#but i will say that i was really inspired by Jacob Geller's video A Thousand Ways of Seeing a Forest

[corvidcall]

None Of You Know What Haiku Are

I'm going to preface this by saying that i am not an expert in ANY form of poetry, just an enthusiast. Also, this post is... really long. Too long? Definitely too long. Whoops! I love poetry.

If you ask most English-speaking people (or haiku-bot) what a haiku is, they would probably say that it's a form of poetry that has 3 lines, with 5, and then 7, and then 5 syllables in them. That's certainly what I was taught in school when we did our scant poetry unit, but since... idk elementary school when I learned that, I've learned that that's actually a pretty inaccurate definition of haiku. And I think that inaccurate definition is a big part of why most people (myself included until relatively recently!) think that haiku are kind of... dumb? unimpressive? simple and boring? I mean, if you can just put any words with the right number of syllables into 3 lines, what makes it special?

Well, let me get into why the 5-7-5 understanding of haiku is wrong, and also what makes haiku so special (with examples)!

First of all, Japanese doesn't have syllables! There's a few different names for what phonetic units actually make up the language- In Japanese, they're called "On" (音), which translates to "sound", although English-language linguists often call it a "mora" (μ), which (quoting from Wikipedia here) "is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable." (x) "Oh" is one syllable, and also one mora, whereas "Oi" has one syllable, but two moras. "Ba" has one mora, "Baa" has two moras, etc. In English, we would say that a haiku is made up of three lines, with 5-7-5 syllables in them, 17 syllables total. In Japanese, that would be 17 sounds.

For an example of the difference, the word "haiku", in English, has 2 syllables (hai-ku), but in Japanese, はいく has 3 sounds (ha-i-ku). "Christmas" has 2 syllables, but in Japanese, "クリスマス" (ku-ri-su-ma-su) is 5 sounds! that's a while line on its own! Sometimes the syllables are the same as the sounds ("sushi" is two syllables, and すし is two sounds), but sometimes they're very different.

In addition, words in Japanese are frequently longer than their English equivalents. For example, the word "cuckoo" in Japanese is "ほととぎす" (hototogisu).

Now, I'm sure you're all very impressed at how I can use an English to Japanese dictionary (thank you, my mother is proud), but what does any of this matter? So two languages are different. How does that impact our understanding of haiku?

Well, if you think about the fact that Japanese words are frequently longer than English words, AND that Japanese counts sounds and not syllables, you can see how, "based purely on a 17-syllable counting method, a poet writing in English could easily slip in enough words for two haiku in Japanese” (quote from Grit, Grace, and Gold: Haiku Celebrating the Sports of Summer by Kit Pancoast Nagamura). If you're writing a poem using 17 English syllables, you are writing significantly more content than is in an authentic Japanese haiku.

(Also not all Japanese haiku are 17 sounds at all. It's really more of a guideline.)

Focusing on the 5-7-5 form leads to ignoring other strategies/common conventions of haiku, which personally, I think are more interesting! Two of the big ones are kigo, a season word, and kireji, a cutting word.

Kigo are words/phrases/images associated with a particular season, like snow for winter, or cherry blossoms for spring. In Japan, they actually publish reference books of kigo called saijiki, which is basically like a dictionary or almanac of kigo, describing the meaning, providing a list of related words, and some haiku that use that kigo. Using a a particular kigo both grounds the haiku in a particular time, but also alludes to other haiku that have used the same one.

Kireji is a thing that doesn't easily translate to English, but it's almost like a spoken piece of punctuation, separating the haiku into two parts/images that resonate with and add depth to each other. Some examples of kireji would be "ya", "keri", and "kana." Here's kireji in action in one of the most famous haiku:

古池や　蛙飛び込む　水の音 (Furu ike ya　kawazu tobikomu　mizu no oto) (The old pond — A frog jumps in The sound of the water.)

You can see the kireji at the end of the first line- 古池や literally translates to "old pond ya". The "ya" doesn't have linguistic meaning, but it denotes the separation between the two focuses of the haiku. First, we are picturing a pond. It's old, mature. The water is still. And then there's a frog! It's spring and he's fresh and new to the world! He jumps into the pond and goes "splash"! Wowie! When I say "cutting word", instead of say, a knife cutting, I like to imagine a film cut. The camera shows the pond, and then it cuts to the frog who jumps in.

English doesn't really have a version of this, at least not one that's spoken, but in English language haiku, people will frequently use a dash or an ellipses to fill the same role.

Format aside, there are also some conventions of the actual content, too. They frequently focus on nature, and are generally use direct language without metaphor. They use concrete images without judgement or analysis, inviting the reader to step into their shoes and imagine how they'd feel in the situation. It's not about describing how you feel, so much as it's about describing what made you feel.

Now, let's put it all together, looking at a haiku written Yosa Buson around 1760 (translated by Harold G. Henderson)

The piercing chill I feel: my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom, under my heel

We've got our kigo with "the piercing chill." We read that, and we imagine it's probably winter. It's cold, and the kind of cold wind that cuts through you. There's our kireji- this translation uses a colon to differentiate our two images: the piercing chill, and the poet stepping on his dead wife's comb. There's no descriptions of what the poet is feeling, but you can imagine stepping into his shoes. You can imagine the pain he's experiencing in that moment on your own.

"But tumblr user corvidcall!" I hear you say, "All the examples you've used so far are Japanese haiku that have been translated! Are you implying that it's impossible for a good haiku to be written in English?" NO!!!!! I love English haiku! Here's a good example, which won first place in the 2000 Henderson haiku contest, sponsored by the Haiku Society of America:

meteor shower . . . a gentle wave wets our sandals

When you read this one, can you imagine being in the poet's place? Do you feel the surprise as the tide comes in? Do you feel the summer-ness of the moment? Haiku are about describing things with the senses, and how you take in the world around you. In a way, it's like the poet is only setting a scene, which you inhabit and fill with meaning based on your own experiences. You and I are imagining different beaches, different waves, different people that make up the "our" it mentioned.

"Do I HAVE to include all these things when I write haiku? If I include all these things, does that mean my haiku will be good?" I mean, I don't know. What colors make up a good painting? What scenes make up a good play? It's a creative medium, and nobody can really tell you you can't experiment with form. Certainly not me! But I think it's important to know what the conventions of the form are, so you can appreciate good examples of it, and so you can know what you're actually experimenting with. And I mean... I'm not the poetry cops. But if you're not interested in engaging with the actual conventions and limitations of the form, then why are you even using that form?

I'll leave you with one more English language haiku, which is probably my favorite haiku ever. It was written by Tom Bierovic, and won first place at the 2021 Haiku Society of America Haiku Awards

a year at most . . . we pretend to watch the hummingbirds

Sources: (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x)

Further reading:

Forms in English Haiku by Keiko Imaoka Haiku: A Whole Lot More Than 5-7-5 by Jack How to Write a Bad Haiku by KrisL Haiku Are Not a Joke: A Plea from a Poet Who Has Had It Up to Here by Sandra Simpson Haiku Checklist by Katherine Raine

#poetry #haiku #writing #literature #anime life #long post #i want to apologize but i had to get something off my chest #and the thing was. i love haiku #and when i see posts on here about haiku. i get so angy. #well ok i really get more disappointed bc nobody is really engaging with the form on its own terms #anyway i hope you enjoy some of my favorite haiku because theyre in there!!!!! #i didnt really get into the history of haiku. and i also did not get into why i got really into it #but i will say that i was really inspired by Jacob Geller's video A Thousand Ways of Seeing a Forest #which is a lot about translation #(which i mean. as an interpreter AND a poetry-enjoyer. really appealed to me lol)

[haootia]

if i had to name one piece of media that really defines my character itd probably have to be its such a beautiful day, which is kind of strange because i only watched it like, a year ago? as opposed to the stuff i watched when i was a kid and in my early teens thats probably more "fundamental" to my personality... but i dunno how much i believe in that stuff, or when the age cutoff is for that "critical period" of development if there even is one. like i guess i could say that the baby bach music box rendition of jesu joy of mans desiring is the most "fundamental" piece of media to my development considering that i listened to it literally thousands of times between the ages of like, 3 and 10, so if anything is really firmly ingrained in the structure of my neurons and shit its probably that. but anyway what i was saying about its such a beautiful day is that i feel like even though i didnt actually watch it until recently i saw a lot of stuff that was inspired by ISABD so i was kind of secondhand exposed to its influence. i think ISABD is a very influential work and the general mindset and atmosphere of it was reincarnated in a lot of other stuff throughout the 2010s, although i cant name anything specific off the top of my head, thats just a hunch i have. i remember i watched the first part of world of tomorrow when it came out, which was when i was 12, and a little less than 2 years after my dad died, and i was in a really weird state of mind around that time that was actually probably foreshadowing my freshman year paranoid breakdown 2 years later. i totally forgot about it but when i saw jacob geller's video about don hertzfeldt -- and i just checked, that video was uploaded 10 months ago so i must have first watched ISABD around then, which is even earlier than i thought -- i was struck with a really strong deja vu, which is a persistent theme in my life, and i had the sense that world of tomorrow was sort of lurking in the background all 6 preceding years and subtly influencing me throughout that time.

why is this line break so fucking massive? i hope it doesnt show up like that when i post. god. anyway i think that post is phrased really interestingly because there are some things i know are/were critical to my personality that i dont want anyone to experience, and i dont just mean that in a like "no one should be reading homestuck in 2022" way i mean there are things i could point to as being very influential to really shitty parts of my life when i was a young teen, like 13 - 16, and if you wanted to totally "understand me" and be able to like, write my biography, you would have to know about that, but i dont want anybody to do that because those things and the parts of my personality theyre tied to are, i dont really know how to phrase this, something between "problematic" and "shameful" and "gross"? ultimately i firmly believe theyre better off being left in the past, which creates a kind of weird paradox, where i aspire to be known & understood, and i like for people to know stuff about my mindset and the reasons why i do things, and i like to share things about myself with my friends, but also there's this period of a couple years that i honestly have to basically black out from my timeline because it was so shitty. and it was shitty in a way that's different from the ways the genuinely traumatic parts of my life were shitty, which im not actually that hesitant to talk about, like about my dads death and my toxic relationships with my high school boyfriends, i dont think theres any benefit to keeping those things secret... and theres definitely parts of those stories that i dont share as willingly but thats mostly because i think they would make other people uncomfortable, and might be triggering and stuff, not because they make *me* uncomfortable to think about necessarily. ultimately what im getting at is that my current self is like, layers built around previous layers yknow like a pearl or something, and some of the previous layers have bad shit in them, and i hope & believe that the newer layers cover that stuff up and even it out and everything, but there was still an influence there even if you cant see it. so really knowing and understanding me means that you would have to know about that, and i dont want people to know about it, but i do want people to understand me. thats the paradox. maybe ive kind of buried the lead here. i mean this whole post is basically just rambling nonsense anyway but whatever.

its an ongoing struggle not to be mad at my past self(/selves) and i have to consciously forgive myself for basically every mistake ive ever made, which sucks, and i think maybe id make more progress with accepting my past decisions if i bit the bullet and dealt with that problematic shit in a more unflinching way but honestly, im ok with "avoidant" being my major character flaw. i mean ive gotta have at least one right? id just be boring otherwise. so im gonna keep flinching a little, and not sharing the worst parts of me, even if they might help people understand the current me a little better. thats probably the actual thesis of all of this.

#outsider philosophy #don't reblog //