“Tanka Take Home” Featured Poet

Interview facilitated by Firdaus Parvez and Kala Ramesh

Michael Dylan Welch writes haiku, tanka, longer poetry, essays, reviews, and other content, and documents his writing life on his Graceguts website. This site includes a section on tanka, featuring numerous poems and sequences, and essays on tanka. Michael founded the Tanka Society of America in 2000, and has organized all six of the society’s conferences, with a seventh one scheduled for San Francisco in September of 2025. With Emiko Miyashita, he translated the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a thirteenth-century collection of waka poems (later known as tanka). In 2012, one of their translations from this book was featured on the back of 150 million U.S. postage stamps. Michael also cofounded the Haiku North America conference in 1991 and the American Haiku Archives in 1996, and founded the Seabeck Haiku Getaway in 2008 and National Haiku Writing Month in 2010. He also served two terms as poet laureate for Redmond, Washington, where he is president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword and curator (since 2006) of the monthly SoulFood Poetry Night reading series. Michael is originally from England and grew up there and in Ghana, Australia, and Canada, and has lived in Sammamish, Washington (near Seattle) since 2003. In 2023, he and his Japanese wife became U.S. citizens.

1. Do you come from a literary background? What writers did you enjoy reading as a child? Did you write as a child?

A small bit of literary connection in my childhood came from being named after the poet Dylan Thomas, because my mother said she liked the name Dylan—although my parents gave that to me as a middle name, not my primary name. And thus, any literary connection snuck in through a back door. I used to dislike the name “Dylan” as a child, because the name was rare (and odd?) when we moved to Canada from England, but I grew to appreciate it as a young adult. I’ve written about my name in an essay on my website. See “What’s in a Name? Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Poetry.”

We had books in our house when I was a child, but not a lot, and they were mostly nonfiction. My mother never liked reading novels (always true stories for her), and my dad read an occasional book about World War II, if any (I read some of them too, such as about dambusters and Colditz). Both of my parents had been evacuated during the war, as children in England (I’m a British citizen too). So, although we had books, I don’t remember a single book of poetry, and the books we had filled just a couple of small bookcases. But I loved writing and reading, and my mother took us kids to the library regularly. I especially remember devouring the adventure stories of Enid Blyton, one of the world’s most popular authors that most Americans (at least) have never heard of. She has sold more than 600 million books and is one of the world’s most translated authors ever. I later read a lot of Hardy Boys mysteries, which were similar to the Blyton books I read. Fun adventures!

I did write as a child, too. I remember entering a school-wide poetry contest one year, maybe when I was in elementary school, at which I won all three honourable mentions, and all three of the top prizes. This was surely a validation to me as a fledgling writer, and the top poem (about not wanting to get my hair cut) was printed in the school yearbook. That was almost certainly my first “publication.” I also wrote a lot of poems as a kid, and I remember my mother sometimes helping me get the scansion right if I was trying to write a metered poem. That was validation, too. My mother had zero creative writing inclinations, but she had learned enough in her own school days to help me with the basics. In school, too, whenever we had essay assignments, I always wrote more than was required and tried extra hard to make the typing look beautiful, sometimes with pictures. I remember having to write a short research paper about the Panama Canal. I ended up writing a long story, in fiction, including Spanish phrases that I researched, about a canal pilot guiding a ship from one end of the canal to the other, working in all the factual details I could find (the encyclopaedia was my friend). I still have that paper in a box, though I’ve lost most others. As a teenager, too, I kept long diaries recording the details of family trips (my dad was a professor and we had long summers off, and I documented two-month trips to Scandinavia, to Yugoslavia and Greece, to Western Canada and the Western United States, sometimes including poems with my prose descriptions and facts about the trips—along with maps and postcards and tourist brochures. I still have all these books—and I guess they were indeed my first “books.”

And I remember Mrs. Foster, an old lady next door to us (I used to cut her grass). When she heard that I wrote poetry, she invited me numerous times into her living room to read my poems for her. She would give me her encouragement and advice—but never share any of her own poetry, though I did recall seeing a book she had published, perhaps self-published. I like to think my visits brightened her day. I wish I still had some of those early poems I shared, whatever they were.

I suppose these experiences show me to have been on the path to poetry early on, don’t you think? I was always writing—poems, stories, and I enjoyed English class assignments. My teacher, Mr. Goodburn, said he wanted to keep two of my assignments to use as examples to show other students how to do them well. One was an exercise on employing emphasis in writing, techniques I still use today, and another on parts of speech and literary devices, in which I had colour-coded all the parts of several paragraphs I wrote to demonstrate each of the techniques. I was given 20 out of 10 points on one assignment. That’s a validation! I remember him writing on one of my high school assignments, “You will make a fine essay writer someday.” Maybe he was right.

In tenth grade, I remember Mr. Goodburn teaching us about haiku (merely as a syllable-counting exercise). I latched onto it. Actually, it was nothing special to me (yet) but became one of the many types of poems I wrote regularly. All my haiku from this time, from 1976 to 1987 or so, were strictly 5-7-5 syllables, all had titles, often rhymed, and had no understanding of haiku as a literary art whatsoever. I was able to collect 46 of these early “haiku” on my website (all written by 1984, by which time I was 22 years old) at “Godawful Early Haiku.” In the summer of 1987, though, I purchased my first book of haiku, Bashō translations by Lucien Stryk, which I remember getting at a Kinokuniya Bookstore near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. These were highly minimalist translations, but for some reason it never struck me that they weren’t 5-7-5. Other translations I read weren’t 5-7-5 either, but I never quite noticed. Later that fall, in November of 1987, at a mall bookstore in Costa Mesa, California, I bought the second edition of Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology, and that book changed my life. Something like 90 percent of the poems (yes, I counted) were not 5-7-5, and on reading that book and beginning to understand why these poems were not 5-7-5, I shifted my understanding of haiku from form to content. This was monumental. My haiku immediately improved, and dramatically so. I discovered that there was a lot more to haiku than I thought.

2. How did you get started as a poet? What was it about tanka that inspired you to embrace this ancient form of poetry? In short, why do you keep writing tanka.

Having written regularly as a child and young adult, it was natural for me to eventually try publishing my work, starting with haiku, though it took me till graduate school to start doing this. I remember the first dollar bill I got from Robert Spiess in response to my very first submission to Modern Haiku, in the summer of 1988. The poem was “my window opens / a hundred frogs / sing to the moon.” And I had a longer poem, “The Clarinet,” also published in 1988. These were my first publications outside of school journals.

Starting around this time, my connection to the haiku community through the Haiku Society of America and the Haiku Poets of Northern California (I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in late 1988) proved to be rich and welcoming. I soon became involved, starting with my coediting HPNC’s Woodnotes haiku journal (extensively documented on my website). I don’t remember when I wrote my first tanka, but it was probably around 1990. In the early 1990s I remember writing in one of my notebooks that there ought to be a Tanka Society of America. In 1994 I published what I believed to be the first tanka anthology in English, Footsteps in the Fog (it preceded Jane and Werner Reichhold’s Wind Five Folded anthology by several months), although I’ve since learned that there was apparently another somewhat obscure anthology of English-language tanka around 1974, I think. Whatever the case, Footsteps in the Fog was an outgrowth of my growing interest in tanka.

I wrote in my notebook again, at least once or twice more in later years, that there ought to be a tanka society. And in late 1999 I thought, well, no one is doing this, so why don’t I start such a society myself? I remember corresponding with Sanford Goldstein about my idea, and he was supportive and enthusiastic. I was going to have an inaugural meeting in San Francisco and I arranged for my nearby haiku neighbour (and fellow tanka writer) Paul O. Williams to be vice president. I figured a society would need a newsletter, so I wrote to Pamela Miller Ness in New York City to ask if she would be the editor. At the time, Randy Brooks was organizing the Global Haiku Festival at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, and it occurred to me that that might be a better place to have a first meeting, engaging people from across the country instead of just California. Randy provided a meeting room, and I organized that first meeting on April 14, 2000. I proposed the Tanka Society of America name and was elected as first president. For me, tanka was an outgrowth of haiku, something similar yet broader, able to employ a greater variety of Western poetic techniques, more overtly emotional or subjective. Basically, tanka was another arrow in my poetry quiver.

I remember reading books such as Jane Hirshfield’s Ink Dark Moon and having periods of following its translations as models, writing heightened love poems. And I remember reading Sanford Goldstein’s translations of Takuboku and others, seeing a more raw or visceral approach to tanka, and I tried writing that way too. I welcomed all possibilities. And while I continue to write more haiku than tanka, even decades later, tanka still fill a hole that haiku and other poetry cannot fill. Tanka has a bit more elbow room. It’s hard to describe what that difference is, but it’s akin to moving from chord to melody, and turning a notch more lyrical than haiku—and yet in a more concise way than longer poetry.

3. How do you develop a tanka? Please guide us through the stages of a poem.

I tend to work out poems in my head extensively, especially haiku and tanka, before I write them down. I say them to myself in my head—equivalent, perhaps, to what Bashō meant when he said of haiku revision, “a thousand times on the tongue.” Rhythm and sound has always mattered to me as much as meaning. I have learned to trust some amount of intuition married with experience that helps make decent poems happen. But because I work them out in my head, I don’t have records of repeated revisions the way some people might. I’m more likely, though, to abandon a poem than to revise it to death, perhaps being more interested in writing new poems instead of revising existing ones on the page.

My process, once I work out a poem in my head, is to write it down in one of my notebooks (I have dozens now). And then, although perhaps not immediately, I nearly always leave it alone, even forgetting it. Once I fill up a notebook, which could take more than a year, I eventually go back through the poems and decide which ones I might want to publish. By waiting all this time, I can see all the poems with fresh eyes, with greater objectivity. If the poem is still radiating energy and clarity to me, that’s a signal that the poem might be worth publishing. Then I write it out on an index card (sometimes revising as I go), and then I track the poem’s submission and publication history using the card. I’ll occasionally revise a poem once it’s on a card—I’m always open to any improvement—but many poems never have further revisions. Once a poem has been published, I add that index card to alphabetized boxes of cards for all my tanka (I keep haiku separately and track longer poems using a spreadsheet). It’s handy to have all these records, so I can quickly and easily look up publication credits for any poem, whenever I need that. The more you write, the more you need a system to manage your poems!

4. Who are your favourite tanka poets? In addition to tanka what other genres of poetry do you write or read? Tell us about some of the books you've enjoyed.

Among Japanese writers, I’m not sure I have favourites so much as I have poets whose work I happen to have read, again thinking of translations by Hirshfield and Goldstein, and by Janine Beichman, along with many other academic translators (Carter, Ueda, Watson, Sato, Keene, so many others). The poets they translated varied a great deal, from the vulnerable minimalism of Takuboku to the formal elevation of Ono no Komachi. But honestly, I don’t really have favourite tanka poets, and that includes English-language tanka too. Maybe it would be good to develop favourites, but I tend to focus on poems more than poets.

I also read (and write) a great deal of longer poetry. Kay Ryan, Mary Oliver, Dana Gioia, Jane Hirshfield, and Billy Collins are a few of my favourites, and E. E. Cummings (I’m a contributing editor to Spring, the journal of the E. E. Cummings Society). And let me also say Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky, among poets for children. I also enjoy anthologies of poetry, lately by James Crews and John Brehm. The themes in some anthologies can give poems context and accessibility that help to open them up. I recently read two large books of collected poetry by Linda Pastan and found many poems to enjoy, but also many that didn’t connect with me, perhaps because I had to work to give each poem context in my life—and sometimes there was no context, no connection. In contrast, I find much to connect with in the poems of Mary Oliver, and I’ve written an extensive essay on her theme of attention and how it applies to haiku poetry. In any case, it’s impossible to keep up with so many good poets.

Where I live near Seattle, I’m president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword that showcases poets regularly, and for nearly 20 years I’ve also curated a separate reading series called SoulFood Poetry Night. Both monthly events feature leading poets of the greater Seattle area and beyond, including Pulitzer-prize winners and other prominently published role-models. This has brought a lot of local poets to me, and I routinely read their books. This has taught me the value of being a successful “regional” poet. We can’t all have a national profile like Billy Collins. On the other hand (here’s an aside for you), David Navarro of the Arizona State Poetry Society once said, “Michael Dylan Welch is the Billy Collins of haiku.” I’m no Billy Collins, but maybe I’ve written a few decent haiku—and tanka. It’s true that building a regional reputation is worthwhile, something to be proud of. Haiku and tanka poets have the luxury of being part of niche communities where worldwide appreciation is possible, but it’s still admirable to embrace a regional appreciation too, especially when one puts haiku and tanka into a larger poetry perspective. But, building a reputation isn’t the goal—writing good poetry is.

As for books, I have about 14,000 of them, all of which are meticulously catalogued. I keep track of which ones I’ve read, too. In 2024 I read 101 books, and 99 the year before. That includes a lot of short haiku and tanka books, so not equivalent to reading that many novels! But it’s a lot of reading—I always have several books on the go at any given time. For 2024, that amounted to 7,896 pages or 21.57 pages per day (in a leap year). Favourite books were three poetry anthologies edited by James Crews, and poetry books by Robert Sund, Frank Samperi, and John Brehm. Among haiku books read in 2024, a few favourites were Dan Curtis’s First Notes, Deborah P Kolodji’s Vital Signs, John Brandi’s At It Again: New & Selected Haiku, Kristen Lindquist’s Island, Madoka Mayuzumi’s Kyoto Haiku, and paul m.’s Witness Tree, among others. There were some tanka books among my reading, too, but I need to read more tanka!

5. Can you give any advice to someone wanting to write and publish tanka? As an editor what are you looking for in a tanka that makes it most likely to get published?

The usual advice is to read more than you write. And read tanka widely—traditional love poems, experimental confessions, the extreme and the middle of the road. Translations as well as tanka in English. It’s good, too, I think, to try emulating these varieties. You may not master all possibilities, but you can give yourself exposure to them all. You’ll give yourself a broader palette to paint from. And when you write a poem, it may naturally come out one way or another. You may feel the impetus to write a love tanka in a formal style (and I don’t mean counting syllables), or want to be freewheeling, perhaps even embracing the bizarre or unexplainable (trusting the intuition). A wide reading experience will open doors to changing how you write, depending on the poem idea that first tickles you with inspiration.

As I mentioned before, I try to fill up an entire notebook before considering any of the poems for possible publication. That distance generates objectivity, enabling me to see even my own work freshly. It’s a percentage game. Write a lot. Then select the best for submitting to journals or contests. And then a smaller percentage will appear in print. And be selective once again to assemble the best of one’s published work for a cohesive book manuscript. Constant winnowing. It helps if one is reasonably prolific, and not everyone has that luxury, so another piece of advice, as your time allows, is to write more. Easy, right? Let yourself write badly, too, because if you write more, a percentage of your output won’t be bad, and if you write for the long haul, eventually you’ll amass a body of poems that are well worth publishing. It takes patience and perseverance. No shortcuts. And down the road, when you might put a book of tanka together, perhaps you’ll see themes or narrative connections. That might give rise to a manuscript that clicks together, rather than just being a disorderly assemblage of greatest hits. This means leaving out some excellent poems because they might not fit the flow. As they say, kill your darlings, or at least set some of them aside.

It’s been a while since I’ve edited tanka (the last time was in 2020 for the Tanka Society of America’s 20th anniversary members’ anthology, Dance into the World), but one thing I look for in haiku that would apply to tanka is surefootedness. I’m not sure how to describe it except to say that some poems just exude a sense of rightness, and that if I entertain a possible change, no matter how slight, I immediately sense why such a change wouldn’t work. The best poets refine everything, down to the punctuation and indents, word choice and rhythm, meaning and implication, not to mention the sequence of images. The puzzle is complete. And with many good poems I read, I don’t even think of possible changes. They have simply snapped together, in the best possible way, brimming with rightness.

I mentioned before that it’s worthwhile to read a lot, but that’s not necessarily enough. You also want to take time to assess what you read, perhaps separately after you let the poems wash over you (welcome that “precognitive response” first!). Then you can think about why and how each poem works, to figure out why this or that possible change won’t help. In the process of considering what works in your own poems, or in poems written by others, it’s good to develop detailed habits of scrutiny. This is conscientious reading, not just reading for pleasure (though there’s a place for that too, in fact as a priority). It takes work. This is how the best poets learn to understand their craft. It’s how their poems become surefooted.

As for publishing, I would never try to write for publication. Just write. Just be yourself. That doesn’t mean to write with no awareness of what others have done (you don’t want to keep reinventing the wheel). This is where empathy, vulnerability, and authenticity arise, as an expression of yourself that no one else can achieve. Beyond that, I always say that at some point you want to think through your poems to consider whether they move from private meaning to public clarity, or at least enough clarity so the poem (usually) isn’t inscrutable to readers. My sense is that you want to give readers enough of an entry point, unless of course you want to risk seeming to be arrogant and inaccessible. You don’t want to write for publication, but it’s good to edit for publication. Again, it’s a percentage game. Find a journal you enjoy reading. Send a set of your poems to it. See what happens. Try again, whether your work is accepted or not. Whenever work is returned, send that work out somewhere else, that day. Use “rejection” as motivation. And if your work reveals your heart, speaking truly of your unique experience, with sufficient crafting, then editors will respond to it and welcome your work for publication. Or you may find that some editors just aren’t wired to appreciate your work, which is also valuable to learn—and you move on. For folks new to writing and publication, these processes take patience. I don’t take “rejection” too closely to heart (good work is frequently returned for a variety of reasons). But I also remind myself not to take publication too seriously either.

6. Do you show your work in progress to anyone, or is it a solitary art that you keep close to your chest before letting it go for publishing?

As I said before, I like to work out a poem in my head a great deal before writing it down. But I will trot out selected poems from my notebook for workshops. In fact, that’s usually the only time I will workshop a poem, because once a poem has made it to an index card, I’m less likely to revise it, or I just make such revisions on my own. But earlier on, I’m happy to hear how or if a poem works well. I also learn when to agree or disagree with certain suggestions. It’s an art to provide criticism but also an art to know how to receive it. In any case, what is a work in progress? In one sense, all my poems are always works in progress. If I ever think of a better way to refine a poem, even if published, I’m happy and eager to make that change. On the other hand, I think it’s vital to learn how to be your own editor, so you don’t share poems with others prematurely. Really knock it into shape yourself, why don’t you? Those with less experience might still need to learn how to do this well, but if you do your best, both pragmatically and intuitively (head and heart), you will save your readers some possible angst.

I’d like to close by quoting a poem by Naomi Beth Wakan (I recommend her book, The Way of Tanka). I don’t think she’s ever said this poem is a tanka, but its five lines still offer a valuable thought that I’m grateful to receive:

One does not write

because the goldfish play

at the bottom of the waterfall,

but because not everyone

can see them.

I have long remembered the first paragraph of William J. Higginson’s Haiku Handbook. There he says that the purpose of haiku is to share them—and thus to validate our shared human existence. I would say the same is true of tanka. In this way tanka is a social art, where each poem might find and even need resonance with another reader. We are each capable of pointing out distinctive and worthwhile observations in our poems that others might never otherwise see. And if others have seen them, how we describe them can still grant a unique perspective to a common experience. And as the unacknowledged legislators of the world, poets also have a duty to speak for others when it’s appropriate or necessary. This reality gives us the obligation to be ourselves, an obligation to share our precise uniqueness, and to truly notice the lives of others and ourselves. And if one of our poems connects with a reader (even if we might never know), then we have made our world at least slightly better.