by Brian Tasker

For too long, tanka in Britain has been something of a poor relation to haiku and it is timely that a forum has now emerged where tanka can be promoted as a poetic medium in its own right. However, it is probably too late to separate tanka from haiku entirely as most people who write tanka in the English language also seem to write haiku. This is in contrast to Japan where haiku and tanka seem largely to remain in their separate worlds.

     It may be fortunate for non-Japanese writers of tanka not to be bound by long-established conventions, but the combination of haiku and tanka is not without precedent in Japan. Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) is regarded as a major influence on the reform of both haiku and tanka and, in an essay published in 1894, he proposed “Harmony between the haiku and tanka.” Janine Beichman describes, in her study of Shiki (page 76), how he felt that haiku and tanka were very much alike and differed only in length. Although Shiki’s proposal that haiku and tanka differ only in length is obviously more complex than can be discussed here, it can be taken as a starting point, with length as a continuum of experience or of energetic contact with the poetic impulse.

     My point can be illustrated by comparing a haiku by Gary Hotham (page 81 in The Haiku Anthology) with a tanka by Matt Morden (page 115 in The Tanka Anthology) on similar themes. Gary Hotham wrote in his haiku:

coffee

in a paper cup—

a long way from home

and Matt Morden in his tanka:

away from home

on business

I find the plate

from her doll’s house

in my small change

Whereas Hotham’s poem stays with the existential feeling of separation, it seems as fleeting as the stop on his journey. On the other hand, Morden who is away from home “on business,” with all the seriousness that entails, finds himself disarmed by an unexpected contact with his daughter. These two poems illustrate the tendency for haiku to be anticlimactic and tanka climactic, although not climactic as a peak, but in more subdued sense, as in a completion. In his book, The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of “The Tale of Genji,” Haruo Shirane (page 122) describes how “In a typical scene, the natural setting, usually a garden or a residence, is described by the narrator or through the eyes of a visitor. Shortly before or after, we are told of the character’s present situation. The landscape becomes infused with the character’s feelings, and then, at a climactic point, nature and human circumstances are merged and crystallized through the poetry.”

     Before I go any further, I should declare a firm bias towards tanka as a spontaneous poem that stays close to its initial impulse and use images to provide the reader with an opportunity to have an experience similar to that of the writer. The poem’s physicality allows the reader to “do” the poem for themselves.

     Actually, this is something that I had intuitively felt when I first came to haiku and tanka via translations of classical Chinese poetry, particularly those of Kenneth Rexroth. I loved those old Chinese poems for their striking imagery and strong sense of place. It was through the experience of reading those poems that I came to understand the power of words as objects and how they can communicate feelings through imagery. In common with haiku and tanka, these old Chinese poems work through an archetypal transference, as in this anonymous poem, which is some 1,500 years old, in a version by Rexroth (in One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, page 14):

Night without end. I cannot sleep.

The moon blazes overhead.

Far off in the night I hear someone call.

Hopelessly I answer, “Yes.”

By archetypal I mean what is common to us all. Everything in that poem is archetypal: the sleepless night, the bright moon, the sound of distant voices and the feeling that is being expressed: the sense of longing and the loneliness of the author. However, it’s the author’s anonymity that brings us to the heart of the matter. The author’s personality, gender, status, and circumstances do not come into it. We are simply engaged with the feeling. What has lived on down the centuries and makes that poem as real today as it was when it was written, is the feeling that is shared—the emotional bond between human beings. The point is not who we are, but what we are and that poem unites us in our longing and in our loneliness.

     Earl Miner notes in An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry (page 9) that “Faith in human feeling—belief in its integrity and truth—is probably the most consistent feature of Japanese literature from earliest to contemporary times.” In Arthur Waley’s translation of the Tale of Genji, Prince Genji says that a person writes “because of their own experience of people and things, whether for good or ill—not only what they have passed through themselves, but even events which they have only witnessed or been told of—has moved them to an emotion so passionate that it can no longer be kept shut up in the heart.” When a friend told of me of her mother’s death and the ritualistic clearing out of her possessions that followed, so poignant and touching was her account that I was moved to spontaneously paraphrase her story into a tanka:

clearing out her clothes

to learn how little

I knew of her life;

so many things

I’d never seen her wear

Although the experience wasn’t mine, it had become mine for the duration of the feeling that it evoked. As playwright David Mamet says, “What comes from the heart goes to the heart.” In my friend’s telling of the story, it had lived and I, for a moment, had lived it with her.

     In our discursive modern culture, where intellect takes precedence over emotion and meaning takes precedence over feeling, haiku and tanka can return us to a fundamental connection with the human condition. In particular, tanka provides a means of expressing love, desire, unrequited love, loss, and grief among other topics with the external world providing a background or foreground to deepen the experience. As in this example from the eighth-century Manyōshu, by an anonymous frontier guard, again in a translation by Kenneth Rexroth (page 74):

Over the reeds

Twilight mists rise and settle

Wild ducks cry out

As the evening turns cold

Lover, how I long for you.

A mood of unmitigated loneliness pervades the poem. But what resolves this surface reading is an acceptance and reconciliation to the passage of time and to the cycles of nature that will eventually yield a reunion. The frontier guard’s initial inaction is contrasted with the action of nature. I call this “ambient theatre”—it is around us all the time and if you are not performing, then you are in the audience. Actually, the frontier guard was fulfilling his role of watching: observing the process of unfolding events until he had no choice but to respond—his defences were breached. What is striking about this poem is that the frontier guard was allowed to feel his loneliness—his humanity was respected.

     There is a Greek word, katabasis, a state of “going down,” that John Armstrong describes in his book Conditions of Love. He says (page 143), “It is a counterpart of the famous notion of the sublime, in which we come to an ecstatic self-awareness. In the moment of katabasis we come down from the ordinary plateau of indifference, we recognise the dark background of existence—its loneliness, disappointment, fragility—and from here we see clearly just how much we need the hesitant tenderness of another person.”

     A correspondence exists here with the refined spirit of loneliness that the Japanese named sabi. My understanding of sabi is that it’s a kind of pure and sublime melancholy that is not received in a self-centred way but simply honoured for what is—a symptom of the human condition and as a state that will also pass. Sabi is not the loneliness that seeks company, but the basic primal loneliness that finds and resolves itself in solitude. It is the profound truth that can be found in the age-old patina of all things. The notion of sabi transforms what might be perceived as an irreconcilable loneliness and transience into an acceptance which is an assurance when it can be seen everywhere.

     In his introduction to The Tanka Anthology (page xlvii), Michael McClintock writes that: “In considering the niche tanka might occupy in English-language poetry, it is possible to make too much of its Japanese origins.” On the contrary, I think the risk is more likely that poets will make too little of tanka’s Japanese origins and lose the profound qualities that attracted poets in the first place. If these poems for us in the West are to be more than just a borrowed idea, it means entering a different psychological world. The difference between the condition of sabi and the counterparts of sublimity and katabasis is an important difference between Eastern and Western thinking. In the East, it is more readily accepted that there will one day be separation from all that is known and loved. This has led to an acknowledgement and an acceptance of human feelings that gives both “happy” and “sad” equal value, where the “going down” can also be sublime.

     These qualities can also be found in the way that we write and read haiku and tanka. The power of emotion to connect us is deepened by its sheer unpredictability—the way that anyone can be caught unawares, be moved, and discover their vulnerability. The writing and reading of these poems are a shared process and these poems can be living, breathing events and not just words on the page. Reading the poems of others can bring us into a wider and richer world of experiences that can often be a rehearsal or precursor to our own experiences that in many cases may well be similar in feeling, if not context.

     Earl Miner writes that, in the twelfth century, the Priest Shun’e replied to a question on the nature of poetry with a lengthy answer that ends by paraphrasing the preface to the Kokinshu:

It is only when many meanings are compressed into a single word, when the depths of feeling are exhausted yet not expressed, when an unseen world hovers in the atmosphere of the poem, when the mean and common are used to express the elegant, when a poetic composition of rare beauty is developed to the fullest extent in a style of surface simplicity—only then, when the conception is exalted to the highest degree and “the words are too few” will the poem, by expressing one’s feelings in this way, have the power of moving Heaven and Earth within the brief confines of thirty-one syllables and be capable of softening the hearts of gods and demons.

It seems to me that, for all the forbearance associated with Japanese culture and being Japanese, it is always paradoxically the vulnerability of being human that is so often conveyed in tanka. And what began on a personally reflective level by the Heian courtiers was elevated to the realms of transcendent spirituality, whilst remaining on a personal level in a poem by monk-poet Saigyō (1118–1190) translated by William R. LaFleur:

Thought I was free

of passion, so this melancholy

comes as surprise:

a woodcock shoots up from the marsh

where autumn’s twilight falls.

LaFleur (pages 103–105) provides a complex commentary in his book The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan and says that it would be a complete misunderstanding to classify Saigyō’s poem as a sad poem, saying that “while the imagery and emotional range of the poem encompass the two poles of our usual dichotomies—light and darkness, life and death, being and non-being, joy and sadness. One always implies and elicits the other.” Saigyō’s training as a Buddhist monk enabled him to transform a moment of human vulnerability into a moment of self-transcendence. As the martial arts proverb goes: “Chance favours the prepared mind.”

     LaFleur goes on to say that Saigyō’s poem demonstrates the Buddhist view that every act of seeing is one in which seer and the seen not only depend on one another but also bring each other into being. All that remains is the poem, after nearly a thousand years as relevant today as it was then—truly the karma of words! What I find most striking about Saigyō’s poem is that it was his being caught off-guard that enabled him to move from vulnerability to transcendence. The guiding principle being not who we are (which implies attachment) but what we are.

     Lama Anagarika Govinda summarises the point in his book, The Way of the White Clouds (page 124): “Individuality is not only the necessary and complementary opposite of universality but the focal point alone through which universality can be experienced.”

     I’d suggest it’s well worth tracking down LaFleur’s book (now out of print) as it explores the concepts of sabi and yugen in depth and can show how limited our Western understanding of Japanese poetics can be and how our lives can be enriched by its study.

     But even with our limited understanding, I feel that there is some intuitive connection that points to a quality of authentic and genuine contact with life (the external world) and our human vulnerability (the internal world) that can be found in tanka as a moment of reconciliation and acceptance to give tanka its place in world poetry. Tanka can offer an opportunity to accept and express (and I feel that the acceptance is deepened and integrated in the expression) of all that life can bring and take away. Both joy and sorrow being the mirror of each other at that point where the present is always becoming the past. An unpublished tanka by John Barlow speaks of an unexpected moment of tenderness deepened by the inherent complacency of a couple living together:

coming to bed

I watch you sleeping

in the last light

of the candle

you lit for me

In the world of tanka, lost love is not without humour as in a poem by Martin Lucas in The Tanka Anthology (page 98):

my wife’s lover

walks straight past me

wearing my wife’s hat

I remember the fit of it

on my own head

Perhaps that tanka is more properly called a kyoka—a humorous tanka. These examples quoted show compassion not only for the subject that prompted the poem, but also for the writer’s own self too.

     As I am speaking in the capacity of a poet as well as a theorist, I should like to conclude with a brief personal account of how a Westerner who has never been to Japan, speaks barely a word of Japanese, and has only met a small number of Japanese people, has used tanka. In The Colours of Poetry: Essays on Classical Japanese Verse (page 29) Makoto Ooka describes one function of waka [or tanka] as being the “Celebration or mourning for those with whom one has had a close relationship.”

     My experience when my father died inspired me to make grief and loss—and how tanka approaches these subjects—the main topic of the original essay that went under the name of “A Ripening Peach: Tanka as Ritual, Tanka as Theatre.” The day after he died, I went to the hospital with my sister to collect his things. If your relative dies in a public hospital, then you’ll have to pass through this ritual. We had to go the office and wait outside. I browsed some old magazines while we were waiting and shared an anecdote from an article with my sister, who wasn’t particularly interested in what I was saying—she was thinking about her dad. An elderly man came out carrying a bag and we were then called in and asked to sign some forms.

the hospital clerk hands me

my father’s belongings

in a plastic bag

the familiar smell

of a ripening peach

I hadn’t been expecting to receive a gift from my dead father. His death was instantly turned on its head. A love of peaches was one of the few things we had in common. In a moment, I was returned to my childhood, when peaches weren’t as common as they are today, when they were a treat. My father’s last meal was a peach before going into hospital to die. I had spent his last night at home, picking him up from the floor when he repeatedly fell out of bed, before we finally all got to sleep sometime in the middle of the night. When I woke in the morning and went to check on my father, I found a single peach stone on the night table, entirely cleaned of flesh that he’d eaten while my mother and I slept. I reverberated between these two memories in the seconds before turning to leave the office with my sister, who knew nothing of my rush of thoughts.

     Nothing is final and the next step can unexpectedly be a step into the light, even in the most difficult of circumstances. In a moment of forgetting, I had remembered. What had always been impossible had become possible, and after so many difficult years, my relationship with my father had been settled. I had completed a cycle and had been returned to the innocence of a father’s son. That the subtle power of transformation can be found in the smallest detail, and can so easily be overlooked, is the value of haiku and tanka, which in their different ways offer a means of acknowledging and holding these kinds of experiences.

     Looking back on it now, I feel an affinity with my friend, the anonymous frontier guard, some 1,200 years earlier, whose vulnerability slowly became apparent to him as the evening deepened before meeting his loneliness. I think that, in some way, the frontier guard meeting his loneliness strikes me as the same in essence as being reunited with his loved one—it returned him to the vulnerability of being human.

     What is required is a shared constant, and if those who write these poems were to accept shared human feeling as a constant, as many do, then that would be a strong unifying principle. I think it needs to be stressed that it’s shared human feeling on an archetypal level rather than feelings filtered or altered through the personality of the writer. I believe that tanka offers us in the West a ritualistic means of living our lives more deeply. The loss of ritual has meant our losing touch with living life on a deeper level. When my father’s ashes were buried, I brought along peach-scented incense for everyone to light, to ritualistically call my father back before finally sending him away for the last time.

     The age-old connection that tanka have with the expression of human feelings is unbroken through the centuries. It’s a link worth maintaining. We are enriched by it and just as haiku connect us with the peripheral, so tanka can provide a ritual marking of that momentary completion. The five lines of a tanka to a maximum of thirty-one syllables is the container that holds the poem’s feeling and energy and enables us to recognise a poem as a possible tanka and focuses the eye. These poems can bring us to acceptance, reconciliation—such is the alchemy of poetry—the potentially transformative power of human feeling.

     Paulo Coelho tells us in The Alchemist that: “If what one finds is of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. [But] if what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.”

my father dead

two weeks to the day

I buy myself a present

in the flea market:

a child’s stamp album

References

Armstrong, John. Conditions of Love. London: Penguin, 2002.

Beichman, Janine. Masaoka Shiki. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1986.

Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist. London: Harper and Collins, 1995.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika. The Way of the White Clouds, London: Rider, 1966.

LaFleur, William R. The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts of Medieval Japan. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1983.

McClintock, Michael et al. The Tanka Anthology. Winchester, Virginia: Red Moon Press, 2003.

Miner Earl. An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1968.

Ooka, Makoto. The Colours of Poetry: Essays on Classical Japanese Verse. Rochester, Michigan: Katydid Books, 1991.

Rexroth, Kenneth., One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. New York: New Directions, 1970.

Rexroth, Kenneth. One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. New York: New Directions, 1974.

Shirane, Haruo. The Bridge of Dreams: The Poetics of “The Tale of Genji.” Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Tasker, Brian. A Ripening Peach: Tanka as Theatre, Tanka as Ritual. Frome, England: Bare Bones Press, 2003.

van den Heuvel, Cor. The Haiku Anthology. New York: Norton, 1999.