Dark Wings of the Night: American Visionary and Tanka Poet, Jun Fujita

Jun Fujita (1888-1963) was born in a village near Hiroshima, Japan, and immigrated to Canada as a teenager. By 1915, he was in Chicago, where he worked for the Evening Post, known as the first Japanese-American photo-journalist. He was also an accomplished poet, arguably the first master of tanka poetry in English. He certainly was a master of the rhetoric of omission or, as he put it, "that fine and illusive mood, big enough to illuminate the infinity of the universe," which is a defining characteristic of tanka. And his Tanka: Poems in Exile, first English language collection of tanka, was published in 1923. The flip-flop ebook version can be found here.

The following is an excerpt about Fujita's view of tanka and his tanka:

... Jun Fujita, publishing in Poetry Magazine from 1919–1929, left behind a small body of tanka poetry and literary criticism. In 1922 he criticized Yone Noguchi, another Japanese North American, for adopting the “carcass” but not the “essence” of Japanese poetry.4 In discussing a poem about a waterfall, Fujita noted that Noguchi focused on the roar of the waterfall rather than its silence. Fujita stated, 

To feel and create this poetic silence, and through it to suggest the roar, the power, and the majesty of the fall without describing it, is the mission of Japanese poets.5

Fujita’s own work embodies his principles. 

While you pant deliriously, I awake 

To the bold moon, 

The somber hills, 

And myself. 

Jun Fujita 6

The five poetic phrases of tanka have been formatted as a quatrain, no doubt to meet Western expectations of what a poem is supposed to look like, but it is highly irregular: 11-4-4-3 syllables. If the first line is broken into two, the pattern becomes 8-3-4-4-3. Obviously, formal form, archaic poetic diction, and classical subjects are not what Fujita conceived tanka to be. Although Hartmann and Fujita are treating the same subject, love (or at least passion), Fujita’s approach is thoroughly modern... 

-- excerpted from To the Lighthouse: The Problem of Tanka : Definition and Differentiation by M. Kei

The following is a a curator talk about the life and times of Japanese-American photographer and tanka poet, Jun Fujita, recored by Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV) on March 3, 2020: 

Jun Fujita: American Visionary

Selected Tanka:

Winter

Among the brittled grasses,

Frosting in the moon glare,

Tombstones are

Whiter tonight. 

Spring:

Milky night; 

Through slender trees in drowse

A petal --

Falling. 

Summer:

Midnight;

Over the lifeless sand plain,

The moon and I

Are Alone.  

Autumn:

On a country road

An old woman walks;

The autumn sun casts her shadow

Long and thin. 

I know it is not she,

Yet, I listen

To distant laughter,

Fleeting away.