Ancient Form, Modern Soul

I sat in a cold room in a college dormitory, making slow progress on my doctoral dissertation. I felt like I was groping my way through a pitch-black tunnel with no end in sight. But I knew that it was far too late to go back the way I came. In the days and years of intense solitude during my long-term study abroad, tanka helped me to keep going. Since I joined academia as a faculty member, I have taken every opportunity to provide lectures on tanka, simply because of my profound belief that "emotions" are a universal language. Without writing tanka poems, I probably could not have survived in a jungle named academia. Put another way, for me, tanka is a way of life, after all.Just like writing a journal or keeping a diary, writing tanka has become an important part of my life. Tanka in Japanese is a truly short poem (written in a single unbroken line; and written in English, it is commonly arranged in five lines) that expresses our hearts, feelings, and thoughts. Tanka is an ideal medium. That is to say, "modern souls" speak using this "ancient form" of poetry.