by Sanford Goldstein

sick

of pretty

haiku

on a pretty

page

From This Tanka World, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue Poets Cooperative, 1977, page 49.

Commentary

There’s a context to this poem that’s useful to know. In “This Elusive Tanka World” in Simply Haiku, the author writes, “When I started sending out my tanka poems in the sixties and seventies, most of them were returned. Haiku was what editors wanted. Perhaps a few of them did not even know tanka existed. Rejection after rejection, but like the Zen neophyte with his endless sitting, I kept sending out my poems, and a few were published in those two decades. . . . In my first collection of tanka, This Tanka World (West Lafayette, Indiana, 1977), I have a final section about writing tanka. I had been frustrated with having only a few of my tanka accepted in the early years. It was, after all, only haiku that was really known. I was frustrated when I wrote [this poem].” In his 1977 essay, “On Writing Tanka” (in a special tanka issue of High/Coo: A Quarterly of Short Verse), Goldstein clarifies his attitude: “In [this poem], I seem to be rejecting the writing of haiku. But the truth is that I admire haiku and regard it as much more difficult to create than tanka since the epiphany moment of haiku is almost impossible to experience while tanka usually deal with psychological anguish. At any rate, I do admire good haiku.”