What is a haiku?

I used to have another, older poetry blog. This was quite a long time ago. Back then, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Android phones, and so on.

I enjoyed writing haiku on a regular basis, and I also enjoyed the online conversations I had with other bloggers, usually through the comments left. That said, I noticed that people seemed to sometimes disagree quite a bit about what a haiku is.

On the one hand, you had people who would say that a haiku is a poem, written over three lines, in a 5-7-5 syllable formation. While on the other hand, some other persons would say that a haiku didn't need to adhere to that kind of structure, as long as it possessed certain qualities.

Since I'll probably be writing some haiku on this blog, I thought I'd refresh my memory a little regarding what haiku are considered to be. For a quick summary, I went over two posts in Wikipedia, namely:

• Haiku, and
• Haiku in English

Here's what I gather from those two posts:

• Haiku began as a form of Japanese poetry.
• These were traditionally written so that they possessed 17 on or "sounds."
• They traditionally had nature as their subject.
• Since then, however, Japanese haiku have evolved so that they are not required to have 17 on nor must they be about nature.
• What has remained though is the idea that haiku present two images or ideas which are separated / sliced apart through the poem's wording, or something like that.

• Moving on to English haiku, it is important to note that Japanese on are not the same as "syllables."
• For example, a Japanese word with 4 on might have only 2 syllables, while a Japanese word with 1 on might actually have 2 syllables. They're not the same thing.

• That said, many English haiku come in the form of 3 lines with 17 syllables.
• But similar to Japanese haiku, this isn't a requirement. Neither is it required for haiku to only present images of nature.
• What seems to be the case is that English haiku tend to be brief. Some persons have described these as "one breath" poems.
• And there still tends to be the structure of having two images or ideas which are compared / contrasted / separated, through the use of wording, punctuation or some other device.

So that's my understanding of haiku. They can come in 17 syllables. Or not. They can be about nature. Or something completely different. What seems to be at the core of a haiku is the contrast or comparison between two images, which are separated through some form of wording or other manner.

Let me just add though that while I really, really like the idea of having some sort of contrasted imagery in a haiku, I won't think any less of a poem if it lacks this. What I look for is some form of sudden realization or shift in viewpoint or ... something ... in a haiku, which makes me stop and think for a while, and which makes clear that the author means more than the literal imagery he or she is presenting.

So that's what a haiku is for me. Thanks for reading this.