Five – seven – five. The number of syllables in the three lines of a haiku. Looks simple, right? Just three little lines. But oh, so much more than that. First, the images in the poem typically connect with the natural world. This guideline alone makes the haiku adventure challenging. Coming up with images that are not clichés can be difficult.
The purpose of haiku is to share a brief moment or event so that the reader can bring to life in his or her mind (and thus undergo the same feelings) without having to physically experience what the author is expressing in the poem.
Haiku don't tell, or merely describe, they allow the reader to enter the poem in their own way. Haiku are ideal for non-fiction observations as a kind of shorthand for remembering events or incidents. They can be therapeutic, and they exercise both the right and the left side of the brain.
The first three haiku below were written by the author of this post. After that, I’ve included a few by Matsuo Basho, perhaps the best know practitioner of this and other forms. Haiku can have titles, or not. I have included titles in all examples of the form. I titled Basho’s poems as well.
Selections Jack Pine Savage
Blue
Determined
robins’ blue eggs hatch without
determinations
Living Here
exist extinction
unsatisfactoriness
annihilation
Rain or Shine
What shape am I now
When hollow security
steams like hot raindrops
Selections – Matsuo Basho Haiku
Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) wrote approximately 1000 haiku poems through the lifetime, traveling around Japan. His writing The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the most famous haiku collection in Japan.
Japan’s Most Famous Haiku
The old pond
A frog leaps in.
Sound of the water.
A Winter Haiku
The snow is falling.
The Meiji era got
Further away.
Basho’s Death Poem
Sick on my journey,
only my dreams will wander
these desolate moors
Background
Haiku comes from a “first verse” called hokku; they often look incomplete as they originate from a linked verse poem where the first verse is finished by the second verse. They have a special place in the multi-poet, multi-linking verse poem known as renga, or renku, that enjoyed a renaissance in 17th-century Japan. Japanese writers began to adapt foreign literary techniques in poetry as Japan was opened up to the West. Journalist, writer, and poet, Masaoka Shiki, took full advantage when he officially made hokku an independent poem in the 1890s called haiku (singular and plural spelling) and brought haiku into the 20th century.
Haiku is one of the world’s oldest regularly written forms of poetry, and Basho (1644-1694) is recognized as its foremost poet. In the early 1850s the West learnt of Japan’s incredible art, and Japanese artists were fascinated by the West’s own techniques.
In the 1900s haiku influenced James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams. R.H. Blyth’s four-volume Haiku became popular from the mid to late 1940s and attracted the attention of Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac.
Jack Kerouac published The Dharma Bums in 1958, and Trip Trap: Haiku along the Road from San Francisco to New York, with Albert Saijo and Lew Welch, on a car trip across the U.S. in 1959. Kerouac said, “A ‘Western Haiku’ need not concern itself with 17 syllables, since Western languages cannot adapt themselves to the fluid syllabic Japanese. I propose that the ‘Western Haiku’ simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language.”
Ginsberg published haiku throughout his long career and in 2004, at the age of 74, Gary Snyder was awarded The Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize for his contribution to the art of haiku internationally.
By the end of the 1960s, the interest in haiku could no longer be considered a fad. The form finds its place in many venues from the classroom, to poetry writing groups, to scholarly works of art.
Explorations:
1. Is Basho’s frog haiku worthy of being this most famous haiku in Japan? (It is almost certainly the best-known haiku in the Western Hemisphere.
2. Can a robin’s egg be “determined”? Explain.
3. Try a haiku of your own and submit it as a comment to this post. Yes!
Right off, I thought that was a May birthday date of someone born in the same year I was. May 7, 1951. I was not incorrect, as likely someone was, but not recorded by Thursday's blog post writer on that date, the bastid!, How could he not? The scurrilous scoundrel he is -- or is inferred here to be. "Only the shadow knows . . ."
ReplyDelete"H-h-h-ai-ku!" the man sneezed outside the poetry class. Luckily for all of us near him, he was wearing a mask and we didn't recognize him immediately.
"Walz his name?" someone hollered, bent on doing the individual bodily harm.
Walz waltzed past and was whisked to safety by security guards.
Somewhere in all that 2nd paragraph gibberish may be a haiku. What do you make of it?
Love your second paragraph. What's that about a May b-day, and whose are you referring to in addition to yourself? I assume the second paragraph is the one in your comment. I agree that it begs to have its haiku discovered. Let me try:
DeleteThe masked man loved verse
His sneeze could have been much worse
At least its not cursed
What else can I say? Not much but thanks for your comment, especially the sound of the sneeze!