Limerick about poetry, poem about a cad

Today’s Reddit limerick challenge had me dashing to the dictionary again. The challenging word to rhyme was tanka.

I’m not the only one unfamiliar with this word. It took three goes before the auto-correct would accept that I wasn’t trying to type ‘tanks’. The tanka is a Japanese verse form, five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. So another form that would repel a pentastichophobe.

With its strictly defined syllable structure, the tanka has a similarity with the limerick; though because the limerick is a comic verse form you’re allowed to muck around with this.

Let’s get this limerick writ

My first thought was that it may be possible to write lines that could be rearranged to change the meaning of the poem depending on whether it was presented as a limerick or tanka. Brian Bilston did this in his poem Refugees, which reads differently depending on which direction you read it in.

I didn’t think too long about it before I realised it would be quite a very tricky thing to do and I wasn’t up for that challenge right now. Or maybe ever.

So, to write a limerick with tanka as a rhyme and have someone from somewhere in Japan as a subject. I couldn’t think of any places in Japan that rhyme with ‘tanka’, so maybe put that into the third and fourth lines. ‘Thank her’ was a placeholder rhyme that made it into the final version.

The city of Sapporo on Hokkaido – Japan’s northernmost island – is rich with rhyming words; ‘borrow’ came to mind quickly and the idea of stealing someone’s work came from that to the final form. Some mucking around with the exact words to get a better flow and avoid repeating words gave me the final limerick:

There was a young girl from Sapporo  
A poet whose genius I’d borrow  
She’d write me a tanka  
I’d fulsomely thank her  
Then publish as mine on the morrow 

The write of reply

Now, how would you feel in the place of the girl from Sapporo? You’d poured your heart into these poems only to find that the cad was passing your work off as his own. You’d do what every right thinking person would do: write a poem about it.

In Sapporo style  
I would write my love tanka  
So earnest his thanks!  

My heart broke when I found his  
Longstanding plagiarism 

I’ve no idea if there’s a particular Sapporo style to tanka.