ARTS: How to Haiku 1: what is not a haiku

[Kokuu]

I can’t speak for other languages, but haiku poetry taught at school in English is almost universally bad. The basic instruction that my thirteen year-old daughter recently received, was that a haiku is a three line Japanese poem comprising seventeen syllables in lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively.

If you are lucky you might get told that it is usually about nature and our relationship with the natural world.

Is this incorrect? Well, not totally but it focusses the attention in completely the wrong direction and misses out several important factors.

It is true that in Japanese, a count of seventeen sound units (morae) are employed in a three-line sequence. However, an English syllable tends to be longer than a Japanese sound unit so English Language Haiku (ELH) written in seventeen syllables often to feel baggy and too long compared to their Japanese equivalents. Moreover, most people writing haiku with the 5-7-5 structure in mind pay far more attention to getting the right number of syllables than forming a good poem. Few modern day ELH poets write in 5-7-5. Some do. Most bad haiku on the internet are written in 5-7-5. The syllable count is often achieved by adding adjectives until the magic seventeen is reached.

The three line structure is also not a good way to think about haiku. It is better understood as a poem of two parts – a phrase (two lines usually containing a verb) and a fragment (one line). This can either be fragment-phrase or phrase-fragment. More about this later.

A haiku also isn’t a bunch of ideas and concepts. It is essentially a form based on images, often coming from nature. You can include concepts as well as images but just concepts is too heady and not visual enough.

Important note- the plural of haiku is haiku!