Kathy Kituai
Kathy Kituai, diarist, editor, poet, creative writing teacher was founder and facilitator of the Limestone Tanka Poets is never happier than when working with other writers and artists. Apart from publishing two tanka collection with Amelia Fielden, she has published poetry with numerous poets, was awarded Arts ACT funding to work with a potter, Fergus Stewart, in Scotland to produce Deep in the Valley of Tea Bowls. Nitya Bernard Parker improvised music for their CD, The Heart Takes Wing. Composer, Rosemary Austin created a musical Script The Lacemaker, the poem Elizabeth Dalmon danced to at Tillies and The Fringe – South Australia Writing Festival.
Kathy was an assistant editor for the Institute of PNG Studies, tanka ed- itor for Cattails, and Muse magazine, is published in Japan, Canada New Zealand, India, UK, USA and Australia, was president and vice president
of The Fellowship of Writers, a host of Poetry Readings at Manning Clarke House, the Steering Committee for the Weereewa Lake George Arts Festi- val, and Arts ACT funding committee. She has judged literary competitions and co-judged the Sanford Goldstein International Tanka Competition. Accolades for her free-verse include CJ Dennis Award, St Kilda Literature Competition, Banjo Patterson Poetry Award (equal second), Somerset Po- etry Prize, (runner up), The Broadway Poetry Award (finalist), and she was awarded two ACT Critic awards for her teaching. Her tanka have also been successful in the Mainichi Japanese Tanka Award, Tea Towel Award (Re- sponses to the art of Otagaki Rengetsu), the Fuji Tanka Award, Eucalypt Scribbler’s Award and Ribbons People’s Choice Award.
Sample
Hooked
Most mornings you are at the Dickson Wetlands, a man with a rod in hand, straw hat squatting on silver hair, wheelie parked safely at a distance. Why do we never talk? What do you hope to catch? Redfin or perch? I am told they’re seeded in the Molonglo River and drift downstream to these wetlands. Do you, like me, contemplate the way children who coast here in a pram, trawl the sky overhead, having no words for vastness and unimagined hues? Can you recall a time you skittled pebbles across a creek just to see how often they touched the water yet kept going? Will you reel in old ways of doing things once new to you as a lad, look fish you catch in the eye, hit them on the head before removing the hook? They say fish have too small a brain to contemplate anything, and never feel pain. Would your steps falter if you pondered on why fish writhe in ice buckets five hours before one last breath?
Dilemma
Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra
This is not the first kangaroo to vault a lake’s wall
and be engulfed in water nor the last to be prized
for its ability to rise
10 feet in the air
tail and hind legs a tripod keeping the balance
How to jump back again
Does the splash as kangaroos collapse,
whack against the wall?
Do shadows of the mob reflect in the lake
as they creep forward?
Does sunset grace their silhouettes
with cerise and golden rays
or do darker skies deepen
when members of their mob fall?
Someone must have loved the wall circumnavigating the lake
was proud of it, and rightly so
to be commissioned to build it
fifty years ago
A wall can only speak
of its purpose brick by brick
Kangaroos can only keep upright
if their hind legs are not hindered
We can only avoid drowning
in the futility of words
speak of cadaver
rootless as driftwood
observe their corpses
There is a move afoot
to renew Lake Burley Griffin’s wall
restore this barrier from wind
ensure pelicans, swans, and bush hens
are safe
This is not the first kangaroo
to vault a lake’s wall
and be engulfed in water.
Crimson Fur Flaring
Edinburgh, Scotland
I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes and poems …
– Mary Oliver
How I loved to run my four-year-old fingers over a figurine of a vixen
head resting on her forefeet
tail wrapped like a scarf around each paw
I didn’t know of their taste
for chickens back then
nor did I conceive how they dug under barb wired coops
to slaughter sleeping chicks
one blood-drenched hen dragged to the den
Today – urban pups
cavort over and under refurbished planks of wood
in metropolitan sites
the way skulks of old pranced across fallen branches of pine birch oaks in backwoods meadowland
TODAY – Vixens sit in the glooming crimson fur flaring tongues caressing tails and fragile chins of hungry pups as tenderly as any mother’s touch.
Confined to brick
and mortared city streets high rise buildings
car yards fast food stalls late night shopping malls what can wildlife hunt?
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
“Kathy Kituai is a skilled author and poet, with many years of experience writing in various genres. For this intriguing collection of new work she has chosen to compose a poetic journal in the form of dated tanka.
Tanka, meaning “short song”, is the modern name for the classical lyric verse that originated in Japan more than 1,300 years ago. Conventionally untitled, tanka are written in Japanese—and now in English—in five unrhymed phrases to a flexible short/long/short/long/long rhythmic pattern. In the Japanese tradition, these poems have just thirty-one syllables in total. However, due to fundamental differences between the two languages, most tanka in English are composed with a lesser number of sound units, in order to convey the essentially light and fragmentary nature of the form.
Straggling into Winter is Kathy’s charming contemporary English interpretation of this form, which continues today to be honoured and practiced as the epitome of Japanese poetry. Here we find some three hundred tanka, recorded under their respective dates of composition from 7th June 2005 to 6th June 2006.
Kathy is an Australian poet, writing with consummate ease of her country and home environment. Australian icons such as kangaroos and eucalypts, cockatoos and wattle, appear in this collection, which in authentic tanka style links and blends nature with human nature.”
– Amelia Fielden, Poet and Japanese Translator
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
“This collection is larger than it first appears: about three hundred tanka printed up to five to a page. It is, nevertheless, very readable, a very good choice of font making a real difference. The book is quite attractive, with a lovely work of original art, Spring, by Deborah Faeryglenn for the front cover. The collection is organized in journal format, with months as chapters, beginning with June 2005 and ending with June 2006. Dates, in a script font, and occasional head notes precede each tanka. The book is dedicated to the memory of Kituai’s friend Rose-Mary Slade Swan, the last year of whose life coincides with the period of the collection and figures prominently in the poems.
The collection opens on June 7, 2005 with:
news that the cancer
growing in your uterus
must be pruned—
I write a requiem
for cut flowers
settling in the ward
she takes her medication—
Rose is facing surgery
I am safely in bed,
facing a blank wall
in your own dim night
you have brought me a gift
of darkness
I had no other way
of knowing how to unwrap
still holding leaves
oaks straggle into winter
reluctantly
too soon at the end
of this tanka journey
One might expect, at this point, that this collection would have an overall elegiac tone. It does not. The poems certainly do treat matters of great gravity and the collection as a whole may reasonably to be taken as an elegy in homage to a dear friend’s life.
Nevertheless, tllere is far too much awareness of the intensity and beauty of life for this to be mere elegy. Rather, it is a celebration of life, both its daily wonders and its sobering losses. Specifically, these poems celebrate life in Australia—the locale is a virtual character in these verses, so distinctive and engaging is it. With its cumulative richness of detail, this collection is almost novelistic. One feels that as one reads it—lives unfolding in their myriad aspects and interrelationships in a fully realized environment. Of course, the chronological ordering of the collection adds to that impression, being a virtual narrative of that year’s passage.
Those who follow tanka, whether online, in periodicals or books, will be familiar with Kathy Kituai. Her fine tanka grace many venues. What is to be found in this book that is of special interest is her talent in handling long-form journaling in tanka. The risk of such projects, of course, is a deadening sameness. In the bands of an expert, that need not occur. Kituai brings fresh insights, imagery, and interest to each tanka while maintaining the thread of the days, weeks, and months connecting them. What rewards wait in these pages for the careful reader … like this one:
no violin string
or concertos required just
yellowing leaves
and that chorus of poplars
against the greyest of skies
(March 11, 2006)
This collection was edited by the poet and translator, Amelia Fielden, who also wrote the fine afterword for the book. I heartily recommend Kathy Kituai’s Straggling into Winter to anyone who loves tanka. For those with an interest in tanka as journal, it is a must-have.”
– the Editor, Modern English Tanka