Sanford Goldstein

Titles published by MET Press:

Four Decades on My Tanka Road: The Tanka Collections of Sanford Goldstein
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Sixty Sunflowers: TSA Members' Anthology for 2006–2007
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Five Lines Down: A Landmark in English Tanka
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Sanford Goldstein is the grand old man of tanka in English. Here is his "Biography" from Four Decades on My Tanka Road, of course, written in tanka:

Biography

my mother:

at times, mother,
with your peripheral vision
you called me by some other name
as if you wanted
twice the love


my wife:

rest
dear wife
from no-thought
from riddles of the universe
from the master's command


my children:

thick donuts
in a brown bag:
a kid offering
to this Sunday
god of wrath


my Zen master:

his mu drawn
on rough brown paper gathered
from a men's room,
the master brushes empty
one stroke after another


my friend:

at the end
of my white string
a soulmate came,
so close to the edge
I could not scissor it away


my teaching:

for fifty-four years
long comments on student
compositions—
yours, Thomas Wolfe,
longer, more passionate


my spanned life:

I have used sandpaper
to smooth down
the rough edges of
forty years of pain—
I’m a gloss, I’m a précis


my poems:

drawn to you
womb-like
tonight
and tomorrow and beyond,
my tanka world!


a summing up:

I kept by the shallow water
where I could wade in safety,
and that's the image I'm left with,
the image of one who failed to leap,
who failed to plunge in and through


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Email: goldsteinsanford@yahoo.com