A home for traditional Tanka
A home for traditional tanka
Ice high in the sky,
a cold aura round the moon.
Not so beautiful
for those who live in cheap tents
ignored on London’s pavements.
One of the oldest Japanese verse forms, tanka poems originated in the seventh and eighth centuries.
Tanka – the word means ‘short song’ - consist of 31 syllables and when written in romaji Japanese or English have five lines of 5,7,5,7,7 syllables. Tanka poems are sometimes called waka or uta.
17-syllable haiku, or hokka, dating as stand-alone poems from the 17th century and more widely known in the West, has the same form as the first three lines of tanka. Both remain widely used in contemporary Japanese writing, and many Japanese newspapers have a weekly tanka column.
When writing in English many tanka poets (but by no means all) try and keep to the 31 syllable format of the classic tanka as a courtesy to the Japanese originators, and also because of the discipline required by an imposed format. Structures such as tanka demand versatility in language and skill in concision, and can add depth to the meaning of the poem.
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Tanka is also interesting and challenging because poetry lines containing five or seven syllables are unusual in English – we are more used to the even-numbered iambic rhythm.
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There are few other rules in tanka writing. There is usually no title and no rhyme or meter. The third line often provides a transition or pivot between the opening lines and the last two, perhaps enabling an expansion from descriptive to reflective or from personal to universal, but this is not always the case. Throughout their long history many tanka have had nature, love, time or evocative places as their theme, but in the last decades poets writing in both Japanese and English have chosen more contentious subjects.
A good blog post on tanka writing can be found here.