The Japanese, for over a thousand years, have composed the tanka and considered it their most important form of poetry.
In the nineteenth century, the spread of European poetry induced many Japanese poets to doubt that a poem in only thirty-one syllables could be anything more than the record of a momentary sensation.
Ishikawa Takuboku, though famous as a rebel poet, answered the doubters, Although a tanka may last only a second, it is a second that will not return again, no matter how long.
Shabda Press Indigo: tanka poetry, paperback/mariko kitakubo
