I started writing haiku (haikus?) a few years ago, for reasons still unclear. I don’t generally attempt poetry but the haiku is a form that appeals to me, at least in so far as I grasp what they are and sort of get what they are trying to achieve.
Haiku in English, I think, are markedly different from the true Japanese sort, but I think are a valid separate form in their own right. Often people say a haiku must have exactly 17 syllables in a 5-7-5 arrangement, but I don’t agree, since are there many successful examples in English that use quite different structures. One of my favourites (and probably the shortest) is by Martin Lucas:
puddles
bubble
I still write haiku with stabiliser wheels attached – that is, I’m still not entirely confident about what constitutes a haiku (though this site offers wonderful introductions to them:
http://www.haiku.insouthsea.co.uk/english.htm)
However, what I like about writing haiku is that they are a great exercise. For me, a haiku is about trying to capture a single moment, a single thought, feeling or experience, in the most delicate framework. In fact I wrote a haiku trying to express that very thing:
dewdrops in the web
captured like bubbles of time
I think of haiku
I don’t think the above is an entirely successful attempt, though, despite its regulation 5-7-5 arrangement. Using a simile (like bubbles of time) is a bit of a cop-out; I think a haiku should give you stuff straight, laid bare, not hiding behind metaphors. Actually, the more I think about it, ‘like bubbles of time’ is a bit lame. But I’ll leave it there to show where I am with this whole business. Anyway, as I was saying, haiku force you to find only the words that will do, and more than that: they train your mind to seek out those moments that in themselves seem to have a ‘poetic’ sort of force. I’m not sure how better to explain that.
Haiku seem particularly effective at preserving memories, as if they were a sort of reality jam:
rainbow rows of jars
glistening with old sunshine
from hazy autumns
Or these holiday snaps from my three days in
a sodden city
smudging the line between sand
and sea
the orange beach ball
escapes over windy waves
light as a bubble
(We never did get it back.)
1 comment:
I bought "The Ink Dark Moon" some time ago. In its pages are words from a Japanese woman who lived a thousand years ago. She wrote in Waka, five lines, more sylables.
"More fragrant
because of the one
who saw and picked them, these flowers,
precious,transient-"
The flowers may have been transient but how loud her words still echo across the world and across centuries.
Izumi Shikibu.
If you do not already know her you will come to love her. She must have kept a cat.
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