[Lee Gurga]

Originally posted by Mike Todd:
[b]Lee—

Haiku strike me as being easy to write but damnably hard to write well. I wonder why this is. I am sure it is something to do with the general difficulty of writing small poems: the smaller the harder. But there is something else to haiku. Perhaps what I am asking in a round about way is, what makes haiku haiku? Certainly the form is only a beginning.

Many people think haiku should be easy because it is short, but, as you point out, the brevity is one of its major challenges. The next issue is the form (external and internal) and the aesthetic issues that must be faces. After all, one can write many, many kinds of short poems. What makes one a haiku and one not? Not an easy question, and one that I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to answer for myself. Some of the answers can be found in resources that Stephen kindly posted for us. One possible position is that anything in 17 syllables is a haiku. But this doesn't leave much of an adventure for a poet, does it? After all, if there is nothing more, a random word generator is more useful than a poet. The seasonal image is important, but not always necessary if you have some other element to add depth or interest to the poem. One might say that haiku offers a special approach to experiencing life and sharing that experience, but that is too general to be helpful advice for writing. So we fall back on some general descriptive rather than prescriptive, definition, which normally includes at least several of the following, but not always all at once (and sometimes others):
1. a short poem, normally between 10 and 17 syllables, but in practice a much wider range, between 1 and perhaps 20, depending on the content of the poem and the length of the syllables, e.g., "be" vs "through."
2. A seasonal or nature image which is connected to the heart of the poet's experience as opposed to something tacked on.
3. literal images rather than overtly figurative language.
4. an ideational or syntactic incompleteness that permits the reader to participate as co-creator of the experience
5. multiple images that permit some aesthetic or emotional tension for the reader to experience.


coffin descending
through a hole in the hoar grass—
how bright the rowan berries

Leonard Koren wrote, "The closer things get to non-existence the more evocative they become." So poems that contain images of death can be some of the most powerful. The rest is up to us--what can we add from our experience that gives the reader some new or moving perspective on that powerful transition? Probably the most important thing is the genuineness of our own experience and then communicating that experience to the reader.