It's not often I guess people would choose to review a haiku, but I felt I needed to intervene in this situation. Yes, you've got 5-7-5 syllables, and that's what *confines* a haiku, but that's not what defines a haiku, if you get what I'm saying.
To show you what I mean, let's take a look at not *a* haiku, but *the* haiku:
fuke ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
This is Basho's milestone Haiku about the frog, which translates to something along the lines of this (unfortunately however, the English mindset does not provide a perfect means of translating such a poem):
An old pond;
Frog jumps in
Water's sound
Japanese, the language haiku was defined for, is based on syllables, so the syllable requirements make sense for that language (less so in English, but we can still imitate the form), but it's also important to understand that Japanese is very mathematical and formulaic, so much so that a haiku is almost like a mathematical function. Think of a haiku's structure as
x=?
f(x)=
y=f(x)
For example
x=2
f(x)=x^2
y=4
Basically, the first line sets a stage, the second line applies some sort of transition to it, the third line reveals the output of that transition. Now, you can play with it a little, but the key is that you must focus on a single image. Your "haiku" has no focus, the images are three and unrelated. Try to choose one of these three images (I recommend the boots in the snow myself) and produce three lines of haiku verse based on that, keeping in mind some form of input, transition, output. You're capturing an instant of change, that's the form of haiku.
Now, pay close attention here because this is what's important. Now you notice in Basho's poem, there's not much on the surface; that is, directly in the written word. That's because the message of the haiku is hidden. Oft in Japanese much of the sentence is left out and left up to interpretation by the reader/listener. The "answer" to a haiku can also be thought about in a mathematical sense, which is why I often call a haiku a "calculus of an image."
If you've taken calculus, you're familiar with the derivative and integral of a function. The derivative at any point tells you how fast the function is changing, and the integral at any point tells you how much has changed overall. Similarly, when thinking about the haiku you need to take the "derivative" and the "integral." You need to think about where you started and where you end up, and how quickly the change is taking place. Is it a frog jumping into a pond where the change happens quickly but the change is small and temporary? Is it a caterpillar building a cocoon where the change happens slowly but the change is large and permanent? Is it a landslide where it's both fast and impactive?
Just remember the following basics when writing a haiku:
1.) Where do I start?
2.) Where do I end up?
3.) What's changed?
4.) How did I get there?
In Japanese "haiku" literally means "play verse" but in English since our language already puts us at a disadvantage to writing them you should think of them as "Calculated snapshots." Too often we focus so much on the syllables of a haiku that we forget what's supposed to actually go on inside of one.
Good luck! Keep writing :)
~antlion falling |
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