A tanka is five short lines carrying one feeling out of one real moment. You do not need a poetic subject, and you do not need special words. You need something you actually lived, and the patience to work out what it meant. This page is the writing itself, step by step. For the form’s background and more examples, start with What Is Tanka? and come back.
Start with the shape: 5-7-5-7-7
The traditional pattern is five lines of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables. Thirty-one in all. Short, long, short, long, long.
Japanese does not count syllables, though. It counts sound units (on), and they are shorter than English syllables: “London” is two syllables in English and four sound units in Japanese. Thirty-one English syllables therefore hold more speech than thirty-one Japanese ones, and a strict count in English tends to produce a poem baggier than the form intends. Most poets writing tanka in English keep the five-line rhythm and come in under thirty-one syllables. Some keep the exact count. Either works. What does not work is padding a line with filler to reach seven.
While drafting, treat the counts as ceilings, not targets.
Step 1: catch the moment
In Japanese the first three lines are called the kami-no-ku, the upper phrase, and the last two the shimo-no-ku, the lower phrase. The upper phrase does the seeing. The lower phrase does the meaning. Keep those jobs separate and half your revision problems never appear.
So begin with two lines of plain experience: something you saw, heard, smelled, or touched, set down without comment. “steady rain” is an opening. “the sadness of rain” is not, because it has already skipped to the meaning, and the ending will have nothing left to do.
If nothing comes, wait for a moment that keeps returning on its own. A tanka needs a moment with weight. The frustration of burnt bacon is a poem for some other form.
Step 2: the pivot line
Line three is the hinge, and it is the part beginners miss. The method we teach is the Tanka Recipe on our What Is Tanka? page: two lines of experience, then a pivot line that reads with the lines above it and with the lines below it, then two closing lines that open into a larger meaning. That page walks the recipe through four award-winning poems.
Here is one of them, by Christopher Herold, from the Tanka Splendor Awards:
steady rain . . .
still only half awake
I wonder
which of these thoughts will be
the one to rouse me from bed
— Christopher Herold
Read lines one through three: rain, a half-awake mind, wondering. Now read three through five: wondering which thought will get him up. “I wonder” faces both directions. That double duty is what makes five short lines move as one continuous thought instead of a list.
If the pivot will not come, write it last. Get the scene down, get the ending down, then hunt for the one line that belongs to both.
Step 3: earn the ending
The last two lines say what the moment meant, without announcing it. Watch Amelia Fielden do this, in another Tanka Splendor poem from the same page:
still empty
my black lacquer box
awaiting
something too precious
to lie uncovered
— Amelia Fielden
She never names what the box is waiting for. The withholding is the meaning, and the reader finishes the poem for her. If your last lines explain the feeling (“and it made me sad”), cut them and go further into the moment instead. The ending should land somewhere the first line never promised, while staying attached to it.
Two habits from our editors’ desk. A tanka is usually one sentence, broken with purpose across the five lines, so write it as a sentence first and break it second. And avoid opening a line with “a” or “the”: articles slacken the compression the form depends on.
Step 4: revise in passes
Revise in separate passes, one job per pass.
- Read it aloud. If it does not move as a single thought, find where it stalls. Usually the pivot.
- The cover test. Hide the last two lines and read one through three; hide the first two and read three through five. Both halves should make sense. If the third line only points backward, you have a haiku with padding, not a tanka. Our Tanka vs Haiku page shows the difference in detail.
- Cut. Articles, adjectives, and any word restating another. Five lines cannot carry passengers.
- Count last. Check the syllables only after the poem works. Fix a long line by cutting, never by trading a plain word for a shorter fancy one.
- Sleep on it. A tanka that still lands the next morning is done. One that needs you to remember the original moment is not.
Drafting exercises
- The reply poem. In the Heian court a tanka was a message, often sent the morning after a meeting (see our Short History of Tanka). Write five lines to a real person about something that happened yesterday. You do not have to send it. Writing to someone keeps the voice honest.
- Upper halves only. For one week, write one observed moment per day in the short-long-short shape. No meanings allowed. At the end of the week, pick the one that still bothers you and finish it.
- Backward. Write the last two lines first: a feeling you actually have. Then find the concrete scene that earns it, and the pivot that joins them.
Common beginner mistakes
- Counting as the whole job. A dull 31 syllables is still dull. The count is the container, not the poem.
- Explaining the feeling. “I felt so alone” tells; an empty lacquer box shows.
- Rhyming. Tanka does not rhyme. Rhyme pulls the ear to the line ends and away from the pivot.
- Whimsy. The form asks for a feeling worth a reader’s silence afterward. A punchline wastes its two extra lines.
- Decoration. Every adjective in a tanka is on trial. Most lose.
Keep reading
- What Is Tanka? — the form, the Tanka Recipe, and four annotated examples.
- A Short History of Tanka — thirteen centuries of the form, from the Man’yōshū to tanka in English.
- Tanka Techniques — Teika’s ten tanka styles, with classical examples of each.
- Tanka vs Haiku — how to tell which one you are writing.
- More Reading — books, journals, and organizations for tanka poets.