Zero to Hero, a Guide - 2. Poetry Prompt 1 – Tanka

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Poetry Prompt 1

Let's Write a Tanka!

It’s an impossible situation to be in, a role where I have to try and define a thing by saying what it is not. Tanka are not Haiku!

This is a Tanka:

Under the mountain,

On the wild moor where we met,

The wind batters me

To look for what can be found

And to think of you no more.[1]

If I had a magic wand, I’d wave it to remove your preconceived notions concerning poetry before we go on. But it’s especially important you forget everything you learned in high school about Japanese poetry. For unlike the abstract thing we think of as Haiku, Tanka are direct and personable. You won’t ever find, or shouldn’t at least find, a Haiku using the words “I,” or “me,” or “my,” or “mine.” In examples like the Tanka above, they are essential.

Tanka are emotional poems where the poet is present and guiding us through both the sights and feelings of the scene. A personal POV is all-important.[2] I can’t overstate that enough: Tanka are subjective poems rife with feelings, and because they’re not abstract, should be easy to relate to.

This is a very ancient form of poetry. Fujiwara Sadaie edited an anthology in 1235 in which he collected only this style of verse and presented them sequentially. The first one dates to approximately the year 660 and the last from the year the anthology was collected. Hyakunin Isshu, or The Issue of a Hundred People, provides one Tanka each from one hundred poets. In the 20th century particularly, many fine Japanese writers have seen the potential in the Tanka's open form and revived it richly to modern tastes. [3]

So specifically, Tanka consists of five lines, which are arranged in the following syllables: 5–7–5–7–7. This forms a cohesive stanza where one thought flows into the next with no periods or hard stops at the end of each line (commas, semicolons, dashes, etc. are not ‘hard’ stops but gentle pauses, which are perfectly fine). The stanza is the basic unit of poetry. Be it Couplet, Tanka, Elegy, or the Quatrain of a Sonnet, the stanza has to be one unified effort and not a string of chopped-up lines. Please remember that.

Now let’s look at more examples, keeping the points just mentioned in mind. Here is a translation of No. 94 by Sangi Masatsune from the Hyakunin Isshu:

Adrift Yoshino’s

Mountain breeze, the autumn brings

Sounds of honest work,

And my cold family manor

Becomes as supple as cloth.

This poem puts you there with Sangi as he sits on his veranda writing and listening to the lively villagers doing laundry in a nearby stream. There is an impromptu feeling to the poem, but also a great and timeless connection to the way things are or have always been. Japanese poets seek this timelessness through references to nature (like the mountain breeze) and to indications of season (like this poet’s plainspoken “autumn”).

Here’s another example:

Say that love is like

The wind-tossed boats of the sea;

Say that they are like

A pathless, rudderless thing,

And your voice will have rung true.

This is No. 46 by Sone no Yoshitada. With this poem, the seasonal word of “wind-tossed” is more subtle but still conjures images of springtime gales along the seashore. All traditional Japanese poetry and songs contain a seasonal reference, and your Tanka should too, but I want to show you it can be casual. For instance, summer can be brought to your Tanka with 'suntan lotion,' 'public pool,' '4th of July,' 'beach blanket,' anything that puts the reader in the heat of the season. Likewise, for winter, 'robin' (which is associated with Christmas in Britain), 'furnace grate,' 'road salt,' 'heating bill,' 'creaking roof,' 'tire chains,' and on and on can serve to put the reader where you are in the time of year. I hope you get the idea and are inspired. Anything that says season to you is fair game for a Japanese-style poem.

In addition, I hope you were paying attention to the stanza form in the examples. The lines move the central theme of the poem forward without coming to a stop at any line except the final one. If you make a poem of five self-contained lines, each ending in a hard stop, you have not written a Tanka.

This brings me to another wand-waving moment. When you come to write your Tanka in English, be sure to leave room for the connecting words and essential elements of grammar. Words like to, for, by, when, if; articles like a, an, the; subjects, objects, verbs, etc., for we wish to create a naturally complete stanza. They don’t cut out these words in Japanese, and it’s even more of a challenge to stay in the syllable counts in that language, but because of it, it’s considered a sign of poetic accomplishment. In English, Haiku has developed its own path away from the originals for a hundred years now, and our high school teachers bombarded us with poems lost in what I call “haiku-speak,” or a doggerel of choppy lines, missing words and hard stops to prevent flow. Don’t succumb to thinking ‘it’s abstract’ and okay. For Tanka, it’s not okay.

Now, I mentioned Tanka has had a great modern revival, and so it has. Here are three examples by Saito Fumi; her work is incredibly good.

Living through an age

Making of base violence

Something beautiful,

I’ll keep singing all the days

My too-childish lullabies.

When there’s neither man

Nor horse to be seen passing

On top of a bridge,

It’s at this time it can show

The true nature of a bridge.

Don’t resemble me –

Please don’t – I tell the woman

Whom I am sketching,

Who has the beautiful grin

Of a wanton seductress.

Here’s another modern stunner by Okamoto Kanoko:

The bursting cherries,

Blooming with all their might,

Bid me to please stop;

To give them some attention,

If not all of my power.

I hope you find these motivating. Tanka may be a bit of a challenge to master, but once you do, the sky’s the limit with it, which is why I love the form. In my life I’ve written more Tanka than any other type of poem. Studying it now also sets up so much that’s needed later, like understanding line length via syllable count and the importance of thinking of a stanza as one thought progressing over the course of several lines.

The Prompt: Write a series of at least five Tanka set in the season of the year where you are right now. Let small things inspire you as you go about your daily routine. Anything that makes you stop and consider your feelings is ideal.

As final inspiration, here’s one written by Shuku Choku, but can you guess the season?

Arrowroot blossoms

Pressed down in the muddy ground

Yet retain freshness:

Some wandering soul before mine

Has already walked my path.

Self-Review: Now that you have written several Tanka, I ask you to perform a self-check against the following set of questions. If you answer ‘Yes’ to one or more of them, and this leads to feelings of dissatisfaction with your results, turn to the appendix List of Random Prompt Ideas and choose one to try the Tanka challenge again. Check this list of questions with your second attempt and whittle those ‘Yes’s down to a comfortable level before going on to the Haiku prompt challenge.

Ask yourself DID I:

- Fall short or go over on the syllable counts?

- Fail to place my personal POV in the Tanka?

- Make hard stops at the end of each line?

- Treat the poem as a bunch of random lines and not a stanza?

- Regress to haiku-speak?

- Fail to make my Tanka unified and flowing?

- Sacrifice basic grammar to achieve syllable count?

- Have a basic seasonal reference? (This one is more excusable if you feel you were aiming for a more modern Tanka.)

Remember, this course is designed to build knowledge and confidence step by step, so please feel comfortable with Tanka before you proceed.

For some final Tanka inspiration, here are a few brilliant translations of Saito Fumi’s work by Edith Marcambe Shiffert & Yuki Sawa. In case you think I am alone in avoiding the dreaded haiku-speak, take a look:

https://archive.org/details/anthologyofmoder00shif/page/150/mode/2up?view=theater