14 Comments

What a great deep dive into tanka! This is a form I'm striving to give more attention to (although haiku will always be my first love). Thanks for this great newsletter!

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Cheers Jason - and you are very welcome! Thanks for reading, and the lovely comment. Yeah, tanka has its own pleasures, not entirely distinct from haikai, but definitely with a slightly different edge. The extra 2-phrases provide their own kind of timespace/scope in tanka. :-)

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This year I’ve wanted to focus on short poems. I love tankas and haiku and they can be so hard to write. Thank you for this post. And I love your tanka.

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Ah awesome! I look forward tp reading some of your tanka and haiku. And yeah, they can be really difficult - but I think with a little study, they can become a lot clearer, and then the poems should start to flow easier. At least that has been my experience - kind of stripping it back to basics. You might enjoy the article I wrote a couple of weeks ago for Haiku Thursday called 'One Plum Slowly Ripens: An Introduction to Haiku' :-) Thanks so much for the kind words about my tanka as well! Really appreciate it.

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Happy you linked back to this post. Particularly startled coming across kenyōgen. I was talking with a friend about Japanese poetry recently, trying to convey this technique. The example I gave, though I have never come across it or used it myself was “pine and pine.” Wonderful!

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Yeah - it took me a lot of years to slowly amass all the lingo, and find examples for everything that transferred from Japanese to English - one of the terms that took me the longest to find was "kugire" - the tanka equivalent of the "kireji" - was so happy to finally come across it haha. Yeah the "pine" for "pine" one is great huh. "Blossom" is also another one which completely works across languages - as in English, to "blossom" in Japan can be used to mean both "flower" and "blossom" and "bloom" - both as nouns and verbs, and can be used metaphorically to refer to the opening/growth of anything. Glad you found some good stuff in here! :-)

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Ah, yes, blossom is a good one too. Where did you end up finding these terms?

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All over the place - reading as much as I could about haikai and tanka, and specifically reading things written by Japanese writers, who were writing in English. And doing my own translations. The information about the forms in English is unfortunately blended continuously with assumptions in English, and weird "rules" that have little to do with the forms as they are practiced in Japan, so it took a lot of cross-referencing and weeding out to get back to the fundamentals. This combined with the realisation that the commentators considered the "best" in English were actually fairly ill-informed - such as R.H. Blyth, for instance.

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Thank you once again for a great post, I missed it last week, but I'm trying to catch up, Dick! The last tanka is truly awesome :)

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Aw cheers! Take as long as you need. I know they're pretty long and involved haha. Yeah that Ono no Komachi tanka is so good huh - I think one of my favs of all time, and the translation just nails it so well.

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This is a fascinating study of simplicity.

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Thanks so much Mark! Yeah - turns out there is quite a lot that goes into that sense of effortlessness and simplicity ;-)

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Absolutely! You can't afford to waste a syllable with these concise forms.

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So true!

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