https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English
the syllable rule does not have to be followed. it doesn’t have to rhyme. a single line can be used, even a single word, or just use as many lines or syllables as you want. so any short evocative sentence can be called a haiku? maybe that’s the joke, hence the haiku bot?
how about that 6-word baby shoes story, can that be called a haiku too?
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Haiku never needed to rhyme. Why wouldn’t you follow 5-7-5 syllable rule? That’s what makes a haiku a haiku
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It’s poetry, the most pretentious form of written word. The rules for a style can be extremely nebulous or hard to define, or even self-contradictory, and still be viewed as that style.
The thing about Western Haiku is that it’s missing a lot of the original values of the medium. It has none of the social context – a period of great artistic expansion and exploration as the result of a large upper class with nothing to do. It has none of the cultural purpose – poetry like this was almost a game of wit. And most importantly, it doesn’t benefit from the Japanese language, which the style was originally created in. Japanese is quite a concise language when it wants to be. It can convey a lot of information in a small number of syllables. English is poor at this, so the 5-7-5 pattern heavily restricts the quality of English poetry. It also leads to a hell of a lot of Haiku getting translated in a way that loses the pattern, so eventually a lot of poets got fed up of the restrictions and just did the same content but ignoring the restrictions (the part that made it a game of wit in the first place) but still chose to call it haiku.
“Haiku” is actually a structural format. In English, Haiku format utilized three lines, with a certain amount of syllables in them: 5 first, then 7, than 5. This is mostly similar to how Haiku works in Japanese.
Theoretically, any thing in that format can be a Haiku, but what people understand to be “good” haikus are ones that use the limitations to their advantage.
This is related to why Haiku exists as a style. It’s actually based off of an even older style of poetry from Japan called “Waka”. Waka were much longer; depending on who was writing, Waka could be six lines or more!
But some Japanese poets realized that there were very clever ways of saying multiple things in small spaces. For example, they could use “Kakekotoba”, or “Window Words”, where a single line or word of the poetry can be read in two completely different ways.
This was such a neat trick, that Japanese poets decided to limit the size of their poems as sort of a fun challenge. Like how people have fun speed running video games. So they shortened the Waka style into the Haiku style, and they liked the challenge so much that it stuck.
Many people try to emulate this style in English, but it tends to not work as well, simply because of how the languages are different. But please do try!
Haiku poems need
syllables five-seven-five;
season’ly refer.
–Dave, this is a haiku / there are many quite like it / but this one is mine.
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