Tanka has a deeper library in English than most people expect, and a handful of journals still publishing it. This is where we would send a poet who has read What Is Tanka? and wants to go further.
Where to start
If you read only one book, make it The Ink Dark Moon. If you want to see what tanka looks like in English today, make it The Tanka Anthology. Everything else on this page is a branch off those two.
Classical Japanese tanka in translation
- The Ink Dark Moon — love poems of Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani. Two women of the Heian court, and the best door into tanka that exists in English.
- One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each — Peter McMillan’s translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, the hundred-poem anthology every Japanese schoolchild still meets.
- Kokinshū: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern — Laurel Rasplica Rodd’s complete translation of the tenth-century imperial anthology. All 1,111 poems. This is the source Teika’s students were reading.
Modern Japanese tanka
- Tangled Hair: Selected Tanka from Midaregami — Yosano Akiko, translated by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda. Her 1901 debut scandalized Japan, and it still has heat.
- A Girl with Tangled Hair — Jane Reichhold and Machiko Kobayashi’s rendering of all 399 tanka of Midaregami, where the book above gives a selection.
- Songs from a Bamboo Village — tanka by Masaoka Shiki, who reformed both tanka and haiku, and who gave haiku its modern name.
- Romaji Diary and Sad Toys — Ishikawa Takuboku treated tanka as an honest diary. Sad Toys is 194 of them, and the plainness is deceptive.
- Salad Anniversary — Machi Tawara, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Published in 1987, it sold in the millions and proved tanka could be spoken in an ordinary modern voice.
- Modern Japanese Tanka: An Anthology — Makoto Ueda gathers twenty poets, from Yosano Tekkan to Tawara Machi. A century of the form in one volume.
- Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka — Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden, bilingual, and a prizewinner. Fielden’s own tanka appears in our examples.
Tanka written in English
- The Tanka Anthology — edited by Michael McClintock, Pamela Miller Ness, and Jim Kacian for Red Moon Press. Eight hundred tanka by sixty-eight poets, with a craft introduction worth the price on its own. The standard reference.
- Wind Five Folded — Jane and Werner Reichhold’s early gathering of English-language tanka, and one of the books that made the form possible here.
- A Long Rainy Season: Haiku and Tanka — contemporary Japanese women poets, edited and translated by Leza Lowitz, Miyuki Aoyama, and Akemi Tomioka.
- Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka — the annual best-of volumes edited by M. Kei, covering 2008 through 2011. The publisher is gone; the books are still findable.
- Dance into the World — the Tanka Society of America’s twentieth anniversary anthology.
Jane Reichhold
Our Techniques page is built on Jane Reichhold’s essay on Teika’s ten tanka styles, published here with her permission. Her other tanka work is worth seeking out.
- Heavenly Maiden Tanka — Akiko Baba, translated with Hatsue Kawamura. Bilingual.
- Breasts of Snow — the life and tanka of Fumiko Nakajo, who died at thirty-two and wrote through it.
On writing tanka
There is no single how-to book on tanka we can point you to, and we would rather say so than invent one. What there is:
- Our Tanka Recipe, which is how we would teach the form in five minutes.
- Teika’s ten tanka styles, which is how it was taught eight hundred years ago.
- The Tanka Teachers Guide from the Tanka Society of America — free to read, written for classrooms, and useful well outside one.
- The craft introduction in The Tanka Anthology, above.
Journals still publishing tanka
- Tanka Society of America — the hub for English-language tanka: contests, workshops, and a membership worth having. Its journal, Ribbons, appears twice a year and reads submissions from members and nonmembers alike.
- Eucalypt — Australia’s tanka journal, edited by Julie Thorndyke, twice yearly in print. Thorndyke’s tanka is one of the examples on our What Is Tanka? page.
- cattails — journal of the United Haiku and Tanka Society, free to read online, publishing tanka and tanka prose twice a year.
- Kōkako — from Aotearoa New Zealand, now a free online biannual carrying tanka alongside haiku and haibun.
A word of warning, because we checked: several tanka journals that show up in older link lists are gone, and two of their domains have been bought by other people and now point somewhere you do not want to go. If you find a tanka site through a ten-year-old bibliography, look at the date on its most recent issue before you trust it.
For a maintained list of English-language tanka books, the Tanka Society of America keeps Tanka in English: A Tanka Bibliography.
Elsewhere on this site
- What Is Tanka? — the form, the 5-7-5-7-7 pattern, the Tanka Recipe, and examples.
- Tanka vs Haiku — how the two forms differ.
- Tanka Techniques — Teika’s ten styles.
- Haiku Journal — our sister journal, and the place to go if the shorter form is pulling at you.
Book links on this page go to Amazon. Tanka Journal is an Amazon Associate, and we earn a small commission on qualifying purchases, at no additional cost to you. We link these books because we think they are the right ones, not because of the commission.