The haiku is probably the most popular poetic form in English, never mind its native Japanese. Its appeal lies in its brevity and apparent simplicity. It would seem to be an easy kind of poem to write, a kind of poem that anybody at all can master. As a result, just about everybody writes them, and it is a popular form for teachers to assign their students to write.
In fact, it is easy enough to write haiku badly, and most are bad. It may be a form easy to write, but it is difficult to write well. It is that way with many things. Perhaps this is because the haiku form has its rules, and most writers of “haiku,” as well as most teachers who assign them are ignorant of these rules or do not wish to be bothered.
Of course, there is the form: three lines; seventeen syllables, five in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. The ancient Japanese writing system, Kana, was a syllabary, not an alphabetical system. So presumably a haiku in Japanese has, or would originally have had, seventeen characters, five, seven, and five. I do not read Japanese, so I can’t say for sure. The visual appearance of the poem on the page would be more important in Japanese than in English. Everyone who knows what a haiku is knows the form, whether they follow it or not.
More important, especially in an alphabetic language, is the rhetoric of the haiku, the internal dynamic. This is a more elusive concept for most would-be haiku writers.
A haiku is highly imagistic: it paints a vivid multi-sensory word-picture that functions as a metaphor for an idea that is seldom explicitly stated in the poem. This is not to say that it is descriptive. Description is another thing, and there is not room for much description in seventeen syllables. Instead, things are named, usually things found in scenes in nature, things for which the reader has his own mental image. The image need not be imparted by the poet; it need only be called up and resonate within the reader. The reader must participate in the poem by supplying details. There will usually be a reference to the season and often to the time of day; these affect not only the look of the scene, but the feel of the air, the quality of the light, even smells. They have their own figurative meanings as well, calling up ideas as well as feelings.
In a reasonable reading of a poem, we must always distinguish between what the poem brings to us and what we bring to the poem, between the text and the reader. The experience of The Poem, Louise Rosenblatt taught us, results from this transaction. This transaction is especially obvious as we read haiku. In no other poetic form is it so important what the reader brings to the poem, and in no other form is it so important that the poet calculate exactly what the reader will bring.
The dominant image, the scene, is usually composed of two complementary images that relate to each other metaphorically and fuse into the single dominant image.
Because the image(s) is familiar to the reader, he can not only visualize it for himself, but it will bring with itself a whole complex of associations, memories, and emotions, a little different for each reader. It operates on the principle of the “objective correlative,” a term and concept not invented by T. S. Eliot, but certainly put on the literary map by him in one of his critical essays. The idea is not to tell the reader about what he sees, but to make him see it, to show, not tell; not to tell the reader what to feel, but make him feel it; not to tell the reader what to think, but to lead him to the thought.
At its best, a haiku is no less than a portal to meditation.
Bad haiku and faux haiku have the superficial appearance of haiku because they follow the form, or at least look like they are following the form. But they do not function like haiku rhetorically. The vivid images are not there, that reach deep within the reader’s consciousness, forming associations with memories and emotions. There is no “objective correlative” operative there. Instead, we often get images that simply don’t work as they should. Worse, we often get explicit statements and overt abstract conceptualizing. Such poems are not just bad haiku, they are bad poems. At worst, they are unintentional parodies.
This brings us to what I call “quasi-haiku” (I think the term is mine). Such poems are haiku-like in their brevity, but they are not true haiku, at least not in form. Their rhetoric, their dynamic, however, is very haiku-like, and this is what matters. While “faux-haiku” are bad haiku and bad poems, quasi-haiku can be very good poems (or not) on their own merits.
One of my favorite examples (and favorite short poems) is by Ezra Pound:
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd, Petals on a wet, black bough.
Formally, it is not a haiku. Its two lines add up to 19 syllables. It cheats by having a title. If we count the title as a line, and it functions as one, we are up to 27 syllables.
We have a place, a railroad station. The reader, especially if he is even slightly familiar with railroad stations, can paint a whole scene in his mind. He can people the scene. We see their faces, which are given to us in terms of an apparition, a ghost-like, insubstantial, fleeting. We may then think of the unreality of others to ourselves, especially in a crowded, urban environment, where people, strangers to us, whom we have never seen before and will likely never see again, are merely scenery. We have a season-reference, spring: the petals, as of fruit trees in bloom. The bough is wet and, therefore, no doubt, is the weather. A stormy spring day. Perhaps the wind is tugging at the blossoms, shaking them about, occasionally tearing off petals and sending them flying. Spring blossoms are transitory and insubstantial in the rain and the wind, as are the faces in the crowd. Is it a dark, rainy early spring day in the railroad station? We are not told so, but we may reasonably, by association, assume so. We may find ourselves led to think about the loneliness of the crowd.
What is a reasonable reading of a poem? We must distinguish between what the poet gives us – the text, words on a page – and what we bring to the poem. In a haiku, or a good quasi-haiku, there is not much text. What matters is what we (reasonably, of course, given what we are by the text) bring to the poem. We are invited to contribute to the poem and extend it. The short poem is an invitation to long meditation.
Another classic example is by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
It cheats a little on haiku rhetoric by telling us that “So much depends.” But by not telling us what depends, or how it depends upon this red wheelbarrow, or how it is “so much,” this vivid little scene, so spare, so minimalist, invites us to meditate on no less than The Nature of Things.
And Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways Of Looking At a Blackbird” works very much like a sequence of thirteen quasi-haiku.
I submit to you some short poems of my own, Some Quasi-haiku, in From the Files. I will call them quasi-haiku for lack of a better name.
“Early,” “Cruelest Month,” and “Winter” are cut from longer, earlier (like, 1960s) poems. “Morning” and “Ghost Story” are fairly recent and are in their original form. Some of them, like Pound’s poem, cheat a little by having a title that functions as a first line.