Welcome to Tanka Time 👋
Your friendly, neighborhood tanka notepad!

What’s a tanka? You can think of it like a slightly longer haiku or a poetic form consisting of 5 lines with the following syllable count, totaling to 31:

5
7
5
7
7

Juggling more than one idea at a time? Just create two consecutive blank lines (hit “Enter” twice) and you’re starting over at 5 syllables for the new line with your work-in-progress preserved above.

I’m Zach Valenti and this app was created to scratch my own itch. I was first inspired to write tanka nearly a decade ago reading “Poems to Eat” by master of the form, Ishikawa Takuboku. Here’s what he had to say about that title:

“The name means poems made with both feet upon the ground. It means poems written without putting any distance from actual life. They are not delicacies, or dainty dishes, but food indispensable for us in our daily meal. To define poetry in this way may be to pull it down from its established position, but to me it means to make poetry, which has added nothing or detracted nothing from actual life, into something which cannot be dispensed with.”

A note on the syllable count:

Syllables live in the voice, but English is written for the eye — the same letters can hide different sounds, which is why “creature” has two beats and “creative” has three.

Tanka Time counts as carefully as it can, but some words simply have no single answer: “fire” can be one syllable or two, “every” two or three, depending on how you read it aloud.

No counter — human or machine — can settle those for you. So treat the number in the margin as an estimate and check your math. Your voice is the final authority — for poets, it always has been.

Writing in Markdown:

Start a line with # — hash, then a space — to make it a title. Titles sit outside the form: no count in the margin, and the tanka beneath one starts counting again at five. The space matters, so a #hashtag stays an ordinary word.

Wrap words in **two asterisks** for bold, *one* for italic, __two underscores__ for underline — or press ⌘B, ⌘I, ⌘U (Ctrl on Windows and Linux) with a word selected, or just the cursor resting in one. > quotes a line and - starts a list.

The marks show on the line you’re writing and step out of the way on every other one, so a page you aren’t touching reads as the poem rather than as its notation. They are only hidden, never removed: what you save is exactly what you wrote, a plain text file any other app can open.

Using Tanka Time offline:

This site is actually a “Progressive Web App” that can be installed locally on mobile or desktop and used without an Internet connection.

On iPhone, tap Share and then Add to Home Screen. On Android, open the browser menu and choose Install. On a computer, look for the small install icon at the end of the address bar.

For more step-by-step instructions, click here.