Haiku in English - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Haiku in English is a development of the Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese haiku

Haiku

' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...

poetic form in the English language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

.

Contemporary haiku are written in many languages, but most poets outside of Japan are concentrated in the English-speaking countries.

It is impossible to single out any current style, format, or subject matter as definitive. Some of the more common practices in English include:

Use of three lines of up to 17 syllables;
Use of a season word (kigo
Kigo
is a word or phrase associated with a particular season, used in Japanese poetry. Kigo are used in the collaborative linked-verse forms renga and renku, as well as in haiku, to indicate the season referred to in the stanza...

);
Use of a cut or kire
Kireji
is the term for a special category of words used in certain types of Japanese traditional poetry. It is regarded as a requirement in traditional haiku, as well as in the hokku, or opening verse, of both classical renga and its derivative renku . There is no exact equivalent of kireji in English,...

(sometimes indicated by a punctuation mark) to compare two images implicitly.

English haiku do not adhere to the strict syllable count found in Japanese haiku, and the typical length of haiku appearing in the main English-language journals is 10–14 syllables. Some haiku poets are concerned with their haiku being expressed in one breath and the extent to which their haiku focus on "showing" as opposed to "telling". This is the genius of haiku using an economy of words to paint a multi-tiered painting, without "telling all". Or as Matsuo Bashō

Matsuo Basho

, born , then , was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Bashō was recognized for his works in the collaborative haikai no renga form; today, after centuries of commentary, he is recognized as a master of brief and clear haiku...

puts it, "The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of."

History

During the Imagist

Imagism

Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...

period, a number of mainstream poets, including Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, wrote what they called "hokku

Hokku

is the opening stanza of a Japanese orthodox collaborative linked poem, renga, or of its later derivative, renku . From the time of Matsuo Bashō , the hokku began to appear as an independent poem, and was also incorporated in haibun , and haiga...

," usually in a five-seven-five syllable pattern. Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell

Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.- Personal life:...

published several "hokku" in her book "What's O'Clock" (1925; winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...

). Individualistic "haiku-like" verses by the innovative Buddhist poet and artist Paul Reps

Paul Reps

Paul Reps was an American artist, poet, and author. He is best known for his unorthodox haiku-inspired poetry that was published from 1939 onwards. He is considered one of America's first haiku poets....

(1895–1990) appeared in print as early as 1939 (More Power to You—Poems everyone Can Make, Preview Publications, Montrose CA.). Other Westerners inspired by R. H. Blyth

Reginald Horace Blyth

Reginald Horace Blyth was an English author and devotee of Japanese culture.-Early life:Blyth was born in Essex, England, the son of a railway clerk...

's translations attempted original haiku in English including those of the Beat period

Beat generation

The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

, such as Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

and Richard Wright

Richard Wright (author)

Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...

Snow in my shoe

Abandoned

Sparrow's nest

Jack Kerouac (collected in Book of Haikus, Penguin Books, 2003)

The African-American novelist Richard Wright, in his final years, composed some 4,000 haiku, 817 of which are collected in the volume Haiku: This Other World. Wright hewed to a 5-7-5 syllabic structure for most of these verses, and frequently employed surreal imagery and implicit political themes.

Whitecaps on the bay:

A broken signboard banging

In the April wind.

Richard Wright (collected in Haiku: This Other World, Arcade Publishing, 1998)

An early anthology of American haiku, Borrowed Water (Tuttle:1966) of work by the Los Altos, California

Los Altos, California

Los Altos is a city at the southern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The city is in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population was 28,976 according to the 2010 census....

Roundtable was compiled by Helen Stiles Chenoweth. The experimental work of Beat and minority haiku poets expanded the popularity of haiku in English. Despite claims that haiku has not had much impact on the literary scene, a number of "mainstream" poets, such as W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...

, Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur

Richard Purdy Wilbur is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989....

, James Merrill

James Merrill

James Ingram Merrill was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies...

, Etheridge Knight

Etheridge Knight

Etheridge Knight was an African-American poet who became a notable poet in 1968 with his debut volume, Poems from Prison. The book recalls in verse his eight-year-long sentence after Etheridge was arrested for robbery in 1960...

, William Stafford, W. S. Merwin

W. S. Merwin

William Stanley Merwin is an American poet, credited with over 30 books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from...

, John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

, Donald Hall

Donald Hall

Donald Hall is an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2006.-Personal life:...

, Ruth Stone

Ruth Stone

Ruth Stone was an American poet, author, and teacher.-Life and career:In 1959, after her husband, professor Walter Stone, committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone...

, Sonia Sanchez

Sonia Sanchez

Sonia Sanchez is an African American poet most often associated with the Black Arts Movement. She has authored over a dozen books of poetry, as well as plays and children's books...

, Billy Collins

Billy Collins

Billy Collins is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida...

, (as well as Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...

, Wendy Cope

Wendy Cope

Wendy Cope, OBE is an award-winning contemporary English poet. She read history at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She now lives in Ely with the poet Lachlan Mackinnon.-Biography:...

, and Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet. He has published over thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 - 2004. At Princeton University he is both the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities and...

in Ireland and Britain) and others have tried their hand at haiku, although their work has frequently demonstrated no awareness of the tenets of the season word

Kigo

is a word or phrase associated with a particular season, used in Japanese poetry. Kigo are used in the collaborative linked-verse forms renga and renku, as well as in haiku, to indicate the season referred to in the stanza...

, cutting

Kireji

is the term for a special category of words used in certain types of Japanese traditional poetry. It is regarded as a requirement in traditional haiku, as well as in the hokku, or opening verse, of both classical renga and its derivative renku . There is no exact equivalent of kireji in English,...

, objective imagery, or other dominant characteristics of the genre. Haiku has also proven very popular as a way of introducing students to poetry in elementary schools and as a hobby for numerous amateur writers.

In 1963 the journal American Haiku was founded in Platteville, Wisconsin, edited by James Bull and Donald Eulert. Among contributors to the first issue were poets James W. Hackett

James William Hackett

James William Hackett is an American poet and philosopher born in Seattle, Washington in 1929, most notable for his work with haiku in English. The James W. Hackett Annual International Award for Haiku, named after him, was administered by the British Haiku Society from 1991 to 2009.-References:...

, O Mabson Southard (1911–2000), and Nick Virgilio

Nick Virgilio

Nicholas Anthony Virgilio was an internationally recognized haiku poet who is credited with helping to popularize the Japanese style of poetry in the United States....

. In the second issue of American Haiku Virgilio published his "lily" and "bass" haiku, which became models of brevity, breaking down the traditional 5-7-5 syllabic form, and pointing toward the leaner conception of haiku that would take hold in subsequent decades.

lily:

out of the water

out of itself

bass

picking bugs

off the moon

Nick Virgilio (Selected Haiku, Burnt Lake Press/Black Moss Press, 1988)

American Haiku ended publication in 1968 and was succeeded by Modern Haiku in 1969, which remains an important English-language haiku journal. Other early journals included Haiku Highlights (founded 1965 by Jean Calkins and later taken over by Lorraine Ellis Harr who changed the name to Dragonfly), Eric Amann's Haiku (founded 1967), and Haiku West (founded 1967).

The first English-language haiku society in America, founded in 1956, was the Writers' Roundtable of Los Altos, California

Los Altos, California

, under the direction of Helen Stiles Chenoweth. The Haiku Society of America

Haiku Society of America

The Haiku Society of America is a non-profit organization composed of haiku poets, editors, critics, publishers and enthusiasts that promotes the composition and appreciation of haiku in English. It was founded in 1968 and sponsors meetings, lectures, workshops, readings and contests...

was founded in 1968 and began publishing its journal Frogpond in 1978. Some key issues that American haiku practitioners debate include: appropriate length and structure of haiku, the use and importance of kigo

Kigo

('season words') (including in regions with little seasonal variation), the relation of haiku to Zen, the use of natural and urban imagery, the distinction between haiku and the related senryū

Senryu

is a Japanese form of short poetry similar to haiku in construction: three lines with 17 or fewer total morae . Senryū tend to be about human foibles while haiku tend to be about nature, and senryū are often cynical or darkly humorous while haiku are more serious...

genre, haiku grammar, and the incorporation of subjective elements, including personal pronouns. Important resources for poets and scholars attempting to understand English-language haiku aesthetics and history include William J. Higginson

William J. Higginson

William J. Higginson was an American poet, translator and author most notable for his work with haiku and renku, born in New York City...

's Haiku Handbook (McGraw-Hill, 1985) and Lee Gurga's Haiku: A Poet's Guide (Modern Haiku Press, 2003).

Significant contributors to American haiku include Hackett, Virgilio, Charles B. Dickson (1915–1991), Elizabeth Searle Lamb (1917–2005), Raymond Roseliep

Raymond Roseliep

Raymond Roseliep was a poet and contemporary master of the English haiku and Catholic priest. He has been described as "the John Donne of Western haiku."- Early life :...

(1917–1983), Robert Spiess (1921–2002), John Wills (1921–1993), Anita Virgil (b. 1931), and Peggy Willis Lyles (1939–2010).

downpour:

my "I-Thou"

T-shirt

Raymond Roseliep (Rabbit in the Moon, Alembic Press, 1983)

an aging willow--

its image unsteady

in the flowing stream

Robert Spiess (Red Moon Anthology, Red Moon Press, 1996)

Other noteworthy figures still active in the American haiku community include Jane Reichhold (b. 1937), Marlene Mountain (b. 1939), Ruth Yarrow (b. 1939), George Swede

George Swede

George Swede , is a Canadian psychologist, poet and children's writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario...

, vincent tripi (b. 1941), Alexis Rotella (b. 1947), Christopher Herold (b. 1948), John Stevenson (b. 1948), Lee Gurga

Lee Gurga

Lee Gurga is an American haiku poet. In 1997 he served as president of the Haiku Society of America. He was the editor of Modern Haiku magazine from 2002 to 2006, and is the current editor of the Modern Haiku Press. He has won a number of awards in the field of English-language haiku poetry...

, Gary Hotham (b. 1950), Michael McClintock (b. 1950), Alan Pizzarelli

Alan Pizzarelli

Alan Pizzarelli is an American poet, songwriter, and musician. He was born of an Italian-American family in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in the first ward’s Little Italy.-Poetry:...

, Jim Kacian

Jim Kacian

James Michael Kacian, an American haiku poet, editor, publisher, and public speaker was born on July 26, 1953, in Worcester, Massachusetts, then adopted and raised in Gardner, Massachusetts. He has lived in London, Nashville, Bridgton and now resides in Winchester, Virginia...

, and Michael Dylan Welch (b. 1962). Examples:

Just friends:

he watches my gauze dress

blowing on the line.

Alexis Rotella (After an Affair, Merging Media, 1984)

meteor shower...

a gentle wave

wets our sandals

Michael Dylan Welch (HSA Newsletter XV:4, Autumn 2000)

Little spider,

will you outlive

me?

Cor van den Heuvel (Haiku Anthology, 34d ed. 1999)

Pioneering haiku poet Cor van den Heuvel

Cor Van Den Heuvel

Cor van den Heuvel is an American haiku poet, editor, commentator and archivist.-Biography:Van den Heuvel was born in Biddeford, Maine, and grew up in Maine and New Hampshire. He lives in New York City with his wife Leonia Leigh Larrecq....

has edited the standard Haiku Anthology (1st ed., 1974; 2nd ed., 1986; 3rd ed. 1999). Since its most recent edition, another generation of American haiku poets has come to prominence. Among the most widely published and honored of these poets are Fay Aoyagi, Roberta Beary, Connie Donleycott, Carolyn Hall, paul m., Scott Metz, Chad Lee Robinson, Billie Wilson, and Peter Yovu. Newer poets exemplify divergent tendencies, from self-effacing nature-oriented haiku (Allan Burns) to Zen themes perpetuating the concepts of Blyth

Reginald Horace Blyth

Reginald Horace Blyth was an English author and devotee of Japanese culture.-Early life:Blyth was born in Essex, England, the son of a railway clerk...

and Hackett (Stanford M. Forrester) to poignant haiku-senryu hybrids in the manner of Rotella and Swede (Roberta Beary) to the use of subjective, surreal, and mythic elements (Fay Aoyagi) to emergent social and political consciousness (John J. Dunphy) to genre-bending structural and linguistic experimentation and "found haiku" (Scott Metz).

The American Haiku Archives, the largest public archive of haiku-related material outside Japan, was founded in 1996. It is housed at the California State Library

California State Library

The California State Library collects, preserves, generates and disseminates a wide array of information. It was founded in 1850 by the California State Legislature. Today, it is the central reference and research library for state government and the Legislature. The California State Library...

in Sacramento, California

Sacramento, California

Sacramento is the capital city of the U.S. state of California and the county seat of Sacramento County. It is located at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River in the northern portion of California's expansive Central Valley. With a population of 466,488 at the 2010 census,...

, and includes the official archives of the Haiku Society of America

Haiku Society of America

, along with significant donations from the libraries of Elizabeth Searle Lamb, co-founder Jerry Kilbride, Jane Reichhold, Lorraine Ellis Harr, Francine Porad, and many others.

Publications in North America

The current work of haiku poets is best represented by the small press movement. Among the North American publishers of haiku collections and anthologies are Jim Kacian's Red Moon Press, Randy Brooks's Brooks Books, Michael Dylan Welch's Press Here, and Jane Reichhold's AHA Books.

The leading English-language haiku magazines published in the USA include Modern Haiku, Frogpond (published by the Haiku Society of America), Mayfly (founded by Randy and Shirley Brooks in 1986), Acorn (founded by A. C. Missias in 1998), bottle rockets
Bottle Rockets (magazine)
bottle rockets is a bi-annual U.S. literary journal that publishes haiku, senryū, tanka and haibun. The journal is published by past president of the Haiku Society of America Stanford M. Forrester, and also includes reviews and essays on haiku and senryū...

(founded by Stanford M. Forrester), The Heron's Nest (founded by Christopher Herold in 1999, published online with a print annual); Brussels Sprout (edited from 1988 to 1995 by Francine Porad), Woodnotes (edited from 1989 to 1997 by Michael Dylan Welch), Hal Roth's Wind Chimes, Wisteria, moonset (edited from 2005 to 2009 by an'ya (Andja Petrović), White Lotus, the Internet-based Simply Haiku, ant ant ant ant ant (edited since 1994 by Chris Gordon), tinywords

Tinywords

tinywords, founded in October 2000 by D. F. Tweney , is an online English language haiku and micropoetry journal that publishes one haiku or very small poem every weekday on its website....

(published by d. f. tweney since 2000), and Roadrunner (an online journal edited by Scott Metz).

Publications in other English-speaking countries

John Barlow's Snapshot Press is a notable UK-based publisher. In the UK, the British Haiku Society publishes Blithe Spirit, and the World Haiku Club publishes The World Haiku Review. Another leading haiku magazine in the UK is Presence (formerly Haiku Presence) edited by Martin Lucas. In Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

, twenty issues of Haiku Spirit edited by Jim Norton were published between 1995 and 2000. Shamrock, the online journal of the Irish Haiku Society edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky

Anatoly Kudryavitsky

Anthony Kudryavitsky born in Moscow on 17 August 1954, better known by his pen name Anatoly Kudryavitsky , is a Russian-Irish novelist, poet and literary translator.-Biography:...

, currently publishes thematic issues on the haiku movements in various countries, as well as international haiku. In Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

, there are two notable haiku journals, Paper Wasp and Stylus, while Kokako is published in New Zealand

New Zealand

New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

Variant forms

Although the vast majority of haiku published in English appear in three lines, a number of variants can be seen.

One line

The most common variation from the three-line standard is one line, sometimes known as monoku. Marlene Mountain was one of the first English-language haiku poets to write haiku in a single horizontal line, by way of analogy with the single vertical line of printed Japanese haiku. The single-line haiku usually contains much fewer than seventeen syllables. A caesura

Caesura

thumb|100px|An example of a caesura in modern western music notation.In meter, a caesura is a complete pause in a line of poetry or in a musical composition. The plural form of caesura is caesuras or caesurae...

(pause) may be appropriate, dictated by sense or speech rhythm, and usually little or no punctuation. It has been practiced by Marlene Mountain, John Wills, and Matsuo Allard, and has been used more recently by poets such as M. Kettner, Janice Bostok, Jim Kacian

Jim Kacian

, Chris Gordon, Scott Metz, Dennis M. Garrison, Charles Trumbull, Stuart Quine, and many others.

pig and i spring rain

Marlene Mountain (Frogpond 2.3-4, 1979)

an icicle the moon drifting through it

Matsuo Allard (Bird Day Afternoon, High/Coo Press, 1978)

Mountain (formerly Wills) writes collaborative linked one-line haiku sequences, which she calls "Mountain Sonnets," each made up of 14 one-line haiku.

At its most minimal, haiku may occasionally consist of a single word:

tundra

Cor van den Heuvel (the window-washer's pail, 1963)

core

John Stevenson (Live Again, 2009)

Four or more lines

Haiku of four lines (sometimes known as haiqua) or longer have been written, some of them "vertical haiku" with only a word or two per line. These poems mimic the vertical printed form of Japanese haiku.

she watches
satisfied after love
he lies
looking up at nothing

pw (Blithe Spirit 10:4, 2000)

beneath
leaf mold
stone
cool
stone

Marlene Wills (the old tin roof, 1976)

The highly prolific poet John Martone (b. 1952) specializes in vertical haiku along the lines of the examples above.

Circular

Haiku have also appeared in circular form (sometimes known as cirku) whereby the poem has no fixed start or end point.

Fixed form

In the "zip" form developed by John Carley, a haiku of 15 syllables is presented over two lines, each of which contains one internal caesura represented by a double space.

buoyed up on the rising tide

a fleet of head boards bang the wall

John Carley (Magma No 19, 2001)

A fixed-form 5-3-5 syllable (or 3-5-3 word) haiku is sometimes known as a lune

Lune (poetry)

Lune is a fixed-form variant haiku created for the English language, and consists of two versions:The Robert Kelly luneRobert Kelly, a Professor of Literature at Bard College, invented a new form of English-language haiku using the form 5/3/5 syllables, with the intention of making the form closer...

History

Publications in North America

Publications in other English-speaking countries

Variant forms

One line

Four or more lines

Circular

Fixed form

See also

Further reading

National societies

Periodicals

Multimedia

Techniques and papers