Love Is a Tanka

In 2020 Jeanne Lupton writes "in the midst/ of writing tanka/ in a café/ I already want/ this happiness again." It's a grand example of Lupton's tanka, illustrating a particular syncopation that is perfect for telling her stories, revealing intimacies, launching memories. Lupton takes ownership of the tanka form to entertain with wit, careful observation, and tenderness. She reveals a life lived over time and with challenges. The tanka come fast and amass a litany of human foibles, stumbles, generous connections, and difficulties. Lupton's Love is Tanka chronicles a fierce human spirit, that's sustained by love, as she learns to endure.

- Sally Elesby, poet and painter



Some of these bring instant tears, others a touch of the poignant soul. All are suffused with the divine light of the ordinary. What is most hidden and deepest is the most obvious, only to see it you must look with the eye that these tanka sharpen. I'm reminded, too, of the Buddhist saying that the most enlightened being appears to be most ordinary. These poems are a treasure.

- Clive Matson, author of Hello, Paradise. Paradise, Goodbye



Love is a Tanka.... As the title shows, this tanka collection is full of love. Love for people, love for nature, love for tanka, love for writing... After reading this book, I'm sure you'll feel good. Jeanne Lupton makes you happy by presenting her happy tanka in this book.

a rainy noon

I run across the square

to the café

to eat tomato bisque

feeling like a poet

- Kozue Uzawa, editor of GUSTS



Jeanne Lupton's condensed language of tanka takes the reader on an unforgettable journey into what it is to be human.

- Chantal Guillemin, author of Truchas and Mi Tierra Adentro




About the Author



Jeanne Lupton, a poet since she learned to read, moved to the San Francisco East Bay from Northern Virginia in 2002 and has been active since then in the poetry community here and in the tanka community worldwide through tanka journals. Her collection, but then you danced, which appeared in 2006, and several booklets published since then are included here. This collection represents the first 25 years of her tanka. Jeanne hosted the Second Saturday Poetry and Prose Reading Series at Frank Bette Center for the Arts in Alameda, California, for 13 years. She has given several short solo performances at the Marsh Theater in Berkeley.



Jeanne leads a memoir writing group for seniors on Zoom, is a member of Fresh Ink Poetry Collective and Bay Area Poets Coalition, and writes with Clive Matson's Too Busy to Write group every Tuesday night. She lives at Strawberry Creek Lodge in Berkeley with 150 other elders and her cat BB.



Tanka are two lines longer than haiku and invite the expression of feeling. Traditionally a love poem, tanka is over 1400 years old. Haiku originated when the first three lines of tanka broke off to become their own poetic form. Young people in Japan today text tanka to each other on their cell phones.