Tanka, Renga, Jesei

Last week, I did some reading online on the Japanese poetic forms/traditions of Renga (collaborative poems) and Jesei (death poems). Then, in my Creative Writing lecture that same week, we had an unannounced special presentation by someone who works here at YSJ and who writes (see below) and is involved with Tanka (Japanese for "short poem") poetry. It was an interesting and inspiring introduction to Tanka poetry and has in the week or so since kept up my interest in learning about this 1300-year-old tradition. I hope to be able to experiment some myself with these forms for my class's final portfolio project.

Anyways, right after class, I went over to the library and checked out a few anthologies: one of specifically modern Tanka poetry, one a collection of the more popular Haiku form, and one more historically-focused anthology by Penguin Books. I would especially recommend the first of these, "Modern Japanese Tanka" edited and translated by Makoto Ueda, especially its easy-to-read and highly-informative Introduction.

More enjoyable than these anthologies, though, was "The Floating Bridge," the new collection of Tanka poems published by the instructor that presented to my class last week, Hisashi Nakamura. Its a relatively quick read, as the book is a standard 70ish-page collection and each only contains one 31-syllable poem. However, as is appropriate to the highly-concentrated meditative quality of Tanka, a lot more time could be spent engaging with each poem. One thing I found especially interesting about Mr. Nakamura's work is the way that the traditional and ancient poetic sensibility of Tanka, which fundamentally involves what the Japanese call "mono no aware," or a sort of melancholy awareness to the fleeting nature of life and reality that celebrates this transience as uniquely beautiful, interacts with the Western/European and modern world in which the actual poems are located. The presence of strange landscapes (such as the Yorkshire Moors) or at times the choice of a certain striking word represent the intriguing disparity which I see at work in these poems, as in the following poem:

Hanging from the bows
Of an old rusty vessel
Tied to the pier,
The black shadow of a cross
falls on the neon red sea.

I've since talked a little more to Mr. Nakamura (he very kindly gave me a free copy of his book) in order to write a short piece on it and Tanka poetry in general, perhaps for "Chimes" or something like that. It was very encouraging to discover this unique resource and opportunity amidst the new, sometimes stifled-seeming academic atmosphere here at YSJ. I would point anyone that might be interested in Tanka poetry to the homepage of the society Mr. Nakamura heads up: Anglo-Japanese Tanka Society.