Introduction to

The Tanka Prose Anthology

Jeffrey Woodward

Gary LeBel, in “Rereading the Tosa Diary,” eloquently evokes an

ancient past and binds it intimately to his contemporary
domestic setting when he writes:

It’s almost midnight—tomorrow’s Christmas.

As I turn the pages of the Tosa Diary I smell the
sea and feel my cold soles’ impress on the
shingle; I hear those ancient pines whose roots
are ‘splashed by waves.’ The rowers pull hard as
a woman intones verses for the dead amid the
long, elegant robes . . . . I peek in on my
sleeping daughter, and then shut the door.

LeBel alludes to the masterpiece of a Japanese nobleman, Ki no

Tsurayuki, who wrote over a millennium ago from the point-of-
view of a woman diarist who, on a difficult sea-journey, is
mourning her lost child.[1] Perhaps the literary convention of
the persona allowed Lord Tsurayuki to distance himself
somewhat from his deep grief over the recent death of his own
daughter. The Tosa Diary that LeBel is immersed in is saturated
with cold waves, rough shingle on desolate beaches and the
ever-brooding pines of islands and shorelines. LeBel, enjoying
Christmas Eve in the comfort of his home, is stirred by the
ancient keening to set his reading aside and to “peek in on my
sleeping daughter,” a desire for parental reassurance which is
elicited directly by his affinity for Tsurayuki’s writing: “... I smell
the sea and feel my cold soles’ impress on the shingle ....”

The Tanka Prose Anthology 9

LeBel’s paragraph of prose is concluded by a single tanka and
Tsurayuki’s longer diary includes over fifty of them, so both
poets employ a similar form which marries prose and verse. It
is the desire and ability of a contemporary American poet in
Georgia to span the centuries and receive inspiration and even
consolation from the Japanese nobleman, however, that lies at
the core of this introduction and provides a motive for this
anthology. What is this form that LeBel and Tsurayuki share in
common, then, and what is its provenance?

Tanka Prose in Classical and Medieval Japanese Literature

The dominant form of poetry for over one thousand years in

Japan was waka, the forerunner of our modern-day tanka, which
in its classical and medieval norm consists of five lines or
phrases of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables.[2] From the compilation of the
oldest surviving collections of poetry, the Kojiki and Man’yōshū
of the 8th century, prose very often accompanied waka, a
practice that continued through the classical and medieval court
periods and into the new tanka reform ushered in by Masaoka
Shiki in the early 20th century.[3] The anecdotal and episodic
properties of this ancient prose, along with formulaic phrases
and other traits, bear traces of oral transmission and point
ultimately to its pre-literate beginnings.[4]

Early exemplars of tanka prose might be best appreciated as

framing or contextual devices—rudimentary prose
accompaniments—that tersely describe the place and
circumstance of a tanka’s composition or, with slightly more
elaboration, deliver an abbreviated tale that establishes not only
a setting but perhaps a character or characters for one or more
tanka. The prose of this period is rarely more than a
handmaiden to the poem.[5]

10 The Tanka Prose Anthology

With the advent of Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary and the
anonymously compiled Tales of Ise in the mid-tenth century,
however, Japanese prose evolved rapidly and tanka quickly
found itself in a baffling variety of prose contexts: diary or
memoir, travel account, military chronicle, romance, biography
and more. Nor was the prose now invariably subservient to the
verse but in works like Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji,
frequently cited as the world’s first novel, or the Nun Abutsu’s
Utatane, a memoir of the unrequited love of her eighteenth year,
the prose and verse are on an equal footing, with now one, now
the other, stepping to the fore.[6]

The above paragraphs offer only a cursory sketch of the origin

of tanka prose—in another language, another culture, another
historical and social milieu. How and when did this mixed genre
“cross-over” and find advocates and practitioners among poets
writing in English?

Brief History of Tanka Prose in English

Any appreciation of the development of tanka and tanka prose

in English requires acknowledgement that the growing practice
and popularity of Japanese verse in the post-WWII period was
centered upon haiku and haibun, not tanka and tanka prose.
That fact is not without irony as tanka, with and without its
prose companion, preceded haiku and haibun in its native land
by a millennium. Western acceptance of the descendent first,
the ancestor later, is therefore a striking inversion of Japanese
chronology.

Haiku found able publicists early in R.H. Blyth and Harold G.

Henderson. The former’s four volume study and anthology,
Haiku (1949-1952), and the latter’s concise An Introduction to
Haiku (1958) provided a broad foundation for academic study
while the adoption of the form by Beat writers, like Jack

The Tanka Prose Anthology 11

Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, brought haiku to the
attention of poets and other literati.[7] The rapid dissemination
of the haikai ethos and widespread practice of the form
culminated as early as 1974 in recognition by a commercial
publishing house with the release of The Haiku Anthology, edited
by Cor van den Heuval.

The import of this circumstance for the history of tanka and

tanka prose in English is two-fold. First, many poets came to
the practice of tanka via haiku and often did so with a firm
haikai aesthetic. Second, when and where poets sought to join
tanka with prose, they were less likely to turn to classical and
medieval Japanese models than to Matsuo Bashō’s 17th century
haibun masterpiece, Narrow Road to the Interior, and more
frequently than not comprehended what they were writing as
haibun and not as a separate and distinct genre, tanka prose.
Clear textual evidence of this is the mixture of tanka and haiku
in a single prose composition that one commonly discovers in
many early assays in the genre.

Michael McClintock, Jane Reichhold, Michael Dylan Welch and

Alexis Rotella, among others, are examples of poets who are still
very much active and who established reputations first as writers
of haiku and only later as writers of tanka. Sanford Goldstein
may be exceptional insofar as his poetic activity, from the start,
shows an orientation based upon tanka and upon his work in
translating modern Japanese tanka masters.

Goldstein is notable as well for providing, so far as can be

presently determined, the first example of tanka prose in
English, his “Tanka Walk” (1983).[8] This journal of some 3000
words documents his daily exercise regimen, general
observations on life in Japan and meditations upon the tanka of
his professed master, Takuboku Ishikawa, while offering the
counterpoint of his own tanka as well. Jane Reichhold’s A Gift

12 The Tanka Prose Anthology

of Tanka (1990), probably the next foray into tanka prose in
English, is a collection that adopts the classical waka manner of
prefacing many of the individual tanka with brief notes that
establish a setting or explain the circumstances attending the
composition of the poem in question.[9] Larry Kimmel’s
“Evening Walk” (1996), not collected here, alternates prose
freely with tanka and haiku passages to describe the activity that
his title conveys.[10] Works of tanka prose multiply after this
with Jane and Werner Reichhold’s journal, Lynx, playing a
crucial role in providing a venue for the frequent publication of
such compositions, especially in the period of 1997–2003. Much
of this early work is executed with greater enthusiasm than
finish and for understandable reasons. In 1983 or even in 1996,
when Goldstein and Kimmel, for example, were attempting this
hybrid, tanka was not yet widely practiced nor were there ready
models or guidelines in English for the would-be writer of tanka
prose. Is it possible now, a quarter of a century after Goldstein’s
work, to define, at least in preliminary fashion, the phenomenon
of tanka prose?

Toward a Definition of Tanka Prose

Japanese criticism, ancient and modern, offers no

comprehensive term that might encompass the many forms and
styles that the wedding of tanka and prose admits.[11] Instead,
the terminology employed in the scholarly literature is form-
specific, addressing not the genus but the individual species,
e.g., preface or headnote (kotobagaki), poem tale (uta monogatari),
literary diary (nikki bungaku), travel account (kikō), poetic
collection (shū), historical tale (rekishi monogatari), military
chronicle (gunki monogatari) or biography (denki).

The first problem to address in defining tanka prose, therefore,

is nomenclature.[12] Whereas Japanese waka practice and
literary criticism provide no precedent, the analogy of tanka plus

The Tanka Prose Anthology 13

prose to the latter development of haibun does. The term
haibun, when applied to a literary composition, most commonly
signifies haiku plus prose “written in the spirit of haiku.”[13]
Haiku prose or haikai prose would be an apt English equivalent
of the Japanese word, haibun. Upon the same grounds, tanka
prose becomes a reasonable term to apply to literary specimens
that incorporate tanka plus prose—a circumstance which may
lead one to inquire, not unreasonably, whether tanka prose also
indicates prose composed in “the spirit of tanka.”

Tanka prose, like haibun, combines two modes of writing: verse

and prose. Verse is metered language, that is, language measured
in some fashion, whether what is counted is stress, quantity
(duration), syllables, metrical feet or some other feature. In
Japanese literature, tanka and haiku established metrical norms
based on syllabic count. Tanka and haiku commonly abandoned
syllabic meter in 20th century Japan and the adoption of the two
forms in the West has widely followed suit.[14]

Tanka prose, then, is a hybrid of these two modes of writing

and one can extrapolate from this circumstance a basic unit or
building block—one paragraph, one tanka—that fulfills, at a
minimum, the expectation aroused by the name.[15] Tanka
prose, of course, is not limited to our basic unit but allows many
compound variations of this unit as well. The variation in the
number and placement of tanka in relation to the prose also
strongly affects the character of individual compositions and is
a prime source of the great variety that is evident in the genre.
Let us discuss, then, the chief variations in form that the reader
will meet in tanka prose.

One prose paragraph plus one tanka constitutes not only our
fundamental building block but also that order of the two
modes most commonly found in contemporary tanka prose.
Larry Kimmel’s “New England Palms” is representative:

14 The Tanka Prose Anthology

 Somewhere between weed and tree, the sumacs
that jungle my unkempt property. I like them.
My neighbors don’t. I call them New England
palms.

cliffside cottage
blue hills in the distance
here I would be
a Ryokan
or a Han Shan

The simplest variation one meets therefore is inversion of this

order, the shift from prose as preface to prose as afterword for
the tanka component as in this entry from Jane Reichhold’s
diary, Her Alone:

a night sky
lit only by planets
dark waters
have forgotten the name
of Moon Lake

Why do I feel that Heidi, too, was awake before

dawn, standing behind the tripod, waiting for
the first pink and blue to leak across the waters
before her? Even if Moon Lake was not the
best pre-dawn shot, maybe she was up just
because she wanted to get an early start on her
day. Or because it was too exciting to sleep any
longer . . . .

Whether the prose in question precedes or follows the verse,

compounding of either or both elements also occurs and, like
inversion, is not without a curious power to alter the tone and
flavor of tanka prose.

The Tanka Prose Anthology 15

The envelope is a compound form that is not rare in tanka
prose. Here, one element is enclosed by the other, whether that
order is prose–tanka–prose (a prose envelope) or, conversely,
tanka–prose–tanka (a verse envelope). This extract from
Sanford Goldstein’s “Tanka Walk” is a prose envelope:

A toothless man does kneebends just at the

curve in the road before he turns right to enter
the bathhouse provided for the elderly by the
prefectural government. A tanka. Old women
carrying sun umbrellas or bunches of flowers.
Lovers in a seaside Toyota. A salesman
practicing his smile in a Datsun mirror. Or
myself at the midway point on a certain
morning:

this gray
anatomy of indifference;
I sit on a bench
along a seaside
road

. . . Or:

I pass
a bag of bones
in kimono,
face
lifted to sun

. . . Tanka and more tanka. Is it any wonder I

have been able to spill at least ten tanka a day
and that I have been doing so for sixteen years
except for two years following the death of my
wife in this same city of Niigata nine years ago?

16 The Tanka Prose Anthology

Alternating prose and tanka elements, however, will be met
more commonly than any other compound form. Bob Lucky’s
“The Way” is an efficient and charming example:

I am the ass Lao Tzu rode into the West. I am

the ass that knew the way. The cost of leaving
the kingdom is a semblance of wisdom.

hastily scribbling
his lines down
Lao Tzu
never looks up
until the final stroke

We pass through the gate, the sun eating our

shadows all morning then spitting them out
behind us later in the day. Lao Tzu holds on as
long as he can. I take him as far as I can go.

a dust storm gathers

on the horizon—
that bit about water,
Lao Tzu laughs,
may have been premature

With every possible compound variation, it is worthwhile to

remember that the ratio of prose to tanka is not fixed at one to
one but may be varied at the poet’s discretion and the exigencies
of the particular matter at hand.

The structure of tanka prose, then, can be adequately described

as beginning with our basic unit of one paragraph, one tanka
and extending to the many variations briefly discussed above.
That structure, in principle and theory at least, can be applied to
the different sub-genres known through classical and medieval

The Tanka Prose Anthology 17

Japanese literature, such as preface, poem tale, memoir,
romance, chronicle, biography and even essay. It may or may
not admit more, depending upon the evolving practice of
modern poets writing in another language and another cultural
milieu.

Earlier, in comparing tanka prose to haibun, I stated that it

would be reasonable to anticipate that the prose element would
be “written in the spirit of tanka.” This implies that tanka prose
differs qualitatively from haibun—not only that tanka and haiku
differ, but that their prose accompaniment does as well. What
precisely this tanka spirit entails is a question beset with many
problems and potential controversies. Some poets will cite
various Japanese aesthetic touchstones such as aware (pathos),
wabi (austere beauty) or even yūgen (depth or mystery), despite
the obscurity, even on its home turf, of the latter. [16] Other
poets will perceive tanka’s spirit from the viewpoint of common
Western critical concepts such as understatement, paradox,
overtone or ambiguity. Given an absence of consensus, it would
be wise to recognize that poets—many of whom may be
content to grasp such matters intuitively—will determine the
nature of the spirit of tanka by their own evolving practice.

Common Traits of the Tanka Prose in this Anthology

The basic structure of tanka prose can be defined with

reasonable confidence but aesthetic issues, such as the nature of
“the spirit of tanka,” prove far more resistant to clear
delimitation. General observations of common traits or
tendencies in tanka prose, however, can be made based upon
the writings in this anthology. Certain of these characteristics
parallel what the reader may find in classical and medieval
Japanese tanka prose; others, not too surprisingly, diverge from
Japanese precedent.

18 The Tanka Prose Anthology

Diaries and memoirs play a central role in the development of
Japanese tanka prose from its infancy in Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa
Diary (935 A.D.) to such late works as the renga master Sōgi’s
Journey to Shirakawa (1468 A.D.).[17] Diaries and memoirs differ
insofar as a diary commonly has dated, episodic entries and is
composed around the present or, at a minimum, maintains a
pretense that events are happening now, whereas a memoir
generally eschews the form of a log book and compresses time
and action, whether present or past, into a more nearly
continuous narrative flow.[18]

Jane Reichhold, in Hawai’i with Heidi (2001) and Her Alone

(2002), wrote two exemplary diaries from which extracts are
offered here. The first concerns Reichhold’s travels with her
eldest daughter Heidi; the second dwells upon her maternal
worries and longing in her daughter’s absence on a hike in the
Sierras. These two diaries, to that extent, might be viewed as
twins, their central motifs, respectively, being the presence and
absence of the loved child. Miriam Sagan’s “Hospice Haibun”
documents, in dated form, an interval of just over one week,
from the day that her mother-in-law comes home, “hospice
style,” to the day of her funeral. Sagan’s work, a meditation
upon impending death, mixes haiku and tanka freely with its
prose, the prose itself is frequently clipped and abbreviated, and
the title strongly suggests that the poet intended to write haibun.
The presence of tanka, albeit only two, is uncharacteristic and
perhaps no work in the current anthology is as close to
contemporary haibun proper. Sagan’s tanka color the whole and
lend an air of newness, however, with a promise of greater
things to come:

Claire died at 6:30 pm. My husband Rich was

sitting in the room with her, doing the
crossword puzzle by himself.

The Tanka Prose Anthology 19

 How odd
To see the timed lamp
Blink on
After
You’d gone

Gary LeBel’s “Sea-change,” while not a diary, should be noted

here—not only for its structural similarity to the diaries but
quite simply for its novel approach and spirit of artistic
adventure. The chronology of “Sea-change” is found in nine
dated letters and eight tanka that constitute both an epistolary
fiction and imaginary life that is based upon a historical
figure—William Horton, owner of an 18th century plantation on
Jekyll Island, Georgia.

Three works in the present collection eschew dates for unity of

action, place and time. “Tanka Walk” by Sanford Goldstein was
cited in the brief remarks above on the history of tanka prose as
perhaps the first example in English of the genre. The prose in
Goldstein’s work is divided between a narrative of this day, this
specific walk, and a memoir-like retrospective meditation upon
this same walk, this same path that has served, on many
previous days, both as his daily exercise regimen and his tanka
discipline. Linda Jeannette Ward’s “Pigeon Mountain” covers a
five-day retreat at a convent of the Cistercian Order and is
composed in the present tense throughout. Like Sagan, Ward
alternates haiku and tanka with her prose but the smoother flow
of the prose as well as the greater presence of tanka places
“Pigeon Mountain” much closer to the Japanese memoir
tradition and to tanka prose in general. Michael Dylan Welch, in
“Hand in Hand,” memorializes September 11, 2001 and his
personal response to the violence and tragedy of that day; his
use of tanka only and his skillful writing convey a degree of
stoic acceptance and classical restraint.

20 The Tanka Prose Anthology

The line between fact and fiction in tanka prose is not always
clearly discernible whether the form employed is memoir or
diary or yet other alternative forms we have yet to discuss. This
is true of most literary genres, if not all, for the simple fact that
literature is art and aesthetic values can and do overshadow
considerations of fidelity to specific chronology, phenomena
and events. Some tanka prose, however, leans more openly
toward pure fiction by its very artifice. This is so in LeBel’s
“Sea-change,” as he explains in a brief preface, but one suspects
as much, also, of a complex narrative like Stanley Pelter’s “the
short straw,” where the elderly woman, who is the subject of
this stark study of a decline in health and competence, is
presented in a repetitive diction that approximates incantation
in its accumulative power. Pelter, true to his modernist
sympathies, presents the woman and her caretakers from
multiple points-of-view as well with only slight variations with
each return to the scene.

Another departure from reportage or fact-as-fact lies in the

tendency of certain writers and certain works to adopt oneiric
qualities. This may or may not be the case with Pelter’s “the
short straw” but it is clearly so in his very short work, “a hill
blows up,” where the imagery of a piano tilted in the air, of
black gloves and a white gull (a reflection of the instrument’s
keyboard) possesses a logic that can only be called the logic of
dreams. Hortensia Anderson, in “Maybe You Can Come
Home,” and Werner Reichhold, in “Shortly,” are engaged in
similar acts of abandonment or possession. Anderson’s tanka
prose is a nightmarish mise en scène where flowers wilt before
“the scent of death” and where the “ice blue eyes” of the
threatening Commandante seem to justify his “kindly”
assertion, “I shall take rememberings by dismemberings.” The
stage in Werner Reichhold’s “Shortly” is neither as brooding as
Anderson’s nor as animated as Pelter’s but, instead, borrows the
pastoral trappings of a peaceable kingdom—a kingdom of

The Tanka Prose Anthology 21

milkmaids, mountain goats, musicians in feathered hats and a
poet in the persona of a bushtit—to lull the reader toward a
dream-like state. The disjunctive shift from prose to tanka is
radical but quite effective for a work of fifty or fewer words.

Much of the tanka prose literature, however, strives to adhere

closely to the immediate environment and day-to-day existence
of the writer, often relating experiental detail and the common-
but-somehow-significant event in a manner befitting the casual
anecdote. These compositions are fundamentally naturalist in
orientation and recall the “sketch of life” (shasei) aesthetic that
Masaoka Shiki imported from the West for use in Japanese
haiku and tanka. Marjorie A. Buettner, for example, often
discovers what might be called, for lack of a better term,
revelation in her domestic surroundings—in working to repair
her Grandmother’s crochet in “Work of the Weavers” or, with
her children absent for a weekend, in the startling void of her
house in “The Presence of Absence.” Terra Martin, in “Once
Upon a Town,” returns to the village of her childhood in
Ontario—now far from the “one long yawn” of her youthful
memories, now transformed by investment and development
into a landscape she does not recognize. Giselle Maya’s gentle
and delicate works are intimately bound-up with her Provençal
village. Maya sketches her fellow villagers, the medieval walls
and the local cats in “A Door of Chestnut Wood” or her doctor
(“a tiny birdlike lady”) in “Acupuncture”; she treats these
matters with unmistakable affection and yet offers clear
observations without indulging in easy sentiments. Linda
Papanicolaou, in “Summer Camp,” provides a similar lively
sketch of her childhood experiences at a Girl Scout summer
retreat.

One substantial group of tanka prose compositions not yet

discussed consists of writings that display in the prose
component a tension and elevation in the diction, marked

22 The Tanka Prose Anthology

rhythm, alliteration, assonance, even refrains—aural properties,
in other words, most often associated with verse.[19] Such
works might be fairly compared to the prose poems of French
Symbolism, to Rimbaud or Mallarmé, and their compass, in fact,
finds its orientation more frequently in the West than in the
East. The reader will find various works of this nature in this
collection but perhaps not one so remarkable as Patricia Prime’s
“Wings Over Water”:

. . . at first glance

your head bobs from side to side like the

cautious mallard on the river a thousand words
and lines the tools of writing tucked into your
backpack in the spring when cherry blossom
petals flutter to the ground or in darkest winter
when the sun disappears behind the Kamai
Ranges

at first glance

you are a heron wings beat and legs tangle as

you swoop along the riverbank your eyes on the
light

a harrier hawk
scrolls the valley
its wings
almost touch
the azure ceiling

The Tanka Prose Anthology 23

 wildflowers
in the meadow
you scrawl
words across the page
illegibly . . .

Prime’s contribution to tanka prose is also notable for the

striking effects she has achieved by inverting the common order
of prose first, tanka last. Her titles that adopt this format
commonly start with a sequence of three or more tanka and
conclude with a prose section of one or two paragraphs. “White
& Red” and “La Fenêtre Ouverte (Matisse)” demonstrate the
curious shift in pace and emotive power that this form allows a
skilled poet to generate in the transition from verse to prose.
They also offer compelling evidence of what we suspected all
along—that haibun and tanka prose at their best, while distant
relatives, each maintain distinct and separate households.

Reference in this introduction has been made to the fact that

many writers of tanka and tanka prose wrote haiku and haibun
before adopting the new genres and that this circumstance plays
some role in accounting for the free use of haiku and tanka in
nascent tanka prose writings. Perhaps it may explain as well the
not-uncommon mixture of these two verse-forms in many
contemporary tanka sequences.[20] While I’ve touched upon
this above in a discussion of Sagan’s diary and Ward’s memoir,
shorter works by Ward and Katherine Samuelowicz offer clear
examples of the same verse-hybrid in simpler but more lyrical
form. Ward and Samuelowicz both weave one haiku and one
tanka into these works of tanka prose. In “Island Sunrise” and
“Merchants Millpond,” Ward’s prose is an instrument for
sensory perceptions that are finely drawn and rich in detail while
the haiku and tanka reinforce the splendor of the natural setting
before her. Samuelowicz, in “His Grandmother’s Orange” and
“Morocco May 2004,” also writes a very poetic prose that is

24 The Tanka Prose Anthology

equal to the accompanying haiku and tanka but, instead of
nature as a central motif, Samuelowicz’s tanka prose is fixed
upon her native Poland. Whether she is returning to her current
residence in Brisbane, Australia after a visit home or whether
she is touring North Africa, Poland, and her distance from it,
are at the core of her perceptions and emotions:

high from a house roof in the kasbah I look at

snow covered mountains at a fertile green oasis
neatly separated with a clean chirurgical cut
from yellowy brown desert at kapusta cabbage
heads in neat rows among date palms

in Chellah on Roman columns nasze bociany

Polish storks and nasze malwy our hollyhocks
against façades of palaces with their intricate
carved wood stucco and tilework i nasze
przydrozne maki and our red poppies among
graves of rulers long dead

Essays in the 18th century and earlier were considered high

literature. Addison and Steele, Johnson and Swift—each
claimed many admirers. The essay has fallen on hard times more
recently and not only the general populace but literati as well
often reject any claim that may be made for the essay’s
importance or potential as a literary genre. In China and Japan,
on the other hand, the essay has enjoyed, from ancient times, a
position of prestige and is the equal, in many respects, of
poetry or fiction. Tao Qian (365–427), a legendary Chinese
recluse, is widely admired for his rustic and outspoken verses
but is perhaps most famous for his utopian essay, “Peach
Blossom Spring,” while Su Shi (1037–1101), one of China’s
greatest poets, professed equal pride in his accomplished essays,
among which is “Red Cliff,” one of the most frequently cited
writings in the Chinese classical canon.[21] Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow

The Tanka Prose Anthology 25

Book, Kamo no Chōmei’s Ten Foot Square Hut and Yoshida
Kenkō’s Essays in Idleness [22]—writings of the 11th through 13th
centuries—are famous Japanese examples of the literary essay
as is Matsuo Bashō’s “Hut of the Phantom Dwelling.”[23] Two
brief examples of the essay with tanka appear in this collection.
Marjorie A. Buettner’s “The Poet’s Cabin” commemorates a
visit to the hermitage of Jun Fujita, an early proponent of tanka
in North America, while offering the essayist’s homage to the
earlier poet. Michael Dylan Welch’s “Four Favourite Tanka,”
while extremely short, indicates yet another path for future
writers to explore in its close reading and appreciation of the
tanka of two other poets.

Allusion to literary texts, to religious or philosophical tenets and

to works of art is a technique common to poetry in the East and
West, so it is not surprising to discover this feature in many
tanka prose works. Allusion establishes the added dimension of
binding the current poet to his cultural past and of inviting both
poet and reader to compare or contrast now and then. Larry
Kimmel, in “Who Loves to Lie with Me,” has his lady
antagonist quote the song “Under the Greenwood Tree,” from
Shakespeare’s As You Like It, as an ironic counterpoint to his
disappointment at the discovery of the woman’s true character.
Bob Lucky, in “Ignoring Dylan Thomas Sometimes, Sometimes
Not,” depicts his own aging body as the vehicle for a comical
evocation of the Welsh poet’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into that
Good Night.” Lucky does not summon Thomas’s “rage against
the dying of the light” but, instead, with “a sort of rolling gait,”
Lucky tells us, “I stumble into the night.” Gary LeBel discovers
himself alone in a hotel in Mitylene, Alabama, a happenstance
that calls to mind Sappho’s association with Mytilene on the
island of Lesbos and that inspires LeBel’s echo of the lament of
the ancient Greek poetess for the passing of youth. Ekphrastic
tanka prose—writings on the subject and form of specific works
of art—find representation in current practice and in this

26 The Tanka Prose Anthology

anthology as well. Terra Martin, in “Matisse: Woman Before an
Aquarium, 1921,” captures the French painter’s motif of
confinement in a finely nuanced prose that remains faithful to
her original stimulus while stressing the relation between the
goldfish that the cloistered woman observes and Matisse’s
implied spectator. In “La Fenêtre Ouverte (Matisse),” Patricia
Prime gazes through the French painter’s open window at
Collioure in 1905 and invites the reader to look as well.[24]
Other tanka prose examples of ekphrasis in the current
collection include LeBel’s “Rooftops” and this author’s “The
Silence That Inhabits Houses.”

What Does the Future Hold for Tanka Prose?

One quarter of a century ago, Sanford Goldstein wrote his

“Tanka Walk” and, during the intervening period, various poets
have attempted tanka prose in English. Each poet brought to
this novel form a different outlook and understanding and, in
some instances, the poets so engaged did not perceive what they
were doing as tanka prose but as haibun.

Twenty five years is the proverbial “blink of an eye” within the

context of cultural history. Practitioners of tanka prose were
few, their contributions to the form in many cases infrequent
and their mastery limited by the very novelty of the undertaking.
Those assessments are no large criticism as one must recall,
from what we have said above, that these poets were engaged
in a genre which had no ready name in Japanese or English, in
a genre not welcome in many publication venues, in a genre
often confused by practicing poet and friendly editor alike with
its distant descendent, haibun. These circumstances offered few
incentives for mastering a difficult medium or coming to grips
with its relation to other similar but distinct forms. Despite such
very unpromising conditions, tanka prose found occasional
adherents and found able realization in the work of writers like

The Tanka Prose Anthology 27

Goldstein or Jane Reichhold, Larry Kimmel or Linda Jeannette
Ward. Gary LeBel is somewhat original in having composed
tanka prose in the late 90s and having continued with some
regularity, over the years, to contribute to its literature; he found
his own path in tanka prose by working quietly and alone, by
exploring new avenues wherever they presented themselves in
his continuing poetic practice. Other poets in this anthology—
Patricia Prime, Bob Lucky, Linda Papanicolaou and Terra
Martin among them—came to the genre relatively late, most
within the past year, and adopted tanka prose’s varied forms
while working directly with this editor in online discussion
groups or through private correspondence.

My studies of tanka prose began in 2007 and were motivated

originally not by my own writing of tanka but by a search for
the solution to certain technical problems I faced in writing
haibun. I soon became fascinated with the possibilities of tanka
prose on its own merits and, in my researches into the literature
and in my attempts to answer the inquiries of poets who worked
with me, I found myself pushed repeatedly to seek solutions to
perplexing questions and to offer clarifications as new problems
came to the fore.

The short history of tanka prose in English affords a mere

sketch or outline of what tanka prose might be. Tanka poets, in
recent years, have shown a true affinity for tanka sequences and
this very desire to expand the possibilities of tanka by extending
its form will inevitably lead some tanka poets to turn to the
example and promise of tanka prose also. Writers who come to
the genre with that motivation—the search for expansive form
—will find what they seek in the varied models of memoir,
diary, essay, prose poetry and fiction that have a rightful place
in tanka prose. It would be shortsighted not to anticipate that
new practitioners, new poets with their own personal
perspective and concerns, will also try new forms and that

28 The Tanka Prose Anthology

documentary reportage, biography and other types of prose will
eventually be adapted for use with tanka as well.

My wish for the reader of this volume is that if his or her

encounter with tanka prose can achieve one thing only, let it be
that sense of adventure, of a vast new world suddenly opening
up before one, that world that Matisse viewed through his
window at Collioure, that world that Patricia Prime captures in
her homage to the same painter and the same window, to the
“two worlds” of interior and exterior, of dark and light:

as I emerge with you

from darkness across
the ivy-garlanded sill
I enter a world
more inferred than real

can’t you see

I share your lucidity
as I pass through
the open window into
a harbour of pink & red boats?

despite the dark

interior you capture
the quick-sleeved
transparency of light
dividing two worlds

Note on the Selection and Arrangement of Work in this Collection

While the intent of this collection is not primarily historical but

aimed at an initial survey of the literature of tanka prose in
English, historical value was weighed with perceived artistic

The Tanka Prose Anthology 29

merit in selecting representative early compositions. No work is
presented here for historical value only. Other than the
anthologist’s common desire to select the best work available,
the great variety in form, matter and style that is already in
evidence among practitioners of tanka prose inspired a
determination on the editor’s part to represent this diversity
faithfully.

Many of the earlier works and authors present here came to my

acquaintance by a private study, over the past year, of online
archives of various literary journals. Jane and Werner
Reichhold’s Lynx was a particularly rich resource in this regard
as were the Reichholds who were generous in supplying me,
gratis, rare print copies of the journal before its transformation
into a digital publication. Lynx has published tanka prose for a
dozen years or more and continues to do so to this day. I was
the recipient of another great kindness via Sanford Goldstein
who, from his current residence in Japan, requested that his
daughter locate and mail to me, from his personal files, a very
rare copy of the 1983 issue of Northeast where his “Tanka Walk”
first found publication.

Writings of more recent provenance came my way, most often,

through my editorial work at Haibun Today, where I have
promoted tanka prose since late 2007, or through personal
associations with poets who have shared my fascination and
worked with me sub rosa, as it were, to explore and develop the
possibilities of tanka prose.

I settled upon arranging the work in the conventional Western

manner—alphabetically, by author—somewhat reluctantly.
Some argument might be made for presenting the work in the
chronological order of its first publication or, perhaps, by
grouping works according to perceived common forms or
subjects. I would have preferred one of these alternatives but,

30 The Tanka Prose Anthology

in the end, was dissuaded by the very youth and tentative nature
of this enterprise where neither chronology nor common
characteristics are yet clearly definitive or discernible.

Jeffrey Woodward
Detroit
May 2008

Notes
1. Helen Craig McCullough, Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 73–102.

2. Certain Japanese linguists and metrists distinguish between a syllable and

mora as it applies to versification in Japanese haiku and tanka. Mora is a term
that will be familiar to students of classical Greek or Latin poetry where it
signifies the smallest metric unit in classical quantitative prosodies, a short
syllable. Two morae, i.e., two short syllables, are by that reckoning equal to
one long. While the distinction is fine and relevant to a discussion of
Japanese versification, any application to English practice is particularly
dubious insofar as accent in English is determinative, not quantity. See Derek
Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975) for a study of the last serious attempt
to sanction quantity as a metrical paradigm in English versification. For
readers interested in the subject as it pertains to Japanese verse, see Koji
Kawamoto, The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Imagery, Structure, Meter (Tokyo:
University of Tokyo Press, 1999). One theoretical view of why these matters
may be pertinent for practitioners of English-language haiku or tanka can be
read in Richard Gilbert and Judy Yoneoka, “Haiku Metrics and Issues of
Emulation—New Paradigms for Japanese and English Haiku Form,”
Language Issues, V6, N1 (2000). Available at: <http://research.iyume.com/
metrics/haikumet. html>, last accessed on May 19, 2008.

3. Mildred M. Tahara, Tales of Yamato: A Tenth-Century Poem-Tale (Honolulu,

HI: The University Press of Hawaii, 1980), 166–168. Cf. Laurel Rasplica
Rodd and Mary Catherine Henkenius, Kokinshū: A Collection of Poems Ancient
and Modern (Boston, MA: Cheng & Tsui Company, 1996, first edition, 1984),
20–21.

The Tanka Prose Anthology 31

4. Jin’ichi Konishi, A History of Japanese Literature (in two volumes) with Earl
Miner, Editor, and Aileen Gatten, Translator (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1986), I, 251–265; I, 365–373; I, 418–430. Cf. McCullough,
op. cit., 7–8.

5. Meredith McKinney, The Tale of Saigyō (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Papers
in Japanese Studies, No. 25, Center for Japanese Studies, University of
Michigan Press, 1998), 13–14. Cf. H. Jay Harris, The Tales of Ise (Rutland, VT:
Tuttle Publishing, 1972), 23. In an earlier paper on tanka prose, I maintained
the useful distinction between the early waka practice of preface (kotobagaki)
and poem tale (uta monogatari) as a means of illustrating some of the simplest
but most effective forms of tanka prose; see “The Road Ahead for Tanka in
English,” Modern English Tanka, V2, N2 (2007), 179–187. Available at:
<http://www.shortverse.com/digital/2007d/ articletheroadaheadfortankain
englishbyjeffreywoodward.html>, last accessed on May 19, 2008.

6. Earl Miner, An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 1968), 27–28.

7. William J. Higginson, The Haiku Handbook (New York: McGraw-Hill,

1985), 63–64.

8. Sanford Goldstein, “Tanka Walk,” Northeast III:15 (1983), 26–32.

9. Jane Reichhold, A Gift of Tanka (Gualala, CA: AHA Books, 1990).

10. Larry Kimmel, “Evening Walk,” Point Judith Light (1996).

11. Konishi, op. cit., II, 251–258.

12. Much of what follows, in an attempted definition of tanka prose, is

derived from my earlier essay, “The Elements of Tanka Prose,” Modern
English Tanka, V2, N4 (2008), 250–262.

13. Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashō (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1982),112.

Cf. “Official Definitions of Haiku and Related Terms,” adopted at the
Annual Meeting of the Society, New York City, 18 September 2004. Available at:
<http://www.hsa-haiku.org/archives/HSA_Definitions_2004.html>, last
accessed May 19, 2008.

14. For an overview of modern tanka’s development in Japan, see Donald

Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era: Poetry, Drama,
Criticism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 7–87. Cf. Michael

32 The Tanka Prose Anthology

McClintock, in the introduction to The Tanka Anthology, edited by Michael
McClintock, Jim Kacian and Pamela Miller Ness (Winchester, VA: Red
Moon Press, 2003), 9–11, for a modern English-language perspective.

15. I wish here to anticipate the objection that a paragraph is elastic and
offers little by way of definition since it may consist of one sentence, or two,
or many more. Two remarks must be made in reply. The first observation is
that while it is true that a paragraph is extremely variable, anyone who has
read the prose of Proust or Joyce will know that a sentence, too, is almost
infinitely variable, that it may be as simple as a monosyllabic subject and
monosyllabic verb or that it may extend over a page or pages by the insertion
of numerous digressions, parenthetical asides, subordinate clauses and so on.
The second observation is that while one readily admits the fairness of the
objection in relation to the elasticity of a paragraph of prose, it must be
pointed out that the form of tanka itself, once relatively restricted to a 5-7-5-
7-7 norm, is in no way fixed in current practice and shows extreme variability
as well.

16. An excellent survey of the obscurity, willful or otherwise, of the aesthetic

concept of yūgen as expressed in formulations by classical waka poets, such
as Shunzei, Chōmei and Shōtetsu, can be read in Robert H. Brower,
Conversations with Shōtetsu, with an Introduction and Notes by Stephen D.
Carter (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies
Number 7, Center for Japanese Studies, 1992), 51–57.

17. McCullough, op. cit., 15–19.

18. McCullough, op. cit., 15–16.

19. Earl Miner, in Japanese Poetic Diaries (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1969), 9, touches briefly on the impact that the presence of tanka has
upon the quality of the surrounding prose: “And yet, the effect of the poems
is to heighten the sense of fiction, the air of art, the presumption of literature.
When a work averages two or three poems per page, the prose continuo must
necessarily be in some degree answerable, and so it is likely to take on a more
heightened artistic quality than prose without poems.”

20. For representative examples of contemporary composite tanka and haiku

sequences, consult Denis M. Garrison and Michael McClintock, Editors, The
Five-Hole Flute: Modern English Tanka in Sequences and Sets. (Baltimore, MD:
Modern English Tanka Press, 2006) and Garrison and McClintock, Editors,
The Dreaming Room: Modern English Tanka in Collage and Montage Sets.
(Baltimore, MD: Modern English Tanka Press, 2007).

The Tanka Prose Anthology 33

21. See David Pollard, The Chinese Essay (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000) and Yang Ye, Vignettes from the Late Ming (Seattle, WA: University
of Washington Press, 1999), two excellent anthologies of the Chinese literary
essay, for translations of Tao Qian and Su Shi.

22. See McCullough, op. cit., 158–199 for excerpts from Sei Shōnagon,
379–392 for Kamo no Chōmei, 393–421 for Yoshida Kenkō. Independent
translations are also available of each title cited.

23. David Landis Barnhill, Bashō’s Journey: The Literary Prose of Matsuo Bashō
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 123–125.

24. Pierre Schneider, Matisse (New York: Rizzoli International, 1984),

220–222.

34 The Tanka Prose Anthology