Haiku Manifesto

I wrote a long response to Hannah’s comment on my poem from yesterday. It was turning into a haiku manifesto, so I’m using it as today’s post.

Her comment:

Hmmmm...now I wonder why, but I have an observation.

One of our local radio talk show hosts--a guy I enjoy--often has silly haiku on topics such as local politics. He invites listeners to call with theirs, and they play this particular music...it's all pretty funny.

HOWEVER, I sometimes feel like it is a little...um...sacrilegious. Or disrespectful to the art form.

What brought this to mind is that when I read "TV flickers" I groaned a little internally. Haiku and tv, (like the silliness on the aforementioned radio show) sort of seems out of place.

THEN, you went on to "beyond the window..." and I sighed internally... I LIKED that you brought it back to nature, I guess.

Am I weird, (okay, I am) or at least does this make sense?


My response:

According to some of the reading about haiku I've done recently, while traditional haiku involves only nature, modern haiku in English often deals with love, technology, etc. Since I live in a world with TV and computers, it’s natural that they would appear in my poetry.

True haiku can only be written in Japanese; I think that since haiku in English is only an approximation of a Japanese form, poets can take certain liberties with form and subject. But then, I've also played around with sonnets--putting the couplet at the beginning, for example, or having lines that don't rhyme or scan in iambic pentameter. I don't think it's disrespectful--just finding ways to reinvent the poetic tradition to suit what I want to say in today's language. (I’ll admit there's a difference, though, since a sonnet is part of the English literary tradition, and haiku comes from another culture.) Interestingly, haiku itself was an evolution from another form—poets took the first verse of longer compositions and started seeing the short poems as a separate form.

I also think that since haiku is short, many people see it as an "easy" form that they learned about in school. When I taught world literature to high school freshmen, we studied haiku, but we looked beyond syllable counts to the use of the kigo (the seasonal word) and the pause (I want to say caesura, but that's not the Japanese word) usually found in the middle. That pause divides the poem in two parts, and there's usually a contrast or a comparison between both parts. Sometimes one part sums up or frames the other in an unexpected way.

In yesterday’s poem, I was trying to contrast the mediated world of TV with the reality of the birds outside the window. As Ben was watching TV (Blue's Room, to be exact), I was struck that we had all the blinds down, but I could still hear the birds outside.

As for the humorous haiku you mention, I think they derive their humor from the implied contrast between the natural world and our complex modern world, as in this list of computer error messages written in haiku. My favorite humorous haiku (thanks, Lauren!) pokes fun at the difficulty of writing concisely:

Oh no! I've only
just begun, and already
I'm out of sylla—

Since I’ll be writing 27 more haiku this month, I reserve the right to try something humorous, although I’m staying away from it at the beginning because I don’t want to descend into silliness too soon. (I would love to hear your radio station try out some humorous sonnets, but I don’t know that many people would be up for that!)

I see poetic forms as constantly evolving. If anything, the problem I see with the writing of many beginning poets is a lack of awareness of forms and traditions that they can draw on as resources. Writers should be scavengers—taking bits of traditions, real life, and imaginings and using them to create something new.