Haiku: Formal Elements

When confronted with the question “what is haiku form?” the answer is not as simple as the three-line, seventeen-syllable form we remember from elementary school. That form is both less and different from what haiku form actually is.

For the Japanese, and for informed poets writing today in English based on the Japanese model, there are three generally recognized formal elements:
· a word or phrase referring to the season
· a “cut” or syntactic division in the poem.
· seventeen “on” or sounds. These are quite different from our syllables.
We will touch on each of these elements in turn.

The essence of haiku resides, in part, in its ability, through the use of a seasonal image, to convey some connection to the natural world and the passage of time. A simple mention of the season, however, is not enough. As Shigehisa Kuriyama writes,

In a poem where the seasonal theme fulfills its true evocative function, there must be a reciprocity between the season, which expands the scope of the haiku and creates the atmospheric background of associations for the specific scene, and the specific scene which points out a characteristic yet often forgotten aspect of the season and thus enriches our understanding of it.

A rather tall order, but its challenge has helped make haiku worth engaging to poets for more than three hundred years. Please note that this is not suggesting that one should strive to write "birds and butterflies" haiku. The best haiku, while using literal images of the seasons, move beyond simple physical representation to insights on the human condition. You might be surprised to hear that traditionally the largest category of seasonal images is called "human affairs," which includes such obvious annual events as Christmas as well as more intuitive seasonal implications such as kite flying (spring), fishing (summer) hunting (autumn) and quilt (winter). Some expand the understanding of season to include the "seasons of life." As your concept of seasons expands, so do the possibilities of your haiku.

The second formal element is the syntactic cut that divides the poem into two parts. The primary poetic technique of the haiku is to place two images (most commonly literal rather than figurative images) side by side without interpretation. At least one of these images, or part of it, comes from nature or the seasons. The second image relates to the first, sometimes closely, sometimes more ambiguously. This juxtaposition of images conveys a sense of significance to the reader by what has been called “internal comparison.” How these images relate to one another is a matter of some delicacy. The relationship cannot be too obvious or the poem will be trite, but if it is too distant the association of images will appear forced or arbitrary. An example of a haiku that successfully juxtaposes images:

the swell of her breast
against the watered silk—
summer moon Charles Trumbull

The cut or caesura between images can also result in a kind of “semantic disjunction” that forces the reader to continually reassess the relationships of the words in the poem as he or she reads:

Chemotherapy
in a comfortable chair
two hours of winter Kiyoko Tokutomi

Finally, the issue of length and lineation, the thing that many of us had been led to believe is the sine qua non of haiku form. Over the past fifty years, there have been many experiments with haiku form in English, some well-informed, some less so. As a result of these experiments, as far as length is concerned, one could divide the vast majority of poems into three groups:
· 17 syllables in three lines (this is the form used by Richard Wright and Paul Muldoon.)
· a three line form of two, three, and two stresses, (or occasionally two, two, and two stresses), without regard to the number of unstressed syllables. (Probably the most common form used by informed poets writing haiku today.)
· “free” or “organic form, varying in length from a single word up to seventeen syllables, and ranging from one to four horizontal lines or one vertical line.


It is a common misconception is that Japanese haiku are written in three lines, but the truth is they are traditionally printed in one vertical line. Another misconception is that the Japanese language has something corresponding closely to our syllables, which it doesn’t. As a result of linguistic differences, R.H. Blyth, the great translator of Japanese haiku, suggested that the second form, of 2-3-2 stresses in three lines was the most appropriate form for English-language haiku. (Some Japanese scholars have suggested that the 2-2-2 stress form most closely resembles the Japanese form.)

Since this is a discussion related to formal poetry, most will probably want to experiment with one of the first two forms. However, please remember that length and lineation is not the only element of form that needs to be considered; both season and caesura need to be engaged when one hopes to write worthwhile short poems that are also worthwhile haiku.
A note on haiku sequences: While haiku have always been intended to be able to stand alone, since the time of Shiki (circa 1890s), haiku sequences have become increasingly interesting to poets. In the best haiku sequences, the individual stanzas retain this “stand alone” quality while interacting with the other verses of the poem in a variety of ways.

A gallery of haiku:

one carp
the color of a woman:
an evening of snow Ryan Underwood

transplanting the sage—
a wheelbarrow full of bees
from backyard to front Robert Gilliland

grating ginger;
the day-end voices
of katydids Ellen Compton

Outside the window
a plum tree—and inside, the
thought of a plum tree Billy Collins

evening calm
the ballgame play-by-play
across the water Jim Kacian


One breaker crashes …
as the next draws up, a lull—
and sandpiper cries. O. Southard

spring moon—
a cricket sits quietly
atop its cabbage Ross Figgins

Venus at dusk—
a thin slice of lemon
in my water glass Emiko Miyashita

Deep within the stream
the huge fish lie motionless
facing the current James W. Hackett

And her homemade kite
of less than perfect design?
Also taken flight. Paul Muldoon

Thank you Lee,
That explanation has opened my previously closed mind. As soon as you spoke of stresses instead of syllables I was an eager reader.
I look forward to more thoughts from you and others.
best wishes,
Janet

moved to open mic thread where it belongs



[This message has been edited by Robt_Ward (edited May 02, 2004).]

Lee mentions the linked poem in which each stanza is a self-contained whole. Here from Rhina's second book, Where Horizons Go, is Haiku, which I think is a good example of this approach:

In our bare maple
a minyan of crows looking
for something to bless

Intricate river
in winter light Twig to root
flowing underground

Sundial deep in white
all day long reads exactly
half past January

Thinking of old friends
Black iron stove Slow fire
talking to itself

Keys on a rusty
key ring Old conversations
Nobody home now

This mother-of-pearl
morning sealed with frost Ah but
two crows on the fence.

Note how very different this is from the extended sentences and interstanzaic enjambents in the adjacent Wilbur thread. Yet each little poem is an evocation of winter, and the whole contraption comes full circle with the return of the crows. Lovely poem, Rhina.

Tim, are you sure you've got punctuation/capitalization correct in your post of Rhina's poem? The words are lovely, but the p/c is weird.

Lee, welcome, and thanks for the essay. Much to think about.

Alan

I agree with Tim that Rhina's is an example of a successful haiku sequence, much different in effect (an intention) than Richard Wilbur's "Signatures." I love :Signatures," partly because I love the plants he writes about, but I would never mistake the 17 syllable stanzas for haiku.

Lee

Having read, written and talked Japanese poetry for a good many years, I have reached the conclusion that (a) English provides ample resources for seventeen syllable haiku without dragging in accentual measure, and (b) there's no use in arguing about it. Write anything you like any way you like, but pray don't call it haiku unless it respects the time-honored Japanese criteria.

Lee, you refer to 17 "on." I assume you don't mean "on"(Chinese reading) but "oto" since "kun" (Japanese) syllables or "onsetsu" are allowed as well.

G/W

[This message has been edited by Golias (edited May 02, 2004).]

Of course reading, writing, and talking are all imortant activities, but, as Shinryu Suzuki said, "True understanding is actual practice itself."

Lee

Mr. Gurga, in your opinion, does counting the English poem as if written in seventeen kana maintain sufficient regard for haiku measure?

swirling
snowflakes
black hat

su-e-ri-n-gu
su-no fu-re-i-ku-su
bu-ra-ku ha-to

G/W




[This message has been edited by Golias (edited May 03, 2004).]

Interesting question! Of course, to do what you are suggesting would require one to write the poem in Japanese first and then translate it into English. An interesting exercise that points out one very important thing: 17 sounds in Japanese is always shorter than 17 syllables in English.

Harold Henderson maintained that if one was going to count syllables in English, one ought to count syllables as the Japanese do. For example, "haiku" is two syllables in English, but three in Japanese: ha-i-ku. So, somewhat surprisingly, if one wants to write in truly authentic form, 17 sylables in English is way too long!

Lee

Yes, interesting. Your magazine might take up the cudgels for requiring (or at least influencing) English poems presented as tanka, haikai, etc. to qualify according to kana count.

Wouldn't hurt writers to learn something of the language itself if they want to use its poetic forms properly.

We might start with Tim and Alan. They learned Old English well enough to do their Beowulf. Hiragana and General Use kanji should be a snap for such young fellers as they be. I can lend them all the basic reference books-- Henshall, Nelson, Martin, Kenkyusha, etc.

Timothy? Alan? What say you?

G/W

[This message has been edited by Golias (edited May 03, 2004).]

Thanks, Wiley, but I have my hands full learning English, which I find more than enough for a life time's study. Alan is learning HTML, hyper-text mark-up language, which he assures me will take several lifetimes. I've made it clear that I intend to write no haiku, just to experiment in accentual lines so short they mimic the brevity of haiku. Nonetheless, I am delighted with much of what I am seeing at the Open Mic thread.

Lee and Wiley,
I can't convince myself that counting English syllables has any meaning or relationship to haiku.

In the sonnet, English and Italian share a common stress pattern and Latin ancestry and miraculously the sonnet fits English like a glove.

I am yet to be persuaded that we can access haiku.

I feel we must make our own equivalent form with its roots deeply in our own language.
Janet

Janet, I can't convince myself either.(Please note that Henderson said IF one is to count syllables, not that ONE SHOULD count syllables.) Of the three formal elements, the essential of length is BREVITY. As Cor van den Heuvel, editor of three editions of THE HAIKU ANTHOLOGY (3rd from Norton, 1999) said,"The essence of haiku is concision, perception, and awareness--not a set number of syllables."
I agree with R.H. Blyth that if one is to have a set form for haiku in English, it should be a three-line for with 2-3-2 stresses.

Lee

For my part, Janet, I think you are right that we have enough to occupy us with the forms that grow out of our own language. I am also western-centered enough to think that with accent and rhyme we outgun the Japanese in the verse department.

I don't entirely agree that we can never access Japanese poetry. But one must learn the language(at least two of several variants, the colloquial and the literary), read many, many Japanese books, and become immersed in the culture, or cultures of the country, in order to experience the effects of the poems as an educated and sensitive Japanese person may do. Few foreigners, starting as adults, can acquire Japanese any great degree of literacy and fluency or participate in the culture to any great depth. But one can, with a few years study and by spending well a year or two in Japan, go some distance along the road to understanding.

Without such an effort, which doubtless requires other motives than merely a desire to access Japanese poetry, we have to resign ourselves to reading their poems as through a glass darkly.

G/W

Thank you Lee.

I love what I faintly perceive haiku to be. Alas I will never read Japanese. I have read translations of Genji and Lady Murasaki so I have some faint idea of the processes involved.

I am grateful for the glimpse be it ever so distorted.
best
Janet

Wiley
I'm sure I might get fairly close if I knew the language and lived in Japan for a while. As it is I fear becoming trapped in "Japonoiserie". I know that truth to materials is fundamental to Japanese thinking.

I enjoy what I sense in what is revealed of haiku. I envy you your deeper contact.
very best,
Janet


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited May 03, 2004).]

Lee,

The questions I’ve been contemplating were answered in part by your discussion of the aesthetics of haiku but have been stimulated further by some of the posted examples.

I suppose I’m also driven by my own experiences with haiku. Many times in the past, I’ve come upon “haiku” and have been extremely bored by what I’ve read. A few of your examples, however, have opened my eyes to the sort of haiku I like to read; for example:

<dir>Chemotherapy
in a comfortable chair
two hours of winter BANNED POSTBANNED POST(Kiyoko Tokutomi)</dir>

My enjoyment of this haiku is a direct result of the choice to pair “chemotherapy” with “winter.” When thinking of winter, I think of snow and the slow dying off of vegetation; chemotherapy brings to mind the slow accumulation of chemicals within the body to kill off cancer. (Plus, there’s the unmentioned but correlative “radiation therapy” that has me thinking of the radiation “snow” from an atomic blast.) This pairing carries most of the force of the poem, for me, even if “in a comfortable chair”—a waiting—pairs with the passage of time in “two hours.” This haiku, then, uses each item to expand on the other; they create a sort of rift or time/space singularity between them.

Several haiku I’ve recently read follow this pattern and have inspired an experiment I’ve posted at The Deep End; the first stanza:

<dir>War over Iraq—
Fallujah, where brothers stack
sandbags for cover</dir>

I’m not sure that “brothers” is working in this example...but my impulse was to compare the phrase “war over Iraq” with “sandbags for cover.” I’ve reversed the order, in comparison with Tokutomi’s haiku, in that Tokutomi begins with a two-line image/event and ends with the broad abstract “winter,” and I’ve begun with the abstract “war over Iraq” and ended with a two-line image. I don’t think the order is formalized one way over the other...?

Many of the “haiku” I dislike appear to follow another route. You have mentioned the necessity of making sure that the images are not too distant from one another; but this brings up my first question, since I think we might agree that a creative (or, optimistic) reader could find similarity between any two images although that “similarity” might be peculiar to that reader.

<dir>Question #1: To what degree are haiku related to Imagist Symbolism, or even Surrealist Imagism—or what separates them?</dir>

I think this question is important for two reasons. First, many “haiku” (?) appear to rely on three lines composed of three different images that might be related in time/space simply because they are located together in a single setting. Ex.: 1) golden grain, 2) mole, 3) setting sun. These three might be handled well, per the Tokutomi example; consider that a “mole” burrows downward into the earth like the sun (appears to do) when it is setting. A reader might need to work out how the golden grain is related to those two; maybe all three have the same color at that time of day, or the sun and grain are similarly colored but the mole is darker like the unmentioned earth over which both sun and grain tower. So we have:

<dir>golden grain
mole
setting sun</dir>

--which seems to me to be rather simplistic, too easy, even if another “association” might be imagined: when the mole has burrowed completely down, the “golden grain” is invisible to it like the setting sun and its golden waves are out of our sight once it has “burrowed” down “into” the earth. Imagine another:

<dir>yellow bulldozer
mole
setting sun</dir>

In a very real way, for me, the associations are not concrete, but symbolic, since each image stands for a quality or qualities and we are really comparing those qualities. The problem, then, in the haiku I’ve read but disliked, is their tendency to dissolve the images or distill the images into qualities—so that one haiku may be hardly distinguishable from another but for the largely stochastic image choice. At some point, the concrete items represented by the images don’t matter; rather, the process of association is on the forefront. So I might get an Aha!, but that feeling of satisfaction and/or feeling of achieved insight is the very same from one “haiku” to another. The “problem haiku,” for me, blur together after I’ve read enough (after I've read only a few of them, sometimes).

<dir>Question #2: You have mentioned the idea that final lines shouldn’t name or summarize the haiku; yet, the final image often does just that by setting the parameters of the association. Using the Tokutomi example, we might say that the third line “renames” or summarizes the first two lines; it is a kind of association via the “=” sign. In fact, the cut you’ve mentioned tends to operate as an equals sign—These are the same—because it forces us to find the similarity. I wonder to what degree summarization must play a significant role in haiku. I suspect that a back-to-forth associative process is required for successful haiku, the poem doesn’t flow only one way and end at the final summarization; however, since Tokutomi’s final line utilizes a broad abstract—winter—after a narrowly defined & 2-lined image, that final line tends to encompass, and summarize, the preceding lines. (I suppose I’m speaking of dominant images as summarizations. For that matter, what role do dominant/subordinate image relations play in haiku?)</dir>

<dir>Question #3: A quick question, related to the above. I’ve been thinking of sonnets during this discussion of haiku, mostly because the “cut” in haiku seems intimately related to the “volta” of sonnets: in each case, an associative field is created between each side of the cut/volta, as the first side is “renamed” in the second, or the first side is put into other words and expanded in the second. (Ideally, in either case a back-and-forth associative process will be present.) There are of course some differences. Do you see a significant similarity; and, care to postulate how useful any similarity would be to the Westernization of haiku or the Easternization of sonnets? http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif This might be of my own peculiar fancy, I know.








[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited May 05, 2004).]

Curtis,

Geez! Isn’t there a rule here about only one question per customer? I don’t mean by this to trivialize the importance of the issues you are raising, but if I have to respond to many more postings as deep as yours, I will have to quit my day job! As you will see, my answers get shorter as I run out of gas. Please forgive me for this. To respond . . .

First, let me agree with you in thinking that the many haiku (and the vast majority of poems presented as “haiku”) fail as poems. (But this is certainly not unique to haiku? This is certainly the era of the proliferation of the bad poem, eh?) There are many ways in which a poem can fail—perhaps we will get into some of them later. Please also recognize that there are ways in which the reader can fail the poem, too.

Yes, Kiyoko’s haiku is a superb one. One of the things that makes it superb is that the deeper one digs into it, the more one seems to find. I am also aware—as you now are—that Kiyoko recently died of the cancer for which she was being treated.

A technical point about the poem. In this poem, the second line acts as a “pivot” that connects the first and third lines in different ways. First we have “Chemotherapy
in a comfortable chair” and then we have “in a comfortable chair two hours of winter.” This is perhaps a legacy of haiku’s origin in linked verse in which two stanzas would work together to create meaning, then the second of these would combine with the following stanza to produce completely different associations.

As you suspect, the break between the two images can come at the end of the first or the second line—sometimes even in the middle of the second line. I consider it overly optimistic to believe that some connection can be found between any two images. Of course, this optimism is part of the basis of surreal haiku, though sometimes they seem to be deliberately constructed to confound any attempt to find meaning. And sometimes they probably are.

Not very adequate answer #1: Let me begin by saying that a serious answer to this question is way beyond me. I am just a haiku guy from a little farming community in central Illinois. That said, I believe there surely is some relationship between Imagist Symbolism, Surrealist Imagism, and even cinematic montage and haiku. If nothing else, these borrow—often consciously—the techniques of haiku or linked verse.

You may not be aware of this, but three images in three lines is normally considered a fault in haiku. The Japanese have some name for it which I can’t recall at present, but here we call it “shopping list” haiku. Almost always successful haiku have two, not three, images, as in Kiyoko’s haiku above. (Though, as we have seen, the two images “overlap” in her poem.)

Mole. Yes, one can arbitrarily construct haiku with any images one chooses, in whatever order one chooses, in order to make a point. But to my simple mind, the best haiku are not about making points, but sharing insights on the human condition. Or merely sharing the joy of existence with the reader. I don’t want to sound peevish, but If you find the feeling of satisfaction or achieved insight is too much the same from haiku to haiku, might I humbly suggest the range of haiku you have read may not be wide enough. Take Kiyoko’s above, and the following, each of which works for me quite well, and on a different part of the heart, if you will:

dark darker
too many stars
too far Gary Hotham

One breaker crashes . . .
as the next draws up, a lull—
and sandpiper cries. O. Southard

one carp
the color of a woman:
an evening of snow Ryan Underwood

after Christmas
a flock of sparrows
in the unsold trees Dee Evetts

valley sunrise
from the barn a small parade
of night-born lambs Melissa Dixon

second husband
painting the fence
the same green Carol Montgomery

Spring funeral
the widow’s family
dress for winter Ernest J. Berry

autumn equinox …
a small rake
beside the grave Michael Fessler

winter eve—
moonlight flooding the crater
of each acne scar Ken Hurm

spring rain
the bicycle thief
tracks mud. Mark Brooks

last slow dance
winter flies
couple on the bar LeRoy Gorman

small town Fourth
so much depends
on the fireflies Joann Klontz

balmy evening
the light of Caravaggio
on strangers’ faces Ebba Story

noonday heat:
at the exact center of myself
the aids patient weeping Robert Boldman

fog-bound road—
walking on the inside of
the inside world Caroline Gourlay

California poppies—
the faintest scent
of Woodstock Le Wild

As these haiku demonstrate, there is an art to reading haiku as well as to writing. And yes, haiku can be symbolic, but the best haiku are successful first at the literal level and add layers to that (as Kiyoko’s and many of these).

Answer #2: Yes, a back and forth associative process is often present in successful haiku. But this is something completely different from a third line that interprets a single image for the reader. A third line that is a PERCEPTION, as in Le Wild’s haiku, is worlds apart from a third line that is a CONCLUSION or CONCEIT.

You have probably already concluded—correctly—that I am not a big fan of “constructed” or “manufactured” haiku. I much prefer haiku like those quoted here, haiku that present an interesting, original, truthful perception.

Answer #3: Yes, of course what you point out is true as far as the similarities in “construction” between the sonnet and haiku. Other kinds of poems have this same “turn.” Tanka, to mention only one.

Sorry again not to have more to give in response to your fine posting.

Lee

Good to know!

E. A. K.

Bumping this up so we can all refresh our memories.