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The Tanka Niche
Michael McClintock, US
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 stand-alone 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 re-examination and
re-assessment 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, non-essential 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 non-essential and,
secondly unlike the haiku, with its inherent and peculiar
limitations by giving full play to the majority of devices
available for poetic expression in English.
Source Note: Reprinted by permission of the author and
the Tanka Society of America, from "Compass"
[President's column] by Michael McClintock, Ribbons: Tanka
Society of America Journal, Vol. 1., No. 2, Summer 2005.
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