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The 6th Hoshi-to-Mori International Tanka Contest - 2004
Comments on the Selection, English Field

Theme ： " Bird "

Of all the evanescent themes for classic Japanese tanka --- dew, love, snow, leaf-fall --- surely "Bird" is one of the most difficult to capture. The very nature of birds is one that is always trying to escape human touch and imprisonment in cages where its very song, cruelly captured, can sound heart-rendingly sad.

　So trying to imprison a bird in the strict form of a tanka would seem to be an ungrateful and almost impossible task. Is not a tanka's exact compactness a verbal cage? How can a wild bird release its wingbeats and a full-hearted song of freedom in nature's heavens when a life so restricted is imposed upon its helpless frailty?

　These are some of the various problems that contestants had to face this year when composing their tanka entries. Of course, the tanka is only a superb literary form and its 31 syllables are not the metal bars of a small cage. It is a form that, when used with grace and originality, can encompass all the breadth of the natural universe in which we, like captured birds, flutter our lives away. Although the syllabic form in only five lines may at first appear restrictive, in sensitive hands it can express infinite variations of feeling and endlessly delicate pictures of all kinds of reality.

　So when faced by the hard task of selecting the three best tanka this year, I was hoping to find originality combined with control of feeling --- a rare, if not impossible ideal, as I was to discover, in tanka written in English. So again I did not feel able to award the supreme First Prize. But I was able to find three entries that come close to the ideal expression of sensibility through close attention to details in the observation of an aspect of nature through the image of a bird.

　On the whole, the tone of the entries was awkward and confused. I seemd to hear those contestants carefully counting their correct syllables, as if they were counting the stitches in a piece of knitting. Very few managed to obtain a natural flow of words. You have to practise writing 5-7-5-7-7 syllables in 5 lines until it becomes "second nature" , when you can compose the tanka freely without thinking of the numbers. Many entrants could not control the correct number of syllables. But it is only a tanka poet of proven reputation who can allow himself the questionable luxury of writing a line with an extra syllable! Beginners should try to master a musical sense of flowing rhythm, for the tanka is a musical form. Constant daily practice is the only way to achieve perfection. The three tanka I have chosen show, in my opinion, a great deal of poetic promise. They are formally correct, yet emotionally expressive, and most of all they show keen observation and a true love of birds.

James Kirkup

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