Tanka

This gets its own page because it's so special to me. Like, this is the first form I go to when inspiration hits. Always.

What is tanka, though? Tanka 短歌(たんか) is a form of classical Japanese verse, consisting of thirty-one morae divided into five units, with the first 17 morae being the "upper phrase" and the final 21 being the "lower phrase". It is the precursor to the much better known haiku. Morae are hard to describe in layman's terms, but they're often equated with syllables, and that's as accurate as you can get, imho.

Tanka and haiku (and many, many forms of waka, now that I think about it...) are given an ill-deserved reputation for being simple and easy to write. I would kick back against this with both feet. With my stompiest goth boots on, no less. The length of a poem does not tell you about the quality of it, nor how easy it was to create.

In my opinion? Writing purposefully short poems of any kind is only "easy" if you're not taking them seriously. Tanka and tanka-form demands a rhythm, a knowledge of certain words and how to make them work. It asks for the creator to feel a connection to nature. The best tanka take eras and eons and endlessnesses and turn them into five lines of wonder, or beauty, or joy, or terror, or...feeling.

All my publicly released tanka form poems are organised into sections over at uguisu, and available in many an ebook format as Bruised Opulence, a self-published collection~