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Time for a bit more tanka poetry, because if you are listening to this in real time, the beginning of November 2024, submissions are open for tanka, your deadline the 15th November. Criteria.
Now many of our haiku community have said that they are bit wary of writing tanka, because they’ve not tried it before. I have a few things to say to that; there will be many of you in the same boat, give it a go, you might just find that you have found the new love of your writing life. Here at Pea Towers we often find that relative novices writing haiku are successful because they are coming to the form with fresh eyes I wonder if that will be the same with tanka? Lastly and please feel free to contradict me, but I feel that tanka are closer to western forms of poetry that many of us grew up with than are haiku, so maybe we’ll have a more natural affinity for them Replies in an email please…
So, the last tanka podcast I brought you was a joint production from myself and Vandana Parashar, episode 41 of this series.
In episodes 36 / 37 I gave you the second part of an historical tanka series, there’s an essay to go with it on my Buymeacoffee page, from waka to tanka.
For episode 37 I read An Anthology of Tanka that was put together by Makoto Ueda published in 1996[i]. In said anthology he features 20 poets but only 5 of them, one quarter, were tanka written by women. He says his criteria for choosing the poets to feature was to illustrate the major styles that have been used in the 100 years prior to publication of his book. My knowledge of modern Japanese tanka is not as yet at the point where I can, as he suggests, compile my own anthology of Japanese tanka. Perhaps in the coming years that will be remedied, but his research set me thinking. Why were there so few women featured? So my plan was to take a little ramble through some tanka by female poets, some featured by Ueda some not and do some research into what was going on during the period Ueda was researching. Well that was the plan, but then I got reading about Yosano Akiko and the plan changed. So at this point of time the new plan is an episode all about Yosano Akiko, a separate episode about the female poets featured by Ueda and then an episode about a rather more modern tanka poet, Tawara Machi.
Today, let’s learn about Yosano Akiko.
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[i] Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Tanka An Anthology, Columbia University Press, 1996
