Poetry Form: Tanka
Image by Valerio Errani from Pixabay
I’ve been back in the swing of working on some form poetry, so I’ve got some new-to-me forms to talk about!
This week’s form is the tanka, which is a variation on a haiku that is five lines instead of three and 31 syllables instead of 17. In general, it still follows the structure of the haiku for the first three lines, with 5-7-5 syllables, but the fourth and fifth lines each include 7 syllables. It’s also more flexible in terms of the themes and allowable literary or poetic devices.
You might not think that those extra 14 syllables are much, but they do nearly double the available syllables, which lends itself to a bigger thought or subject than a haiku does. I also love tanka (and haiku) because the form doesn’t require meter or rhyme, which makes them a good building block for something bigger! You could write a chained tanka (similar to a chained haiku), in which you would have even more room to explore your subject. And I think a combination of haiku stanzas and tanka stanzas could also work, especially if the haiku follows the more traditional format and the tanka inspires or draws inspiration from the haiku.
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