In a recent blog posting, I mused about publishing a collection of my short stories, along with the notion of inserting a tanka at the beginning of each story as an epigraph to set the tone for the story.
Like its more familiar cousin Haiku, Tanka is a traditional form of Japanese poetry. It differs in terms of length, structure, and content. Haiku is a three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable pattern. Tanka, on the other hand, is a five-line poem with a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern for a total of 31 syllables.
Poetry, by its nature, expresses a great deal in much fewer words than prose; it requires great concentration and imposes structural limits, while at the same time granting a writer a lot of freedom from the ordinary rules of grammar, sentence structure, word association, image interpretation, juxtaposition of ideas — in other words “poetic licence.”
I see Tanka as taking this apparent dichotomy of freedom and restraint to a more advanced level. I believe that endeavoring to write Tanka, even if I never become truly successful at it, will bring me closer to at least thinking like a poet.
By applying the compressed form of tanka, I seek to invoke in the minds of the reader ideas, pictures or recollections not explicitly stated in the text itself. That is, those in the audience become participants in the creation of this miniature artwork by supplying a portion of the final product in their own minds. For example, the following, one of the selections in my “City Life” set, conjures up the atmosphere in a noisy, busy Greek restaurant:
Sizzling pans of eggplant,
waiters barging headlong while
juggling over-heaped plates.
Aroma of feta, spices,
compete with shouts of Oh-Pah!
Any reader familiar with such a scene is likely to “fill in the blanks” and further color the experience for themselves. Which, if you think about it, is what much of conventional western poetry seeks to accomplish.