Origin of This Species:

Although it wasn’t known as haiku at the time, it was derived from an opening stanza of a traditional collaborative work called the renga or haikai. Then, it was known as hokku. Its usage was to open a line of thought which the next collaborator would work from, and so on. However, by the mid 1600s the hokku was beginning to be noticed to Japanese writers as a form that could be combined with other art, progressing the hokku into forms such as the renku, the haiga, and the haibun. However, by the end of the 1600s, with the help of two Japanese poets, known as Matsuo Basho and Ueshima Onitsura, the form hokku as a standalone gained in popularity. At that time it was still called the hokku. Aside from one or two reformations by later poets, the hokku did not change much in style or delivery.

It wasn’t until 200 years later, in the late 1800s, when Masaoka Shiki re-invented the hokku by doing away with its Buddhist overtones, and began to abbreviate the term haikai no ku “a verse of haikai” into haiku. Being influenced by Western Imagists, and of course by his taste in some of the word-paintings of his predecessors, Shiki imagined that the haiku should be approached in a ’shasei’ manner: that is to say, to sketch nature in words. He felt that the ’spirit’ of the haiku must change with the times.

It is because of this attempt by Shiki to re-invent the hokku, that early 20th Century poetic attempts at translating the ’spirit’ of the haiku went misunderstood. This ‘lost in translation’ feeling needed to be invigorated, and in spite of early 20th Century poets’ attempts, much of the previous 200-year era of hokku was dwindling away. However, that occurrence did not halt the evolution of the haiku, because with the imagist movement in the early 1900s, the haiku gained something that it didn’t have in its previous era: the ’shasei’.

Several poets from the 1910s tried, unsuccessfully, to bring the form into power. Then, in the late 1950s, Kenneth Yasuda and Harold Henderson added to the ’shasei’ theory by expounding the ‘moment in time’ insight: that a moment captured elicits an understanding of a comparison or contrast between nature and human nature or vice versa. Yasuda added also, that more poetic character could be achieved through the rhyming of the first and third lines, and that was a thought Henderson latched onto, for he translated every haiku he found thereafter into a rhymed one.

The Minimalist Debate

Though these poets added much to the development of the haiku, they both have taken through literal translations of Japanese haiku from the early to mid 20th Century that the 17 onji count in Japanese is not equivalent to 17 English syllables, and that fewer syllables in English are required to fulfill the same quota of understanding. I do not agree.

The largest reason I do not agree is because Shiki, in his wisdom, proposed to keep the 17 syllable-rule for English writers so that with the number of syllables available any English haiku could maintain proper sentence structure and still have plenty of space to work poetic magic in. The Japanese haiku in 17 onji allows them with their particular linguistic rules to apply literally billions of combinations of words and sentence structures, whereas the English language is not so easily rearranged. Also, 20th Century minimalists are those who prefer (in their precision) to do away with every ‘unnecessary’ word. However, it can be seen that through the translation of the terms onji and mora, that the major development of hokku and haiku is based on stressed words. In Japanese, the haiku is 17 onji, or stressed vocalizations (mora), all of which produce a complete thought within 17 divisions. The closest representation to that in English, which Shiki was trying to convey, was a complete thought in 17 English syllables. In Japanese haiku, every onji is stressed, yet, because we write in English, there are some that may not be. That still, however, does not imply that English haiku-writers have the right to do away with the 17 count. On the contrary; the evolution of theory does not put form in the past, rather enhances it for future pleasure.

Some Hokku/Haiku Examples

Matsuo Basho

The first cold shower!
Even the monkey wants a
little coat of straw!

Etsujin Kawahara

Only a chirping
insect told me it was night;
so bright was the moon.

Raizan

You rice-field maidens!
The only things not muddy
are the songs you sing.

Richard Wright

Whitecaps on the bay:
A broken signboard banging
In the April wind.

The True Definition

In Japanese a haiku is one line with three segments of 5, 7, and 5 onji. A haiku in English consists of three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Through the years, and with the changes in theory, a haiku has come to be a representation of a moment in time that highlights through the usage of fine imagery the similarity between nature and human nature, using a contrast of opposites, and requiring a kigo (a seasonal word). In Japanese the form requires a kireji (a cutting word, or what some English translators call a verbal caesura) that can occur anywhere within the haiku and produces the separating thought effect which forces both segments to be viewed against each other. The use of the cutting word in English is rare, but a verbal caesura, when used, is sometimes represented by a proper punctuation mark (em-dash, ellipsis, or even period) and helps to illuminate the contrast of opposites.

The Falling Out Of Tradition

Ever since the 1950s when the haiku found its “True Definition” as marked here-above, there have been many poets and writers reformulating and reformatting the haiku to suit their personal tastes. Why did poets abandon such a brave and marked new traditional form? What is so bad about it? It does after all present itself in clarity and has a beautiful structure, which Yasuda perfected with rhyme. Yet, is there an underlying pressure assumed by the implication of the word ‘tradition’? Haiku is so relatively new to the literary world that it surprises me to see that people so want to avoid its rules and structure.

And yet, that’s the rub of it, right? Rules and structure are abhorred by modernists. They favor the ability to adjust or do away with forms for the sake of the reverence of personal freedoms. They feel that the rules should bend to them, not they to the rules. Perhaps that sounds like an attack, and maybe it is, yet, it is only so for the logical reason that rules are set to establish an order out of chaos, and structures are put in place to separate one thing from another. Is it not therefore a reasonable suggestion that to identify item from item there should be categorizations and classifications, so that such distinctions can be made? Modernism has instead blended the structures so that forms are barely identifiable anymore.

And my point with saying this is that there have been several such meshings even with so clearly delineated a form as the haiku.

Sub-Forms

There is the monoku, introduced as a one-line variation of the way haiku is written in Japanese. This one would not have been such a bad idea if it hadn’t been the catalyst that resurrected the senryu, whose unbinding of the content rule surreptitiosly brought about the fall of the form. There is the four-lined haiku called haiqua, and other ‘vertical haiku’ in which most lines only have one or two words per line. There is the circular haiku called cirku which in its form has no definitive beginning or end. There is even a haiku form called scifaiku which deals with speculative fiction and promotes the minimalist approach.This, of course, leads us to the ‘free form haiku’, which can be in any number of syllables in any number of lines from 2 to 6, on any subject that so pleases the writer. All I can do to that one is shake my head.

Minimalists and the Senryu

The senryu is alike in form to the haiku except that it deals not in the nature/human nature contrast but in other mundane human foibles, including but not limited to religion, humour, cynicism, political or societal issues, and urban life. The senryu was developed by an 18th Century Japanese poet named Senryu Karai. Its obvious attractive quality to modern writers is that it has fewer content rules.

However, because of the minimalist approach to the Japanese translations and to literal definitions of the Japanese-English syllable difference, modern writers have used the debate to justify their exercises in fewer than 17 syllables, resulting in a not-so-obvious grandiloquence and a typical promotion of the breaking of the rules of traditional poetry, not to mention a breaking of the rules of grammar. The fewer words you use, the harder it is to put them into sensible sentences in a haiku. If 10 words in any style on any subject can be a haiku, then what is the poetic world coming to?

For Future Reference

The blurring of the lines is only going to continue as well, because the more modern writers that buy into this “free form” movement without studying poetic theory first, then the more the lines of poetic form are going to fade into non-existence. Then, anybody, anywhere, writing anything, will be able to produce ‘quality’ poetry and get away with it.

So, I beseech you all to re-invigorate poetic theories on the haiku by paying attention to the definition that imparts the clearest and truest ideal. I implore you all as self-proclaimed poets to do your research, to find an understanding of what it is you’re writing, whatever that is. Only through such exploration do the horizons of poetical ability broaden and become diverse. Keep your nose in the books, and your fingers on the keys and surely we’ll all meet in the end with success unexpected in our common endeavor.