Tanka

Tanka (短歌) has a rich history stretching back more than 1,300 years. Its predecessor was originally known as uta (歌), or “song,” when written language first reached Japan from China. Later, this poetry became known as waka (和歌), or “Japanese song,” as Japan began to develop its own language and writing systems distinct from Chinese. Tanka is the modern term for waka, and tanka in Japanese is more wide-ranging than traditional waka. In English, a tanka typically has five lines, often with a pivot line of some kind, and seeks to leave something out so that it may be implied, usually with intuitive or emotional effect. Traditionally, tanka were love poems, but tanka has evolved over the centuries to encompass a variety of topics, and tends to be more overtly emotional and subjective than haiku (for this reason, and because it allows more metaphor and simile than, say, haiku, perhaps tanka is the most “Western” of Japan’s poetry genres). For essays on tanka, see the Essays page (scroll down to the Tanka section), and for some of my waka translations, see Selections from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. In 1994, my press published Footsteps in the Fog, which was the second anthology of English-language tanka (after an anthology published in 1975 by the Tanka Chapter of the Chaparral Poets of California). And in 2000, I founded the Tanka Society of America, convened its first meeting, and served as its president for five years, returning again as president in 2018. My journals Woodnotes and Tundra also published tanka, especially Woodnotes, which was one of the earliest English-language journals to feature tanka extensively. My own tanka have appeared in Ribbons, Gusts (Canada), Tangled Hair (England), and the Tanka Journal (Japan), among many other journals, as well as in numerous anthologies. On 24 March 2012, the United States Postal Service issued a cherry blossom stamp, in an initial print run of 100,000,000 copies (and a reprint of 50,000,000 more), featuring a waka (tanka) translation I did with Emiko Miyashita, from our artbook of waka translations titled 100 Poets: Passions of the Imperial Court (Tokyo: PIE Books, 2008).     +

Some repetition of poems occurs among the following links as a result of grouping or sequencing poems for different purposes.

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