by Michael
McClintock
Up until the 20th century, the short poem in English
was dominated by the epigram and proverb, particularly those translated from
the Bible and from the Greek and Roman poets, and found embedded in various
forms of native and folk literature, including songs, lullabies, and various
forms of prayer, homily, and exhortation. Limericks, clerihews, nursery rhymes,
and various other forms of doggerel and light, witty, scatological or political
verse filled out and completed the range of the short poem. Only with the
advent of the Imagists, in both America and the United Kingdom, particularly in
the early work of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and the creation of the cinquain by
Adelaide Crapsey, was the short poem in English seen to have a potential far
beyond that of “light” or “occasional” verse, or the merely comic, humorous, or
witty rhyme.
Fueling
this revolution in the English short poem, and most clearly witnessed in the
last half of the 20th century, has been the ever-widening study, translation,
and adaptation in the West of Japan’s tanka and haiku literature. The brevity
and precision of these standalone short poems, and the close examination of
their techniques and aesthetic principles, deftly adapted into English by a
relative handful of poets, has resulted in a profound reexamination and
reassessment of the strengths and weaknesses of English poetry and poetics
generally—and the realization that many of the English canon’s finest moments,
most-remembered lines, and highest achievements in meaningful expression, past
and present, appear in fact to reside in a relative few muscular, irreducible
lines that are themselves embedded in long slabs of otherwise extraneous,
nonessential verse.
Therein, it
seems to me, can be found the singular niche and role of contemporary
English-language tanka—to exploit that realization, and to introduce into
English literature a kind of short poetry that fully measures up to the
achievements of the more traditional, longer poetic forms. Tanka appears ready
to accomplish this by, first, peeling away the extraneous and nonessential and,
second—unlike the haiku with its inherent and peculiar limitations—by giving
full play to the majority of devices available to poetic expression in English.
From “President’s Compass” by
Michael McClintock, Ribbons, Vol. 1,
No. 2, Summer 2005.