President’s Message: Tanka Travels

At the end of June this year, the biennial Haiku North America conference took place in Massachusetts at the Boston Conservatory. The event included four days of workshops, papers, presentations, readings, and other activities related to the conference theme of “Haiku and Beyond”—including tanka. Some may argue that tanka is not “beyond” haiku, being much more independent poetically, but I am grateful for the inclusion of tanka at this important conference, as it is clearly a topic of interest to many haiku poets. Since its inception in 1991, the HNA conference has grown in scale and significance, and is easily the most anticipated periodic event focusing on haiku and related genres of poetry in North America. A great deal of scholarship and creativity, not to mention flourishes of publishing, culminate in this celebration of haiku and related poetry, bringing together all the haiku tribes from across the continent.

At the moment, tanka poets are effectively a subset of the haiku tribe, for nearly all tanka poets also write haiku, or came to tanka through haiku, with few exceptions. At some time, though, American tanka poets may need to strike out on their own with an independent conference dedicated to tanka poetry. While it may be premature to hope for a tanka conference on the same scale as Haiku North America, perhaps such a conference might be possible in the future. I imagine it could cover the following topics:

• • • Differentiating tanka and haiku

    • Tanka aesthetics

    • Experiments with and around tanka

    • Tanka sequences

    • Tanka equivalents to senryu (kyoka)

    • Education issues

    • Tanka on the Internet

    • Tanka translations

    • Tanka developments in Japan

    • World tanka

As such a conference for tanka isn’t planned or anticipated anytime soon, perhaps the next best thing is to discuss these issues in the TSA Newsletter. What is it about tanka that, for you, sets it apart from haiku? How do you feel about four-line or six-line tanka? Or three-line tanka? (Juliet Winters Carpenter’s translation of Salad Anniversary, for example, employed three-line versions of Machi Tawara’s classic tanka collection.) Is it more necessary for tanka to be in five lines to qualify as tanka than it is for haiku to have three lines to qualify as haiku, and if so, why? Is “concrete” tanka possible? What other experiments have you seen or tried with tanka, and what value do such experiments have in developing and refining this poetry? What are the pros and cons of a lean style of tanka along the lines, say, of Takuboku? What are the problems of being too imitative of classical or contemporary Japanese tanka? Have you explored the potential for tanka sequences, and what aspects of them do or don’t help make the sequence succeed? Do you think there’s a significant difference or not between a “tanka sequence” and what Sanford Goldstein calls a “tanka string”? What experience have you had with kyoka, which is to tanka as senryu is to haiku (that is, where a tanka might be more serious, a kyoka is a more light-hearted, witty, or biting equivalent)? Are there new developments in tanka on the Internet that you’d like to share with TSA readers? And, to broaden the scope of our American perspective, what is happening in Japan and elsewhere in the world regarding tanka? Is tanka undergoing a growth in popularity around the world to the same extent that haiku is? What can we learn from tanka writers around the world, in addition to those who write and discuss tanka in Japan? All of these issues are ripe for discussion. I invite you to offer your comments, in the form of letters to the editor or brief articles, through the TSA Newsletter.

Meanwhile, the TSA definitions committee is continuing its work on a definition of tanka. Ongoing discussion of this topic will help differentiate tanka and haiku—perhaps one of the key issues facing tanka today. At least one TSA member has questioned whether it is a good idea to define tanka at all, thinking that attempting any definition would limit the genre. However, my perspective is that a good definition should seek to provide some guidance (for surely there are things that a tanka is not) while also being liberating. The definitions committee is sensitive to the problems of limiting tanka in its definition, and is seeking to avoid these problems as best as possible. We recognize that tanka is an evolving art, even after more than 1,300 years of history in Japan, but especially in English where its history is quite a bit less than the hundred years of the history of haiku. Definitions are of course always subject to debate, and the definitions committee is committed to proposing a solid definition by which debate and further evolution of the genre—and the definition—might continue. Indeed, by proposing a definition of tanka, the Tanka Society of America aims to provide a benchmark by which tanka can be written and discussed, even if one’s own view of tanka may differ widely.

It has now been more than a year since the foundation of the Tanka Society of America, and I am pleased to report that we now have about 150 members. We have also just completed the second of our annual tanka contests, the results of which appear in this newsletter. Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to Paul O. Williams and Cherie Hunter Day for serving as judges. Thanks also to Job Conger for coordinating this year’s contest. If you didn’t enter the contest this year, please plan to enter next year (deadline is April 30 each year).

If you have ideas for improving the society, or our annual contest, please do share them. Your executive committee continues to discuss ways to improve the society and its services, such as possibly having annual book awards for the best tanka books published in English. If you have other ideas to suggest, please contact any TSA officer. Also, in the autumn we will need to elect new officers, and I encourage you to think about possibly running as an officer yourself. If you are interested, or if you have questions, please contact me. The society will succeed only with the active involvement of a significant portion of its membership.

As we continue with the summer months, after many of us have traveled to Boston for HNA, or may be engaged in other personal trips around the country or abroad, I encourage you to keep your writing notebook handy, to write of the places and people you encounter, and to record your experiences and impressions in the tanka spirit. Only through the practice of crafting our poems and in sharing and discussing them together can we further our understanding and appreciation of tanka poetry.

—Michael Dylan Welch