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Thanks Tim! Im hoping that it will be useful. And now, for todays installment . . .
Haiku Form I: How Many Syllables?
Okay, so you've always read that haiku are short poems of seventeen syllables, written in lines of five, seven and five syllables each. But many of the English haiku you see don't seem to follow this rule: they're often much shorter, and sometimes they're written as a single line, or in two lines instead of three. Or perhaps you've heard that Japanese "syllables" aren't really syllables at all, and that it's actually
wrong to write haiku in English with seventeen syllables . . .
What's up? What is the "correct" form for a haiku?
Perhaps the simplest answer comes from the Haiku Society of America, who state as part of their definition of Haiku: "Most haiku in English consist of three unrhymed lines of seventeen or fewer syllables, with the middle line longest, though today's poets use a variety of line lengths and arrangements." In other words, free verse! (Note: I think they mean that the total should be "seventeen or fewer syllables," not that each line should be that long!)
Nothing wrong with such a definition, of course--the bottom line should always be what works as poetry. But as the many formalist poets who gather here at Eratosphere know, form itself has significant virtues, whether as a spur to creativity or as an aesthetic element in its own right. Haiku most certainly are a fixed, "metrical" form in Japanese. So what would be the equivalent form in English?
Complete consensus on anything to do with poetry no doubt will forever elude us. But perhaps the majority of haiku poets writing in English today work towards an ideal first articulated by R. H. Blyth more than forty years ago in his landmark study
A History of Haiku:
Quote:
The ideal, that is, the occasionally attainable haiku form in English, would perhaps be three short lines, the second a little longer than the other two; a two-three-two rhythm, but not regularly iambic or anapaestic; rhyme avoided, even if felicitous and accidental.
A History of Haiku, Volume II, p. 351
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In other words, what William Higginson has dubbed . . .
The "Traditional Form" for Haiku in English
A "Traditional Form" for Haiku in English
An excerpt from William Higginson's book
The Haiku Handbook which outlines the basic structure of haiku as a
formal poem in English. (Note to Netscape users: Google Books may crash your browser; best opened using Internet Explorer.)
William Higginson "Haiku by the Numbers"
A longer, theoretical essay which outlines the rationale behind the "Traditional Form" in detail, using examples of what works and what doesn't in various translations of Matsuo Basho's famous "old pond" haiku.
Forms in English Haiku by Keiko Imaoka
An interesting article discussing the structural differences between Japanese and English that affect the question of line length and form in the two languages.
Haiku Definition
Full text of the Haiku Society of America's definition of "Haiku," quoted from above.
And for an alternate view:
From One-Line Poems to One-Line Haiku
A history of experiments with one-line haiku in English, by William Higginson.
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[This message has been edited by Stephen Collington (edited October 21, 2008).]