posted
While I enjoyed OSC's last column, I have to disagree with him that haiku is easy to teach and write. Telling a student to give you something in 5-7-5 is easy, but it isn't haiku.
Haiku stems from the Victorian tradition of not saying outright how you feel. It is one moment in time that made you feel strongly. You are now relaying it to someone else so they will also feel strongly about it, but you never tell them what you felt.
Haiku should contain a reference to a season which is often represented by one of the two images used. The images should not be anthropomorphized. The verbs used should only be verbs the nouns can literally do. No metaphors, no similies.
The hardest part of all is finding the Ah! Moment. Taking a nature scene you enjoyed, distilling it to its simplest essence, and presenting it to others is exceedingly difficult.
Writing haiku is one of the hardest things a poet can do.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I think you mean writing good haiku is one of the hardest things a poet can do. I also didn't know it was Victorian in extraction.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Ack! Haiku comes from the Japanese tradition, not Victorian. In the Western world, Pound and other imagists admired, emulated, and popularized (inasmuch as poetry is popular!) the elliptical and highly visual nature of haiku and other Japanese poetry. That's why the 5-7-5; Japanese poetry is based on syllables, not meter.
(A lot of imagists also used Japanese and other east Asian cultures as subjects for their poetry, notably Amy Lowell. Since most of them knew little or nothing about that area of their world, some of their poems are hilarious. Like one guy refers to his Japanese love's blue eyes, for example. Others just rely on stereotypical images like chrysanthemums, kites, cherry blossoms, etc.)
Since Imagism as a poetic movement dates from around 1910 and Victoria died in 1901, even it isn't really a Victorian movement. Granted, culture doesn't make sweeping changes just because a queen dies, so the desire to say something without saying it may possibly have its roots in Victorian modesty. Haiku, though, is much much older.
Everything else I agree with. It's easy to show students how to write haiku, very hard for them to write a good one.
Posts: 834 | Registered: Jun 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Look Haiku might be a beautiful thing, but they are easy to teach. 5-7-5 and they don't have to rhyme. Thats easy, the art is making them make sense. So I am in agreement with OSC and Liz. I can teach a six year old to write a Haiku, but the art is in the beauty.
Posts: 120 | Registered: Jan 2007
| IP: Logged |
posted
A bird flies south, lands on a near dead tree branch and turns to fly home.
^is that a real haiku? I've always heard there was more to it than the syllable counting, but never knew what that was. So this is my first attempt at an actual haiku. Does it follow the rules correctly?
Posts: 2596 | Registered: Jan 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
Sam what ever you are having, pass it along and see if we can write a better version of "Were the Buffalo Roam". I think that would be much harder then learning to write a haiku. Trying to write a readable story while totally under the control of chemical substances meant to alter your mind and motor functions, now why don't they teach that in college? Or maybe they did, but I was to involved with the class to remember it.
Posts: 120 | Registered: Jan 2007
| IP: Logged |
quote: Ack! Haiku comes from the Japanese tradition, not Victorian.
Right. It was discovered by people who spoke English at the tail end of the Victorian or beginning of the Edwardian period. It was probably described to us as having a Victorian sensibility to emphasis the repressed nature of the form.
Most Western poetry is about emotion and elaborate series of metaphors. Haiku isn't.
And for the record, it's only 5-7-5 in Japanese. English syllables are too long for that to work. It should be just as long as you need to tell us what you saw.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
sometimes it's hard to figure out whether words are one syllable or two; for example, "smelled." one or two?
Posts: 930 | Registered: Dec 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
Often in the arctic night, so gelid, The fens that in summer evenings smelled Of the stray dead fish or crawly annelid... Seem pure and white, all scent dispelled.
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[ROFL]](graemlins/rofl.gif)
![[Cool]](cool.gif)
peek-a-boo
