic, alongside being passive-aggressive, is one of my
major faults. When I point out that this is two faults, she adds pedantry to the list.

It isn’t difficult to kill someone, particularly when you have access to the internet, though
the advice you get is often qualified with reference to the trickiness of modern forensics,
and they all agree that a major difficulty is disposing of the body. Fortunately, I have pigs
and they will eat almost anything.

“One day,” I say, scratching dried flakes of mud from behind the listening ear, “one day . . .”

cornflower
blowing in the breeze
clouds gather overhead

That one was published in drifting sands last month.

This one is a tanka prose. It doesn’t have a Japanese name. It’s a tanka (five line poem) added to a prose section instead of a haiku. This one was published in Contemporary Haibun Online earlier in the year.

Angel with Spear, 1860s. By N H J Westlake or J M Allen. St Michael’s and All Angels, Derby

The Next Funeral

Amazon reviews indicate I am not the only person to have searched for a black tie with next day delivery. I could have sworn it was in the car’s glove compartment, neatly folded from the last time I wore it. My one white shirt hangs, ghostlike, from the bedroom picture rail and my timeless drab tweed jacket hangs next to it. The tie, I suddenly remember, is in my jacket pocket.

Tomorrow, as I nod to cousins, we will remark that we really must try to meet without someone dying. My uncle, who has just turned ninety, tells his brother in law to wrap up warm or he’ll be next. One day, I suppose, I will realise there is no obvious candidate to be next . . .

in church the sun
shines through an angel’s robe
bubbles trapped in blue glass
I wonder whose breath is
captured forever

St Joseph and the Angel c 1920 by Wilhelmina Geddes.

Sixteen Swimming Swans

11 Replies

 

Mute Swan – Rufford Abbey

This morning I thought of several poems whilst I was on the way back from dropping Julia off. This is the same time frame where I used to have all my best ideas. My brain is awake but the task of driving on a fairly clear road is not too demanding. At that point thoughts come into my head. I actually had my first idea before we left home, had a second as I dropped her off and had several more on the way home. No pad, no voice recorder, just me repeating things to myself.

When I reached home I noted the ideas down and wrote the prose sections for five haibun. That’s more than I did in the last months – the ones I’ve submitted have all been written for ages and I have merely worked my way through them without originating anything. They have had a few tweaks, and have needed a haiku or a tanka here and there, but generally all my recent acceptances have been written for months. That, of course, is how it is supposed to be. People who know these things advise leaving work to mature.

Mute Swan at Clumber Park

I just looked back and realise that I have had three months this year when I have submitted nothing and that everything I have had accepted since March has been, and been rejected, at least once.

Since this morning I have had two more ideas, though I have not settled to write them yet. Even poets have to wash up and drink tea. One of the ideas is actually about drinking tea.

Swan at National Arboretum

If you’ve ever followed my creative process you will have noticed that things change and I’m more of an artisan than an artist. I don’t really have a creative process, despite what I just wrote. In three months it’s quite likely that the reflections on drinking tea will have become a poem about eating sandwiches. That’s how it goes. That’s how my poem about two swans flying by became a poem about sixteen swans swimming, and was eventually accepted and published as a poem about a cormorant.

If a poet’s studio is a serene place of beauty where words flow and great thoughts are written in flowing calligraphy, mine is more like a backstreet workshop where power tools scream and where things are bolted together roughly and beaten into shape with hammers.

Eventually I will rewrite the one about the two swans flying by.  I liiked it and it contained an idea that didn’t work with cormorants.

Guess what the theme of today’s photos is . . .