Haiku / 158
11 05 2008Phone off, foot like a mole
Poking from a hole in the sheets.
Forgetting about everything for a while.
Shaw Malcolm
Hunger & Curiosity
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I guess you know that haiku is 5-7-5 syllables
Hi Matt,
C’mon, buddy, live a little.
Haiku is so much more than “5-7-5 syllables.” I recommend you read the first page of Julio Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch. It doesn’t include haiku, but it does refer to the unwavering and cramped need to write only on lined paper and to always squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube.
For your benefit, I’ve included below a section or two from a response I wrote and posted previously for another reader who expressed an attachment to the 5-7-5 format. Enjoy.
*
In Japanese, the original language of haiku, the tradition is for the lines to be written in a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern. However, in other languages, writers often, and for good reasons, do not follow that tradition; one very good reason is that the benefits of the 5-7-5 format are specific to the Japanese language.
In English, haiku often needs to break out of the 5-7-5 in order to make its own unique contribution. I often think of writing 5-7-5 haiku as the literary equivalent of coloring inside the lines or taking the exact same route to work every day. Predictable, boring. If a haiku I’ve written is 5-7-5 or close to it, it found its way there on its own.
Haiku, like life, is meant for exploration, not for being stuffed and compartmentalized into the tiny boxes of tradition. The seasons, after all, speak of change.
Haiku is not about counting syllables and including a season — it’s about intention, about observing the details of nature to find the miraculous in the ordinary.
Hi Shaw, I just stumbled across your haiku and genuinely wondered what your thoughts were on it. Personally, for me, poetry is a free-medium and it doesn’t really matter that much. I have to say though that trying to keep to the 5-7-5 does force you to consider every word choice in a different way.
Just 2 cents of thought
squeezed from bottom of toothpaste
now need lined paper
Hi Matt,
Yes, great point about how structure informs content. As I was writing my last response, I was thinking about the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet and how the formal tenets of it help to shape the writer’s senses towards a particular vision. In a world of so many choices, it does help to find abundance more clearly through “limitations” or “rules” of structure.
It’s much like a human being understanding his or her own “strengths” and “weaknesses,” being truthful with that understanding and allowing the awareness, combined with compassion, to shape choices and actions.
Words on unlined paper:
Footprints lost deliciously
In the forest of the page.
I’m more of a freeverse poet, but some structure helps, I think
the brain enjoys the challenge of having limits and squeezing
from those guidelines as much as it can. That’s part of the enjoyment
for me.
forests of the page
tree lines drop thumbed leaves
spaces just thought skies
I tend to not put any punctuation in my haiku, which I guess is
my version of unlined paper in this form, and I too break the
syl count sometimes.
Really liked your -
Words on unlined paper:
Footprints lost delciously
In the forest of the page.
Good stuff!