The Haiku Foundation Forums

Julie, oh now I get it. I've written one of those and sort of regretted it. It borders on a trick unless it really delivers insight, and some really do deliver.

Gael, those are 2 clever finds.

This is not in line with the post's intended point, but I feel most good haiku are fresh images of an instant that suddenly jumps into one's perception--in other words, the haiku feels like a "found" perception.

Basho's frog leaping haiku is one such instant that I love. It's a "found" moment of insight, which I admit is not  what a found poem is. Yet, in both cases a random observation arises into awareness, at first perhaps incongruously, but then its appropriateness is valued.

Going on a haiku walk, or ginko, provides just such "found" moments.

As to the common type of reflections, stuff like moon-on-water-breaking-into-fragments-as-water-is-disturbed, I think often the poet is capturing a sense of instant as well as transience, with a dramatic action in nature.

A condom in the snow is a modern incongruity and I think that's why--even though the back story is unknowable--this image works as haiku. Modern haiku has a fair number of these--odd objects of our age that seem incongruously out of place. Haiku has lots of incongruities, jumps, and juxtapositions that alter the observer's perceptions, so this kind of haiku works well with the genre.

Yet, I think it is this haiku's snow, its traditional seasonality, that brings intensity to the observation. Winter, the dead and cold time of year, the end of life, here intensifies the condom image. It emphasizes the end of lovemaking, the passion and the warmth of human emotions that are now with the passage of time dead and cold as snow. I think it is clash between the human need for warmth and the hard awareness that all our passion will eventually pass out of experience, that makes this haiku as traditional as it is modern. Transience often is the primary haiku observation when seasons are involved.

I have guessed at the meaning of the knot and get nowhere. I think it deepens the incongruity, and perhaps "ties up" the pouring of passion that here turns to ice.

To the above very fine comments I would like to add this. If you avoid publishing a chapbook prematurely, then you'll have an easier time gleaning truly good haiku later for a stronger book. The temptation of publishing too early can lead to a collection that is mechanically proficient but lacking a unifying impact or falling a little short of projecting a distinct aesthetic sensitivity.

Also, if a collection is a random collection of haiku--a sampler box of chocolates--then as a whole it may be limited in "meaning" something. That is, there may be no sense of "book statement." The more you write over time, the more you find what it is that you can say.

Note that if you can provide a publisher with 3 times as much material as would be needed, you're allowing that person to pinpoint your finest strengths.

Finally, I think it takes a number of years for one's haiku to reflect a cohesive sensibility. First the craft must be learned. In time, that craft starts to express what one is. There is an interior discovery process in this that can take a while.

Colin, go ahead and use it. I lack the skills to do anything with it.

Perhaps it was cold and beginning to snow outside their car. When finished they did not want to leave the car's warmth, and theirs. The condom was knotted before throwing it out the briefly opened window, to avoid messy splashing.

Umm, no.
::)

I would like to post a roadside sign by the side of  the haiku writer's highway. It would read:

     REDUCED
SYLLABLE COUNT
     AHEAD

Just sayin', folk.  ;)

Punctuation varies and like most haiku writers I have no standard preference.

I observe, though, that when there is no punctuation then the effect simulates an initial flash of perception as it arises freshly--before an idea gets packaged into grammar and syntactical patterns. There is less an impression of "statement," of explicit telling, and more an impression of immediate insight in the process of happening. It is a freshly birthed, pre-grammar kind of dramatic moment.

Personally, I usually reserve the dash for a strong cutting effect--a slightly more unexpected and stronger reversal of perception than weaker punctuation marks, or none, suggest.

It doesn't bother me when lack of punctuation creates temporary confusion as to meaning, because at second reading I see I have caught an interior insight just arising from raw psychic flow.

I don't like over punctuation.

Basho heard a frog leap into a pond, his enlightenment being made in the frog's image.

I like the point about standard cliches and images of religion being ineffective for haiku. Here is a haiku I wrote that seems wholly, deliberately irreligious:

  even frost
along the privy path
  knows the way

The final word suggests the religious, but the destination is a stinking place of feces. There are two sensibilities that intersect here. One is existential and postmodern: religious belief seems an absurd, insupportable social construction in our times. The other is that if indeed reality issues from a divine dimension, then all is included in that mystery, and even feces emanates from the refulgent sacred. That's how I communicate spiritual orientation in a way that respects the despair and alienation that I recognize are part of the fabric of modern existence.

There are many times when I have sat down to write haiku because a mood drove me. The feeling I get when writing in such moments is like the feeling of prayer. Intense meditative focus, deeply felt, when the natural object being observed is also psychic projection. When this "mood" drives me it seems to be a desire for a repeat experience of such moments.

It is often said there is a "haiku moment"--some mystico-mythic essence of the haiku that is expressed and that we should capture as a matter of craft. I don't believe in such a craft entity. I just believe the concentrated focus of observation and psyche is so unique that we want to quantify it with a prescriptive rule or guideline.

Incidentally, I do not have comparable feelings when writing standard verse. There the concentration is more diffusely leaked into developed logical expression.

For my first few years of haiku writing I wrote "craft haiku," or mechanical things that visually resembled haiku but that failed to tap into my interior self or anyone else's. After much time, I gradually began to think a haiku, meaning the haiku came out of me and then I polished or "crafted it." At this point the form was becoming internalized, becoming a vehicle leading to exploration rather than inhibiting it.

Some of these explorations surprised me.

I also noticed that haiku magazine editors had an uncanny ability to pick only those haiku in a submission that had the authentic quality of interior surprise. The rejected ones simply lacked that dimension and could not be saved by craft. They were just craft.

That is my experience with the craft of haiku.

A good haiku is like a sip of merlot wine. A book of fine haiku is the whole bottle.

Haiku (or hokku) is the start of a poem...and suddenly one knows that the rest of the poem is not needed.