Haiku (ON-GOING) Book 1 of Haiku Series

Prologue

Prologue

Why "No 5-7-5"?

This essay is long, but give it a read to better understand why it's an urban myth to think of English-language haiku merely in terms of 5-7-5 syllables. National Haiku Writing Month (NaHaiWriMo) is not really anti-5-7-5, but counting syllables is hardly the only target for haiku (if at all). Find out why you don't need to aim at such a syllable pattern in English, and why other targets are more important.

"The term syllable is an inaccurate way of describing the actual metrical units of Japanese poetry."

— Haruo Shirane, in his introduction to Kōji Kawamoto's The Poetics of Japanese Verse

(Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2000)

"I don't think counting 5,7,5 syllables is necessary or desirable. To reflect the natural world, and the season, is to reflect what is."

— Gary Snyder

"To make the three lines of a haiku 5, 7, and 5 syllables long is a merely superficial conformity to the Japanese original. What counts is the spirit."

— David Steindl-Rast

You may have thought that haiku was supposed to be 5-7-5, so what's up with the logo for National Haiku Writing Month-NaHaiWriMo? Is haiku 5-7-5 or not? Well, yes and no.

In Japanese, yes, haiku is indeed traditionally 5-7-5. But 5-7-5 what? In English and other languages, haiku has mistakenly been taught as having 5-7-5 syllables, but that's not really accurate. You probably aren't in the mood for a linguistics lecture that explains all the reasons why, but Japanese haiku counts sounds, not strictly syllables (the linguistic term is mora- Japanese is a moraic language, not a syllabic one).

Indeed, I would even say that writing 5-7-5 syllables in English is a violation of the haiku form rather than a preservation of it.

Furthermore, Japanese has another difference that makes 5-7-5 syllables sort of an "Urban Myth" for haiku in English. In addition to counting sounds and syllables differently, most Japanese words tend to have more sounds or syllables than their English counterparts.

Thus, despite the way haiku has been widely mistaught in English for decades as 5-7-5 syllables, it actually should not surprise you that the vast majority of haiku published in leading haiku journals and anthologies are not 5-7-5.

In fact, that's a really good piece of advice to remember as you write your own haiku: Don't write about your feelings. Instead, write about what caused your feelings.

The point of haiku is indeed to convey feeling, not ideas, concepts, or judgments.

Consider this haiku of mine, which won first place in the 2000 Henderson haiku contest, sponsored by the Haiku Society of America:

meteor shower

a gentle wave

wets our sandals

How do you feel when you read this poem?

Do you feel the surprise of the tide turning, thus wetting your sandalled feet?

Do you feel the moment's summerness?

Do you notice the effect of the word "our," which makes this a shared rather than solitary experience? Even if you've never been to the ocean, I hope you can feel the enthrallment with the meteor shower, and then the surprise wetness from a wave, showing how nature, in this case through the changing tide, caused by the gravitational pull of celestial objects, can touch us in unexpected ways.

A good haiku will make you realize something that you always knew but might have forgotten.

A haiku takes you back to yourself, back to who you are, and what it's like to be human— to your "falling leaf nature," as translator R. H. Blyth put it.

And you make this realization emotionally, not intellectually.

You also bring a lot of yourself to each haiku, which is sometimes called an "unfinished" poem because of what it leaves out.

And what you bring to each poem is how you have personally experienced your world through your senses. Thus haiku poems are about the five senses, and how you take in the world around you through those senses.

In other words, the haiku is about what takes place outside you.

It is generally not about what you think about the experience or how you interpret it, at least not for beginners.

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Michael Dylan Welch