Jenny Ward Angyal

Presently I serve as Global Moderator of Inkstone Poetry Forum and Tanka Editor of Under the Bashō.  For the last quarter-century, I’ve made my home in the piedmont region of North Carolina, halfway between the mountains and the sea.  I live with my husband and one Abyssinian cat (the latter calls the shots) in an old farmhouse on five acres with a pond, orchard, vineyard, and vegetable garden.  My husband grows more organic produce than we can possibly use, and I do my best to prepare and preserve it. Raising some of our own food is part of our commitment to sustainable living; we also have solar panels that generate a portion of our electricity and hot water. When we’re not busy in the kitchen and garden, we enjoy playing Irish traditional music, hiking in the southern Appalachians, and spending time with our two sons and three grandchildren. 

The Blue Door of a Dream: My Journey through Poetry

I grew up in the shadow of elms in rural western Connecticut and spent my childhood roaming woods and meadows, with jack-in-the-pulpit and the scent of sweet fern for companions. Unchurched, I absorbed through my pores my mother’s belief that every leaf and stone is holy.

the unblinking eye
of a painted turtle
laying eggs . . .
how long does it take
to birth a universe

~from ‘In a Grain of Sand,’ a tanka sequence
red lights 17:1, January 2021

And from earliest childhood I was immersed in the sounds of poetry:

my mother’s voice
reciting The Highwayman
by moonlight
the gleam of a dark red love-knot,
the clatter of galloping years

 ~Moonlight on Water, 2016

For four years, I attended the last operating one-room schoolhouse in New England, but I composed my first poem before I learned how to write. I still have it somewhere, penciled on brown paper in my brother’s hand.

at age five
my first poem, an ode
to lampshades—
trying ever since to grasp
the nuances of light

~A Hundred Gourds 3:2, March 2014

I continued attempting to write poetry throughout high school and college, but while I was busy earning two degrees in biology, pursuing two careers, and raising two children, my muse was often sadly neglected. 

scribbling 
poems to eat  
on the grocery list
I let the toast
go up in smoke

~Atlas Poetica 13, Fall 2012

During my first career, I wrote and edited educational materials about biology and science. Motivated by my younger son’s disabilities, I embarked on a second career teaching children (many of them nonverbal) how to communicate by any means possible. So the threads were there—communication and the natural world—but they weren’t woven together into poetry for many years. 

As a young adult, my disabled son moved to a group home, and some years later I retired. With time to think at last, I began writing more than I had in decades.  I published a fistful of poems and won a couple of awards from my state poetry society.  I wrote mostly free verse but experimented with various forms, including a few haiku. 

Then I stumbled upon tanka in Jane Reichhold’s little book, Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide.  The genre immediately appealed to me.  My first published tanka comprised an entire sequence, ‘The Rosewood Bird,’ which, to my amazement, was one of three winning sequences in the twentieth Tanka Splendor Contest sponsored by AHA Books.  Writing that sequence about my father showed me the uncanny power of tanka to explore even a complex grief muffled for forty years. 

still folded
in a trunk
the sweater I wore
the day I learned
what you had done

~from ‘The Rosewood Bird,’ a tanka sequence, 
Twenty Years Tanka Splendor, AHA Books, 2009

Soon I was writing tanka pretty much exclusively. In 2012, I joined Jane Reichhold’s AHA Poetry Forum, which was immensely helpful in developing my skills. My engagement with tanka grew steadily, and within a few years I became Moderator of AHA’s Tanka Forum, and also Reviews & Features Editor of Skylark Tanka Journal, a position I filled for over five years. 

In 2016, I co-edited the Tanka Society of America Members’ Anthology, Ripples in the Sand. After the untimely death of Jane Reichhold in August of that year, and the subsequent demise of the AHA Poetry Forum, I was involved in the creation of Inkstone Poetry Forum. Also that same year, Skylark published my first tanka collection, Moonlight on Water.

the story
of my life as a changeling—
this poem
a silk purse stitched 
from a sow’s left ear

~from “a sow’s ear,” a tanka sequence
kernels 1:1, April 2013

During these years, I wrote mostly individual tanka and tanka sequences, although I also published quite a few tanka-prose pieces along the way. I used tanka as a medium to explore everything: my personal and family history, my relationship to the natural world, my wonder at the cosmos. Although I do occasionally write haiku, I find that tanka’s five lines afford the writer just enough space to explore the subterranean passageways that connect subjective and objective realms, psyche and Gaia. 

stumbling
into a world new-made
I search
for the shape of my face
in a pool of dreams

~from ‘Lost,’ a tanka sequence
Only the Dance, 2021

In recent years I have increasingly focused on using tanka to celebrate and mourn the natural world, as human actions seem hell-bent on destroying what created and sustains us. In 2021 I published my second book, a small collection of tanka sequences on these themes, called Only the Dance. 

Currently I am writing more and more tanka-prose and occasionally haibun, exploring what it means to live in this Anthropocene Epoch, with its runaway global warming and mass extinctions. Writing prose gives me space to tell the stories of what’s being lost, and interweaving poems into the prose allows me to reflect on those losses. Nature, of course, will outlive the destructive human species, but so much will surely be swept away before we’re done.  My task is to bear witness.

a rift in the wing 
of a wild goose
flying headlong 
through gathering dusk
the fate of the earth

~from ‘Beyond the Threshold,’ a tanka sequence
red lights 16:1, January 2020

closing behind me
the blue door of a dream
I hear the words
don’t forget the absolute
yet love the leaves & branches

~ from ‘Credo,’ a tanka sequence
red lights 13:1, January 2017

---

my breath is the wind

that carries a leaf with rain in its veins down to the earth that built my bones from fire and clay

floating 
behind my eyelids
the cosmos

~Under the Bashō Nov. 15, 2020

---

LINKS

Books:

Moonlight on Water

Only the Dance

Blog:

The Grass Minstrel

Publications on Drifting-Sands-Haibun:

Contagion

The Fourth Freedom

A Leaf on the Wind

Moonstruck

What’s in a Name

Selected Tanka-Prose & Haibun Elsewhere on the Web:

Bread of Life

But Now We Are Many

Dust to Dust

The Filly

Genius Loci

Original Sin

Sketches from Life