My Dear Friends and Readers:
I'm happy to share with you this exciting news: I am deeply honored and humbled to have been selected to be the Poet of the Month at Triveni.
You can read the full interview with Triveni editors here and the following is the Q&A about how I became a tanka poet:
2. TTH: 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?
After more than ten years of struggling towards a new life vision and preparing for a major change in my field of study (computer science to cultural studies), in the summer of 2002, I emigrated to Canada to pursue a PhD and settled in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto. After arriving in Canada, I was frustrated by the lack of in-depth and wide-ranging classroom discussions, and most importantly, I was stressed by the financial burden. I quit my studies and started to write essays in an adopted language, English.
After two years of striving, I published three essays but got little attention from scholars in those fields. Furthermore, I was disappointed by my inability to master English quickly. My pent-up emotions began spilling over onto pieces of scrap paper in the form of short poetry. The more I wrote, the more I thought about becoming a poet.
After a year of striving to write free verse poetry without much success, I came across three books of tanka poetry by Takuboku: Poems to Eat, A Handful of Sand, and Romaji Diary and Sad Toys. The emotional strength, socio-political sensibilities, and colloquial language of Takuboku’s tanka, a kind of poetry in the moment, appealed to me.
For Takuboku, writing tanka was more like the emotional outburst of a mind agonized by the inner struggle and external events that shaped his life and identity. Since encountering Takuboku’s heartfelt and poignant work, I came to view tanka as a poetic diary that could be employed to record the changes in my immigrant life, a newly-racialized life of struggle with transition and translation.
Three of my tanka are selected for your reading pleasure:
I look away
from his intense gaze …
this homeless man
speaks English
with an accent like mine
Honorable Mention, Tanka Section, 2017 British Haiku Society Awards
the dervish
of first snowflakes …
a Syrian
child refugee talking
to the foreign sky
Runner-Up, 2019 British Haiku Society Awards
mid-autumn night …
the wind whispers to me
Chinese words
that offer me a home
in the shape of a moon
Tanka First Place, 2011 San Francisco International Competition Haiku, Senryu, Tanka, and Rengay.
Happy Reading
Chen-ou
Note: For more about my tanka journey, please read my "Poet and Tanka" essay, which was first published in Ribbons, 12:2, Spring/Summer 2016.
