Examples of tanka

Answer 1

Tanka are a five line, short lyric poem originally from Japan. The ancient Japanese were composing them even before they were literate (7th century AD); they sang them as songs. For more than a thousand years tanka was the dominant form of Japanese poetry. It lost its pre-eminent place when haiku was invented in the 17th century, but it continues to be written to this day. Famous tanka poets in Japan sell millions of copies of their books are celebrity writers with tv shows and newspaper columns.

Tanka were adopted into English at the end of the 19th century. However, the Japanese form of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables did not adapt very well to English; due to differences in the structure of the languages, an English poem is able to pack about twice as much information into the same number of syllables. Thus writers in English abandoned syllable-counting and instead strove for the lightness, suppleness, and flexibility of the tanka form. The aesthetics are considered more important than the syllable count. Writing in 1922, Jun Fujita, a Japanese-American tanka poets remarked that poets who count syllables have adopted the "carcass" but not the "essence" of Japanese poetry.

Amateur poets often write tanka in the 5-7-5-7-7 form because they have not been exposed to the more than one hundred years of tanka literature written and published in English, and most short descriptions of tanka merely note the syllable requirements in Japanese with no discussion of aesthetics. A number of mistaken ideas are forwarded about tanka poems: that they are the love poems of courtiers, that they are a question and response composed by two people, that they are always about nature, etc. Historically speaking, good taste ruled the works of courtiers, but in the modern era no subject or approach is taboo.

While love and nature continue to be popular topics for tanka (as indeed they are popular in most genres of poetry), tanka may be written about anything and everything. Humorous, satiric, or just plain oddball tanka are called 'kyoka.' Most journals and anthologies publish tanka and kyoka together without distinction, but there is one journal, Prune Juice : A Journal of Kyoka and Senryu, that specifically publishes kyoka.

Tanka Central, the megasite of tanka poetry in English, is hosted at theMETPress.com, and has many links to journals and resources. MET Press also publishes The Tanka Teachers Guide as well as Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka, the anthology series. Volume One has an excellent introduction to the topic, and the approximately 300 tanka in the anthology are a digest of the best work being done in English today.

In addition, the TankaOnline.com website offers lessons to novice poets and exhibitions by well-known tanka poets from around the world. The Tanka Society of America tankasocietyofamerica.com, Tanka Canada, and the Anglo-Japanese Tanka Society all provide resources and publish journals.

An international resource guide appears in issue 7 of Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka. ATPO 7 is devoted to tanka in translation, and features work in Innu, French, Spanish, Romanian, Lithuania, Hebrew, German, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Japanese, Chinese, Luganda, Fante, Ewe and Twi (Akuapem).

The following tanka appear in the Introduction to Take Five, Vol 1, Baltimore, MD: MET Press, 2008:

the old woman

with a walking stick

bent over

her daughter's grave

like a question mark

André Surridge

I could tell

from the look in her eyes

the cancer had spread

from her lungs to her liver

and into both our lives

Barbara Robidoux

only a one sentence

rebuke

to my kid

and all day

the lousy after-taste

Sanford Goldstein

I am

I am not

I am

as I walk in & out

of mist

A. A. Marcoff

and when

the sand runs out?

the stillness

of the hourglass

and I are one

Denis M. Garrison

this past August,

all at once, the abuse of a decade

condensed into a bullet-

there's a house for sale

in our neighborhood

Larry Kimmel

a rooster on a leg string

stands at the end of his world

daring traffic-

even a chicken feels

the pinch of a tethered life

William Hart

blood-soaked the bodies

littering the marketplace

this hot afternoon

one melon and a small child

not hit by flying shrapnel

C. W. Hawes

suddenly

sunglint

sparrows

suddenly

gone

Jim Kacian

still held

by the sound

of a shakuhachi flute

I walk out into the wind

with holes in my bones

Peter Yovu

in the deep silence

of scorching midday heat,

my mother's spine

remembers

our wartime defeat

Mariko Kitakubo

hot august

an open fire hydrant

flushes out

the whole under-ten

neighborhood

Art Stein

As you can see, a wide variety of forms, subjects, and approaches are typical of tanka in English in the 21st century.

Answer 2

the pond lies so still

the fish swim so peacefully

calm like yin and yang.

lilies floating in the pond

like stars in the dark night sky