A tanka is a Japanese lyric poem (stay with me). It’s like a haiku, which you probably had to learn about at school, but a bit longer – 31 syllables rather than 17. Tankas are made up of five unrhymed lines of five, seven, five, seven and seven syllables. They’re often romantic poems, and they talk about the weather a lot as well (so us Brits should LOVE them). They generally follow a set structure – the first three lines are usually about a particular image or thought, then the last two move the focus to something else (but still related to the original idea). Confused? Me too. Here’s an example of a tanka by Stella Pierides, a British writer and poet which hopefully shows what I mean.
this sultry evening
I mistake your eyes for two
hovering fireflies
such stillness only the dead
and the truly happy know
Nice, right?
The word ‘tanka’ was used in the second half of the eighth century in Japan to describe short poems, as opposed to chōka for (you’ve guessed it) long poems. As time went on, and probably due to a general lack of attention span, short poems became more popular. These were given the general name of ‘waka’, and the word ‘tanka’ fell out of favour for a bit (thank god they didn’t decide to combine the two names…). Then, in the early 20th century, a Japanese poet and critic by the name of Masaoka Shiki decided that waku needed updating for the times, and revived the word ‘tanka’. He also made the word ‘haiku’ popular as well (these were previously called hokkus) for the same reason. I’m not sure where he got all this renaming power from, but well done him.
Seventh-century nobles in the Japanese Imperial court held tanka poetry competitions. I like to think of these as ye olde rap battles.