President’s Message:
International Connections

Near the end of September this year, I boarded a plane in San Francisco, bound for the Third International Tanka Convention at the Renaissance Hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia, where I was privileged to represent the Tanka Society of America. At this meeting more than a hundred members of the Japan Tanka Poets’ Club had traveled from Japan, led by President Takeo Fujioka, Tanka Journal Editor Hatsue Kawamura, Mitsue Kurahashi, and Hiroshi Shionozaki. They were joined by about seventy other Japanese-language tanka poets visiting from Hawaii, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. Also attending were English-language tanka poets Winona Baker and Melissa Dixon from Canada, Margaret Chula and American Tanka Editor Laura Maffei from the United States, and Amelia Fielden from Australia. A few of us met for lunch just before the afternoon event on Wednesday, September 27, where we were joined by Canadian tanka poet Gerald St. Maur, who happened to be visiting Vancouver but was not able to stay for the convention. I was particularly delighted to meet all the poets in attendance, most of whom I had not met in person before. The event itself was an afternoon of speeches, the ceremonious awarding of prizes for the Japan Tanka Poets’ Club Third International Tanka Contest, and much socializing and exchanging of books and gifts, topped off by a sumptuous banquet in the evening—complete with the singing of “O Canada” and the recitation of numerous poems. The entire group of two hundred people also posed for a formal photograph that served as a great memento for the occasion—and amazingly made available before the banquet ended!

In this newsletter you can read Melissa Dixon’s report of the tanka convention [see below] as well as my speech of welcome [see “Welcoming Speech at the Third International Tanka Convention”, with photographs]. For me the experience felt as if I were in Japan. Though key parts of the event were ably translated into English for us by Hiroshi Shionozaki, almost the entire convention was in Japanese! It was a great pleasure to meet so many fine poets, especially the visitors from Japan, and I look forward to future interaction.

To switch topics, I’m pleased to report that the Tanka Society of America is on the cusp of reaching one hundred charter members—the goal I had hoped we’d reach by the end of 2000. As I write this, we’re only a handful of members shy of one hundred, but I suspect we’ll pass that number by the time this newsletter reaches you. Many thanks to each TSA officer and numerous individual members for supporting and promoting the society. With a strong membership base, as we now have, we can begin to establish traditions that will further promote tanka poetry for years to come. Perhaps we can have a tanka conference of our own sometime!

It’s not the number of tanka society members we have that matters most, of course, but our poetry and our connections with one another. I’m pleased to extend these connections internationally as well as domestically. As we step forward into the new year, let us continue to celebrate our local and global connections with each other through our tanka.

—Michael Dylan Welch