LIBRARY BLOG
The Poetry Nook: Haiku
Tiny stories caught/the lines pulled taught and clipped short/nature bends to will
Welcome to The Poetry Nook, where each month we discuss poetry: the different forms, the writers, and the lore. You will also get to try your hand in different poetic forms with a thematic writing prompt. So, pour yourself a cup of tea (or coffee if you prefer) and let’s get started.
Earlier this month in Lillian’s blog post, Poetic Forms: Not All Poetry Has to Be Pretentious, we learned about twelve different ways that you can write a poem. In this introduction to poetic forms, she gave us the opportunity to see the myriad of ways that you can express yourself. Here, we are going to dive in and explore haiku, the mighty poems that tell their stories in just 17 syllables.
While many of us are familiar with the three-line form of English language haiku, the traditional Japanese form was told in a single line. These writers relied on their language, cutting words, or kireji, and punctuation to convey the rhythm of the poem. Haiku got its start in 12th century medieval Japan where it was just the first stanza of a two-stanza form called Renga, its pattern being 5-7-5, 7-7. Over several centuries, haiku’s popularity began to grow, allowing some poets to earn their living with their 17 syllable snapshots of the natural world around them.
Matsuo Bashō, born in 1644, is arguably the most famous haiku poet. The son of samurai, Bashō spent much of his life wrestling the poetic form out of the hands of jokesters in order to get it the attention that he thought it deserved as an art form. His poetry earned him praise and renown by his thirties, but he was completely unconcerned and uninterested in notoriety or fame. Instead, he chose to spend the last ten years of this life traveling the Japanese countryside and writing.
The next 200 years brought the writers Yosa Buson (1716-1784), whose poems sang to your senses, Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), who celebrated the small helpless creatures, and Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who decried the fawning over Bashō and who liberated haiku from Renga and elevated it to modern art and the 17 syllables we know today.
From the outside, the pocket-sized haiku may seem unintimidating, its 17 syllables nicely sliced into three neat lines. In fact, its small size and ties with the natural world around us is what is so appealing to both seasoned writers and those unfamiliar with poetry. It seems an easy thing do, to count out sounds on your fingers and neatly chop the picture down to its predetermined lines. But I caution you against discounting haiku’s power because of its stature. It was once described by Alan Watts as a “wordless poem” and writer Cor van den Heuvel, in The Haiku Anthology, explains what that means: “Haiku, for the reader, is wordless because those few words are invisible. We as readers look right through them. There is nothing between us and the moment.”
Or, as the Bard once wrote, “…though she be little, she is fierce.”
Writing Prompt
Let’s not forget that nature, and haikus, can also be playful. For this month’s prompt, I would like you to write four separate humorous poems, one for each season of the year, making sure to focus on one of your senses. When you’re done, we’d love to read them. Send your poems to naomi@mytpl.org and we will share them on our Facebook page.
- Autumn: Sight
- Winter: Touch
- Spring: Sound
- Summer: Smell
Here are my examples:
Recommended Books
References
- Atwood, Ann. My Own Rhythm: an Approach to Haiku. Scribner, 1973.
- Heuvel, Cor Van den. The Haiku Anthology: Haiku and Senryu in English. W.W. Norton, 2000.
- Larrabee, Hart. Haiku: Classic Japanese Short Poems. Chartwell Books, 2016.
– Naomi Hurtienne Magola, Youth Services Librarian