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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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.
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