The Haiku Foundation Forums

Hello Gael,

I had the very interesting exercise once of explaining one of my haiku (in writing) to someone who wanted to know what it was about - it took me a little while to formulate the answer and, as I wrote it, I found links and comparisons in it that hadn't occurred to me when I wrote the haiku!


standing naked
in moonlight -
the taste of nashi


- published The Heron's Nest, 2004; A New Resonance 5 (Red Moon Press) 2007; the taste of nashi (Third New Zealand Haiku Anthology, Windrift 2008).

I do think that a good haiku will reward close examination - although sometimes I find it's not possible to explain my reponse as adequately as I would like, sometimes it's at an instinctive level.

My friend and early mentor Catherine Mair came up with a great description of haiku as part of a project we were working on for the Katikati Haiku Pathway:

words which sing * words which paint pictures * small stories * images which seduce the imagination * that transform  your visit * which expand each location * pictures which don't explain * images which invite you to make up your own stories * thoughts that have never been to your house before * small verses  which adapt to weather, seasons, time of day, tides * haiku which never sacrifice spirit for syllable count * haiku which are the direct experience of a moment * images which evoke  sights, sounds, touch, smell and hearing * tiny poems which are wonderfully large


Read about the pathway project here:

http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz/node/279

Hi,

As per my message re Haiku NewZ on another thread:

http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz/aboutarchivedhaikuarticles

Hello,

I'm the editor of Haiku NewZ and can recommend the Journals listing on the website (link at the bottom), it covers English-language journals from around the world for haiku, tanka, haibun, haiga, renku and senryu. Some are specialist journals, some accept all forms.

Each listing on Haiku NewZ is accompanied by a link to the website, if there is a website (and mostly there is).

I endeavour to list only those journals that publish regularly, that are generally reliable and that contain "proper" haiku (or whatever).

Happy reading!

http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz/haikunews/haikupublications

You may also be interested in the archived articles (see the left-hand menu on the Haiku NewZ website); I have found many of them very helpful and still refer back to several.

Best wishes,
Sandra

I always get a kick out of discovering a haiku that I love and THEN realising (or sometimes not until it's pointed out to me!) that it's 5-7-5.

The worst ones are obvious, the great ones aren't - not a spare word contained therein.

Personally, I write "free-form"  haiku and on the odd occasion when I have tried 5-7-5 have found it extremely tough to do anything decent, so hats off to those who write well within the confines of a syllable count.

I don't count syllables at all, but judge the poem's rhythm and pacing on its sound when I read it aloud.


Which is a good tip for new writers - read your poem aloud. If the tongue trips over a word or a pair of words, then the eye is likely to as well. If you read aloud (even under your breath is good if you're surrounded by non-poets) you will quickly "hear" the edits that need to be made.

I feel the "status quo" is simply wrong and misguided causing the deeper confusion we have today about "haiku".  If you don't believe it being deeply confusing today, just read what passes for "haiku" today: Chibi

I'd like to reply to this and had already planned to do so when I saw Chibi feeling that he had been patronised.

Now, I'm feeling patronised. Maybe.

Could you clarify what you mean by "what passes for 'haiku' today". I am writing haiku today and feel that remark is somewhat insulting. It may just be the quotation marks round haiku, but I'd still like to hear.

Any literary form has its pioneers and innovators and whether what they're doing has merit is down to the individual reader/editor. Do you want haiku contained in amber?

And, if you're so concerned about what is being written in English, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on gendai haiku being written in Japanese (and which I read in translation only).


I really don't feel like I've grasped the essence, or even importance, of your position, sorry.

We write what we write. (You didn't appear to want to call it a weasel though?)

I've toyed with the word coinage of ASP "American Short Poem" and ESP, "English Short Poem" : chibi

Oh dear, oh dear.

Thanks so much, chibi, for dispensing with all those speakers of English who don't happen to be American or English ....

Where shall I start? How about Canadians? Or Scots, Irish, Welsh? Or Australians, New Zealanders, Samoans, Fijians, Tongans, Cook Islanders? Or South Africans, Kenyans, Nigerians, Batswana, Gambians? Or Jamaicans, Barbadians, Belizians? Or Indians, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans? And the list goes on.

If I may be so forward as to speak on behalf of the people and nationalities you've disenfranchised, I wonder how serious you really are. It seems that you've taken a provocative stance but haven't done much thinking to back it up, if the best you can come up with is "American" or "English" short poems.

Humph, etc.

"I've read so many boards of this same discussion, it's become almost hard to believe." Don

Yes, and this argument - we shouldn't call haiku "haiku" because we don't write it in Japanese - has been thrashed out pretty comprehensively on the old THF discussion boards too, including a very circular argument that posits (something like) it should all be called hokku anyway and because most people don't "understand" the rules of hokku they aren't writing them!

As you Americans are wont to say, enough already.

English is an amazing language that has no morals - absorb what you like/want from other languages, discard the rest and become the language of the world (in business at least this is the case).

Words such as pyjamas and bungalow (from India), mutton and beef (French), coleslaw and apartheid (Dutch), sky and ransack (old Scandinavian) and the very pithy single-syllable swear words from Anglo-Saxon are just a few examples of how adaptable English is.

I suppose we could always pin a tail on it (haiku) and call it a weasel, as Baldrick almost said.

Hi Josie,

You've had some good responses here so I won't repeat that useful advice, but would like to also remind you that punctuation contains a visual element.

An ellipses can be used to subtly underline, say, a notion of "footprints" or of trailing off; a colon is like a wall to be climbed; a semi-colon is a crumbling wall, not so daunting; a dash is a span to cross, offering time to think; etc

Fanciful, yes, but haiku are allowed to have a graphic element too and I quite like playing round sometimes to try and reinforce that.

And, of course, our punctuation carries in-built pauses, even when one is reading silently - a comma is a short pause, a fullstop a long pause, and so on.

BTW I much prefer the em dash - if you're using Windows you type a word, enter a space, type the dash, enter a space and type the next word and then when you enter the next space, lo and behold a hyphen becomes an em dash. Using one at the end of a haiku line, enter the second space before you make a carriage return (ha, and that shows my age, doesn't it? = "enter").