grey teardrops are in their beds
where the river weeps.
Copyright © 2013 by Simon Austin
What is a Haiku?
A Haiku is a very short Japanese poem. There are many rules that determine what is
(and what isn’t) a Haiku in the very traditional sense. As time and cultures have developed, Haiku’s
and their rules have also widened in scope, and today’s English Haiku’s follow
slightly different conventions to their traditional counterparts, but typically
there is:
A use of three lines of up to 17 syllables, traditionally in "5–7–5" form.
An allusion to nature or the seasons.
The use of a ‘caesura’ or ‘kire’ represented by punctuation, space, a line-break, or a grammatical break to compare two images implicitly.
Haiku’s generally try to reveal enough information around a subject matter without distinctly describing it or revealing its true ‘self’. Matsuo Bashō, a famous Japanese poet, described the Haiku as, "The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of."
A use of three lines of up to 17 syllables, traditionally in "5–7–5" form.
An allusion to nature or the seasons.
The use of a ‘caesura’ or ‘kire’ represented by punctuation, space, a line-break, or a grammatical break to compare two images implicitly.
Haiku’s generally try to reveal enough information around a subject matter without distinctly describing it or revealing its true ‘self’. Matsuo Bashō, a famous Japanese poet, described the Haiku as, "The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of."
No comments:
Post a Comment