About the Book
(from the introduction) The tanka (or waka or uta) is a Japanese poetic form of great antiquity. It is believed to have originated as early as the 7th century of the current era & has been the preferred verse-form during much of Japanese literary history since then. Consisting of five lines with a 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic pattern, it is essentially an expanded haiku. However, historically the tanka is earlier, the haiku not having arisen until about the 10th century. I began composing both types of little poems in English (& sometimes in Spanish) many years ago, with some efforts that I consider quite successful. My own policy & practice in creating these has been to keep to a strict syllabic count as in the Japanese models - playing tennis with a net, as Robert Frost might say. Because English syllables are, on the average, inherently more meaningful than Japanese syllables, this naturally leads to poems that are richer in meaning over all than poems of the same structural type in Japanese. Seen from the other side of things, this also means that translators of Japanese haiku & tanka into English must sometimes pad their lines through wordy circumlocutions if they wish to maintain the original syllable-count in their translations. A few years ago, my friend Anita Chundak loaned me the book Crossing State Lines, a unique sort of anthology of short poems by 52 poets ranged all across "these States" (as the Good Gray Poet would say) coordinating the composition of their poems in a linked manner, as has been traditional in Japanese literary culture for centuries. The editors of the little volume established an order of transmission for the projected collection & suggested that the standard format for each poem be a double tanka: two tanka(s) one after the other, the two of them sharing a common theme, begun in the first tanka & further developed in the second. Successive poets in the chain were encouraged to link their contribution to the immediately previous one so that a sense of continuity of semantic flow might be established & maintained. However, not every poet in the anthology abided by these prescriptions, some of them seeming to have ignored the semantics of what came before in the chain so as to harp again on well-worn personal themes, while a few others ignored the formal prescription entirely, producing free-form poems that are in no way structurally akin to the tanka. As I read through the little anthology, I realized that it would not be very difficult at all for me to produce a book a lot like that one, but made up of just my own five- & ten-line compositions. So quite naturally & readily I then shifted a significant amount of my literary attention to the making of such poemlets, & now, just a few years later, I have been able to gather together & present here a sizeable collection of these. Apparently, the rules for composing tanka do not include a prescription for themes out of nature - as is the case with haiku - & thus the subject-matter of these poems ranges quite broadly & all-inclusively. In contemplating the double tanka that I've produced over the last few years, I have noticed a number of different ways in which the second tanka may relate to the first. In some cases the second part provides a bit of commentary, in more general terms, about what has just been presented in the first part; in other cases more information, at the same level of particularity, is added; while in still other cases a semantically unrelated but temporally co-occurring set of images may be presented.
About the Author: Dennis Graham Holt (born October 6, 1942) is an American poet, linguist, and translator. Born in Hollywood. Attended the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA, in Linguistics (B.A. 1972, M.A. 1973, C.Phil. 1975, and Ph.D. 1986). 1966 to 1969, in the Peace Corps in Bolivia, and later teaching English as a second language. Active in Los Angeles and Santa Cruz poetry groups. Holt published his first book of poetry, Windings, in 1973, then Some Bard's-Eye Views from Santa Cruz, Le Missoulambator, La Fogata Cruceña, The Quincunx, and others. He has lived in northern Jalisco state, Mexico, Los Angeles again, where he married Carleigh M. Hoff. They to Santa Barbara, where Leif Hoff-Holt was born, then to Providence, Rhode Island, East Hartford, and Hamden, Connecticut. After divorce, Holt moved to Missoula, Montana, then back to Santa Cruz County, where he currently resides.
