my personal history with haiku
I’ve known about haiku since I was a kid. Back then I was told, and I’d always believed, that a haiku is a 3-line poem with a syllable count of 5-7-5. That’s just not right.
The only haiku I can remember having written before 2023 was from the late 1970s:
loud yelling voices
the ring lies on the floor
still, unremembered
As I typed that out just now, I think, it’s not bad, for a kid with little personal experience with romantic relationships. Of course, it could be better.
With the word “yelling”, do I need either “loud” or “voices”? Or might “angry voices” be a better choice? The ring already “lies” on the floor. Do I need to say it’s “still”? And why is the ring already unremembered? The (presumed) argument just took place, and surely the people haven’t forgotten the ring already.
Here is a rewrite that only changes two words, but makes me feel better about this haiku.
loud angry voices
the ring lies on the floor
love unremembered
Angry voices don’t need to be loud, but these are, so I say it. And it’s very possible that love can be unremembered in a moment.
the haiku sandwich
As a bit of an aside, I want to say that this haiku is also an example of what I call a “haiku sandwich”.
A haiku sandwich combines two standalone couplets that share the center line. So we have couplet #1:
loud angry voices
the ring lies on the floor
It’s a complete story, or set of alternate stories.
A couple argued, and one of them took off and tossed a ring significant to the relationship to the floor. Or maybe one of them was about to give the other a ring, and the argument caused the ring to be discarded. Maybe the story is that the argument is about the lost ring, and if only the people arguing could remember that love is more important than a ring…
Then we have couplet #2 from the ring’s (and love’s) perspective:
the ring lies on the floor
love unremembered
I feel power there, and this couplet raises questions like:
- Why is the ring still on the floor?
- Why is the ring on the floor at all?
- Who forgot the love?
- Or is it the ring who’s forgotten the love?
Upon discovering haiku sandwiches, I often rewrite to construct one, if the original concept for the haiku lends itself to that.
editing haiku
There are schools of thought that say, “Don’t rewrite.” They claim the spirit of haiku is that it is in the moment. (I don’t have a citation for that, but I remember reading it.)
I am not of that school of thought.
In fact, I don’t see much point in writing anything if I’m not going to edit it. Witness the edit history in just about anything I post to Facebook.
I’m working with someone on a website, and they are a good writer, which is to say that what they spit out onto a page is cohesive and understandable. However, they need editing. Fortunately I love editing!
capitalization and punctuation in haiku
My personal choice is not to use capital letters in my haiku unless I include a proper noun. I also write the pronoun “I” as the lowercase “i”. (See more about my use of personal pronouns in my haiku below.)
I’m not sure that I have a good reason for this lack of capitalization outside the fact that I like the way it looks. In fact, when building this website, I had the whole thing, including this article, in lowercase, because I thought it was a cool aesthetic. However, I didn’t like the lack of readability, so I switched to normal sentence case for prose.
As far as punctuation goes, I don’t use it in haiku unless I need it for clarity. A comma here and there. I’ve also used a colon, and I often use a double dash or an em dash to signal a break or a leap.
I’ve seen people use a “/” at the end of each line of their haiku. This is common when quoting poetry prosaically, using the slack to indicate a line break. It makes sense in that context, but not in any other.
The break in Japanese haiku is called kireji. Usually translated to English as “the cutting word”, kireji creates either a pause or simply a break in the rhythm of the haiku, and often signals a leap, creating a juxtaposition between two seemingly dissimilar things that requires a bit of imagination to find the similarity.
must haiku be 3 lines of 5, 7, 5 syllables?
Despite my love of writing and early exposure to the simple art of haiku, I never thought of haiku as a way of life or even an artistic pursuit until I attended an online offering presented by the Upaya Zen Center called The Way of Haiku (from which I derived the name of this website). It was at that workshop that I began to understand, among other things, that haiku does not need to fit into a 3-line, 5-7-5 structure.
Three lines. Line one is five syllables. Line two is seven syllables. Line three is five syllables. That’s old-school western thinking.
Japanese haiku follow a pattern of 17 sounds that may be written in one line or three lines. But the Japanese language is not like English in syntax or structure. Suffice to say that the 17-sounds pattern does not translate well to English.
For that reason, most modern English-language haiku breaks severely from tradition.
Consider the extreme with what is thought by many to be a one-word haiku masterpiece:
tundra
Cor van den Heuvel
When I view this haiku on a (mostly) blank page — that is another way modern English-language haiku breaks from tradition, by playing with the placement of the words on the page — I can feel the impact. Do I fully get it? Nah. But ther