The couple were galloping over the fields on strong horses, having gone to see the bush clover bloom. I could feel the wind in my hair as I rode with them. Everything about the poem felt fresh and contemporary. When I finished the tanka, my eyes fell to the date it had been published: 691 C.E. It was part of the Manyoshu, an ancient Japanese record of early tanka, which were then called waka. I experienced them for the first time in 2012. Now as Jenny Angyal Ward has written:
deep in autumn
I am haunted by horses
the color of moonlight
running like quicksilver
in the wake of dreams
Presence, 69, March 2021
She and others have inspired me to delve deep into the intuitive poetry derived from Japanese culture that have that indefinable something often referred to as the tanka spirit. For me, part of the tanka spirit is the intuitive space in the poem, the dreaming room that allows the reader to step into the poem with his/her own experiences and use intuition and imagination to ‘finish’ the poem. Tanka are a co-operative effort between the author and the reader. In my opinion, this is part of what allows such a short poem to resonate with layers of depth and meaning.
I also came to know tanka as a form that could use language to get beneath language, as Michael McClintock did so brilliantly in this tanka:
I’ve this memory—
riding my father’s shoulders
into the ocean,
the poetry of things
before I could speak
The Tanka of Michael McClintock on Pinterest [2011-present]
Even a child that cannot yet speak, may, like the readers of this tanka, intuitively grasp the poetry of a moment in time that defines meaning, significance or beauty in a novel and profound way. William Least Heat Moon spoke of those defining times in our lives most eloquently in his book, Blue Highways. For him, the moment was sharing a piece of old-fashioned buttermilk pie with new-found friends who had taken him in for the night on his long journey across the United States. For Michael McClintock a childhood memory was poetry and it became poetry for us as well as for himself, not through the use of excessive or impressive words, but through the sharing of an image that takes us into the experience with him. Tanka is traditionally imagistic, possessing the power and magic of images that take us beneath words to the essence of experience.
Sometimes tanka can speak of the unspeakable by showing us the words that aren’t there, as in this tanka by another person who has inspired me, the world-class Canadian poet Susan Constable:
orphan
widow widower
why not
a word for those
who lose a child?
Atlas Poetica, 6, 2010
Noting the absence of a word, eloquently reveals pain that is present but unaddressed in the English language and our shared cultures.
I came to tanka with the sensibility and culture of a woman of the Deep South in America. I have heard the South described as like the layers of an onion, where you can peel away a layer, only to find another layer and another. It is difficult to get to the bottom of the story here. Part of this is because communication is often subtle, with understanding implied rather than spelled out. Tanka often functions this way, too. Consider this tanka by Canadian poet, Chen-ou Liu:
the pieces
of his jigsaw puzzle
litter the floor…
winter moonlight slipping
through the hospice window
Tanka First Place, 2015 San Francisco International Competition Haiku, Senryu and Tanka
What is left unsaid is powerful and may be the most important part of the poem. Most of us have unfinished business in life, almost as though our lives were an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. But in this poem, we see that the setting is a hospice. The author doesn’t tell us that the patients have little time to accomplish their unfinished business in life. But what remains unsaid is revealed by the imagery of the puzzle and the knowledge we all possess about hospice and the endings in life. Our hearts allow us to identify with the unknown hospice patients, even as our empathy and intuition enable us to imagine how easily the poet’s reality could be our own, or that of someone we love. Our imaginations arc over the small bridge of words in the poem, cross the space unspoken and emerge as actualized realization and poetic and emotional truth. This quality, in my opinion, contributes to the ‘dreaming room’ that characterizes the best in tanka poetry.
Chen-ou, who has won many international contests and awards for his tanka, helped me write my first tanka. It was a failed haiku about a blues singer standing on the street corner in New Orleans. He suggested that I add a couple of lines to a haiku that didn’t really want to be a haiku, and voila! My life as a tanka poet was born. Chen-ou continued to encourage my writing. Because of his comments comparing the following poem to Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1958 painting Ladder to the Moon, I was emboldened to enter it in the Tanka Time division of The Poetry Society of Tennessee’s 62nd Annual Poetry Contest, where it won first place:
if only
I could reach the stars…
the child in me
climbs the first rung of a ladder
that used to scrape the sky
Another early influence in my tanka life was the famous haiku and tanka poet, Jane Reichhold. I studied with her on her AHA Poetry website, eventually becoming a moderator of the AHA Poetry Forum. Jane was a wise and wonderful friend, and when she died, I was devastated. After her death, I came across this tanka she wrote in 1990:
a dead brown seed
becoming in a muddy pot
a white flower
it is a lie you know
about death, I mean
A Gift of Tanka, copyright 1990
This July will be the fifth anniversary of Jane’s death. She often wrote poetry and other works that championed women in their struggles. Inspired by her and by her AHA Poetry Forum tanka moderator, Jenny Ward Angyal, I wrote the following poem and entered it in the Eighth International Tanka Festival in Tokyo, Japan where it won a certificate of merit:
I seem to be
a woman of glass…
so many panes
through which to see
the bending of the light
And, in 2020, I entered the Sanford Goldstein Annual Tanka Contest sponsored by The Tanka Society of America, where the following poem won an honorable mention, one of only three awards given in the contest that year:
watercolor poppies
blowing across the fields…
why
is it so hard
to learn from history
So many times when we write tanka, we call back memories from our childhood and our common history, as I did in this poem. Our culture and our ancestry often figure in as well. For me, these have been fertile grounds for exploration not only in my creative writing, but also in my life. Sometimes the lines between life and poetry blur and the magic happens. I once again curl my small toes through the morning glories twining up the columns of my grandparents raised cottage. As a schoolchild, I buy red paper poppies from old soldiers and am transported to 1918, an era of pandemic and war. For a moment, I see watercolor poppies blowing across the field. And, I am there, but cannot stay. We are always changing and so is life. Even when we’re inspired by the past, nothing reminds us more than spring that change is eternal and we are ephemeral. I leave you with this poem of mine, inspired by a tanka written by Tekkan Yosano:
the drift
of white feathers plucked
from a swan…
spring wind scatters us, too,
no trace left of who we are
NeverEndingStory, May 30, 2016
