Five Lines Down: A Landmark in English Tanka

Five Lines Down: A Landmark in English Tanka, edited by Denis M. Garrison, is a compilation of the four issues of Five Lines Down, the first journal of tanka in English. The original editors of Five Lines Down were Kenneth Tanemura and Sanford Goldstein. Five Lines Down: A Landmark in English Tanka was selected for the "Best Books for Fall Reading, 2008" by The Montserrat Review. “Five Lines Down was the first journal devoted exclusively to English-language tanka. An interesting, if brief, attempt at pointing a spotlight on tanka, it emerged in 1994 as part of the first sustained exploration of tanka in English. While some of its baby steps were sometimes shaky, they were encouraging and optimistic steps towards a maturing art form. The journal was surely one of the several building blocks that helped facilitate the formation, in 2000, of the Tanka Society of America. The republication of Five Lines Down is a window into the burgeoning tanka world where both formative and significantly mature poems were showcased in a respected journal that ended much too soon.” —Michael Dylan Welch, founder of the Tanka Society of America. “I celebrated the news that Kenneth Tanemura and Sanford Goldstein had teamed up to launch a new magazine called Five Lines Down, because I knew that this would be a magazine that would champion an expansive approach to English-language tanka. And as each issue came out, the editors showed us by example after example that tanka can take a variety of forms, a wide range of human experiences, and an introspective psychological eye into the heart of our darkest and lightest emotions. This was an English-language tanka magazine that was aware of the modernist and post-modernist Japanese tanka poets, encouraging us to write our lives in five lines down.” —Dr. Randy Brooks, Millikin University. • Back to the Selected Books page.