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The composition of tanka in English has been less prominent than that of English-language haiku, but it has a history dating back at least one hundred years. While translations into English of classic Japanese tanka (traditionally known as waka) date back at least to the earliest translation of the Hyakunin Isshu in the Bakumatsu era, this article focuses on original English compositions.

History

The earliest known English-language tanka collection was Ida Henrietta Bean's Tanka, in London, 1899. The first North American tanka collection was Jun Fujita's Tanka : Poems in Exile, in 1923. Tanka had been previously published in English by other authors, including Sadakichi Hartmann, who was better known as an art critic than poet. The first known anthology containing original English tanka was Tanka and Hokku, edited by Edith Brown Mirick, in 1931. Tanka and related forms appeared in Clement Wood's Poets Handbook in 1946. The first known tanka-only original English anthology, Tanka : Contemporary Poets of Dorrance, edited by Noel D'Arpajon, was published in 1948. The first known North American collection containing tanka in English written by a person not of Japanese descent was Blue Is the Iris, by Eleanor Chaney Grubb, 1949.

Japanese Americans won the Imperial Poetry Contest several times during the 1940s, but the first person not of Japanese descent to win was Lucille Nixon in 1957. Her win garnered considerable media and diplomatic attention. An educator by profession, Nixon succeeded in getting tanka included in educational resources in California where she lived. Nixon had trained as part of the Totsukuni tankakai, which was founded in 1927 by Yoshihiko Tomari. She was tutored in Japanese and tanka by her housekeeper, Tomoe Tana, herself a previous winner of the Imperial Poetry Contest, and by Tomari. The journal of the Totsukuni tankakai published tanka in English as well as Japanese during the 1950s, making it the first known journal to publish tanka in English. The second known English-language journal to specifically include tanka was SCTH (Sonnet Cinquain Tanka Haiku) published from 1964 - 1980, edited by Foster and Rhoda de Long Jewell.

Tanka publication in English was sporadic until after World War II when various Japanese North American tanka poets began publishing anthologies and collections in Japanese, English translation, and bi-lingual editions. These efforts apparently began immediately after the poets were released from internment camps in Canada and the United States, but the oldest known anthology in English is Tana and Nixon's Sounds from the Unknown, 1963, and the Kisaragi Poem Study Group's Maple : poetry by Japanese Canadians with English translation, 1972. (An earlier edition in 1964 may have been Japanese-only, and was inspired by the first Canadian to win the Imperial Poetry Contest.) Similar works continue to be published sporadically. In the United Kingdom, the first known English-language anthology was the Starving sparrow temple anthology : haiku, tanka, linked verse and other pieces edited by William E. Watt, 1971. (Japanese-only anthologies had been published in the United States starting in the 1920s and perhaps earlier.) By 1969, tanka was well-known enough that it started appearing in anthologies of student work published by public schools in the United States.

Tanka came to the attention of poets writing English-language haiku in the 1980s, and during the 1990s some of the better known names in tanka and haiku publication, including Jane Reichhold, Michael McClintock, Sanford Goldstein, Michael Dylan Welch, Janice Bostok, Pat Shelley, Father Neal Lawrence, and George Swede, published tanka collections and anthologies, or mixed collections containing tanka, haiku and other forms. Though some tanka had been published in haiku magazines, with the out-pouring of tanka in Mirrors and the beginning of the Tanka Splendor Awards and resulting yearly anthologies by AHA Books, the interest in English tanka began to blossom. The publication of A Gift of Tanka by Jane Reichhold, of Sanford Goldstein's At the Hut of the Small Mind,and of Lawrence's Shining Moments by AHA Books opened the way for more tanka books, as did Michael Dylan Welch's anthology Footsteps in the Fog and then Jane and Werner Reichhold's anthology Wind Five Folded. Kenneth Rexroth's The Love Poems of Marichiko was also published; originally presented as a translation from the Japanese, they were later shown to have been a hoax, the poems being Rexroth's own work.

Some English tanka poets are also known for their haiku, senryū, and cinquains. Most early English-language tanka appeared in journals that featured a variety of small poem forms (although the main American haiku magazines published only haiku and sometimes senryu). Lynx (co-editors Jane and Werner Reichhold) has since 1992 been an outlet for tanka and tanka sequences in print and now online. Michael Dylan Welch's Woodnotes journal also published tanka prominently, starting in 1990 and continuing through to its last issue in 1997, and also published winners of the annual tanka contest run by the Haiku Poets of Northern California. The HPNC tanka contest, along with the Tanka Splendor contest, was one of the earliest contests for English-language tanka and is still continuing.

Tanka journals were published in the United States in Japanese starting in the 1920s. Bilingual English-Japanese journals were published in the 1950s. Only recently have there been journals devoted exclusively to tanka in English, including American Tanka (1996) in the United States, edited by Laura Maffei and Tangled Hair in Britain, edited by John Barlow. The first English-language tanka journal, Five Lines Down, began in 1994, edited by Sanford Goldstein and Kenneth Tanemura, but lasted only a few issues.

The Tanka Chapter of the Chaparral Poets of California was operating in the early 60s, as mentioned in the Introduction to Sounds from the Unknown (1963), but it is not known whether they published a journal. They published an anthology in 1975, entitled simply, Tanka. The Tanka Chapter is no longer extant. The Tanka Society of America was founded by Michael Dylan Welch in April 2000, when he invited numerous participants to the inaugural meeting at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. This society now publishes the tanka journal Ribbons. Tanka Canada also publishes a journal titled Gusts, and the Anglo-Japanese Tanka Society (UK) hosts a web site with tanka and articles.

Tanka publication expanded through the 1990s with the establishment of additional journals, online forums, and contests such as the Tanka Splendor Awards, but broadened in the early 21st century with the establishment of several tanka organizations working in English, and a proliferation of international sources. Various special-interest tanka groups have also sprouted, such as "Mountain Home," named for the English translation of the title of the famous collection of Saigyo's waka, the Sanka Shu ("Mountain Home Collection"). The number of literary journals (print and web) that regularly publish tanka in English now numbers in excess of twenty.

Throughout most of its history, English-language tanka has focused on the individual tanka, but Fujita sequenced Tanka : Poems in Exile (1923), making it the first known tanka sequence in English, as well as the first book length sequence. The 1946 Poets Handbook listed forms such as 'double tanka' that extended the length of tanka, but conceptualized it as a long poem, rather than as a 'sequence' as that term is generally understood. The Tanka Chapter of the Chaparral Poets of California experimented with short sequences in their anthology, Tanka (1975). Sequences appeared in Japan : Theme and Variations : A Collection of Poems by Americans, edited by Charles E. Tuttle (1959). Fire Pearls : Short Masterpieces of the Human Heart, edited by M. Kei (2006), and The Five-Hole Flute : Modern English Tanka in Sets and Sequences (2006) edited by Denis M. Garrison and Michael McClintock, are the first sequenced anthologies. Sanford Goldstein pioneered work in tanka sequences, and Lynx under the Reichholds encouraged 'symbiotic' poetry (multi-author, multi-form poetry), including sequences and responsive tanka. Sequences were also included as part of the Tanka Splendor Awards.

Notable publications

• Conforti, Gerard John. Now That the Night Ends. Gualala, California: AHA Books and Chant Press, 1996
• Goldstein, Sanford. Four Decades on my Tanka Road. Baltimore, MD: Modern English Tanka Press, 2007
• Lawrence, Neal Henry. Rushing Amid Tears. Tokyo, Japan: Eichosha Shinsha, 1983
• McClintock, Michael, Pamela Miller Ness and Jim Kacian, eds., The Tanka Anthology: 800 of the Best Tanka in English by 68 of Its Finest Practitioners, Winchester, VA, Red Moon Press 2003 ISBN 1-893959-40-6
• Reichhold, Jane. A Gift of Tanka. Gualala, California: AHA Books, 1990
• Reichhold, Jane, and Reichhold, Werner, eds. Wind Five Folded: An Anthology of English-Language Tanka. Gualala, California: AHA Books, 1994

Online

• Conforti, Gerard John, For My Brother Victor & Elsa His Wife
• Conforti, Gerard John. Now that the Night Ends
• Conforti, Gerard John. Spirit of the Wind
• Helsem, Michael. 404; & In the Time of the Fall of the Towers
• MacRury, Carole. The Tang of Nasturtiums. Snapshot Press, Ormskirk, 2012
• Reichhold, Werner. Cybertry Part II A
• Reichhold, Werner. Cyberpoetry

References

1. Homepage of AHApoetry.com
2. ^ 'A History of Tanka in English Pt I : The North American Foundation, 1899 - 1985' at Tanka Central, 2011.
3. A Chat about Tanka. Interview with Michael Dylan Welch

External links

• American Tanka magazine
• Tanka Society of America

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