The Changing Seasons of Haiku

Thinking about the nature of haiku and the use of sound

Hello, Poetry People!

What counts as a haiku?

thump, thump, thump, thump, thump
basketball pounds the pavement
in time with my heart

The Changing Seasons of Haiku

A short essay on nature and season words in haiku

Figuring out what a haiku even is when you’re writing in English is not a trivial matter.

Is a haiku any three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable pattern, or does it have to be about nature? Does the poem need to contain a season word or kigo (季語) like haiku in Japanese do? What if the poem has three lines, is about nature, and has a kigo, but does not follow the 5-7-5 pattern? What if the poem has three lines, follows the 5-7-5 pattern, and is not about nature but does use a kigo? Is that still a haiku? What if a poem is one line that is 17 syllables long (5+7+5) is about nature, and has a kigo, is it a haiku? What if there is no kigo to be found, but it’s a 5-7-5 three-line poem?

Untangling all of these different scenarios plus all the other possible ways to write something in English that could be considered a haiku is beyond the scope of what I can do today. However, these are the kinds of questions I’m constantly thinking about. My short answer to all of these questions is that all of these poems are English Language Haiku.

Once the Japanese poetry form of haiku entered English, it was transformed by the new language and the radically different cultural context. English Language Haiku is a broad tent that covers many different forms and variations.

One way to see how English Language Haiku must be different from the original Japanese form can be seen in the use of the season word. In Japanese, a haiku must use a season word from an official list. While the list contains baseball as a season word for spring (or possibly summer), the list of kigo is conservative and, as you would expect, tied to the seasons as experienced in Japan.

However, in this wide world seasons are not the same. As we all experience climate change, our sense of the seasons is different. Here in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., where I’m writing, we now have a wildfire season in a way we did not experience 20 years ago.

Seasons are also cultural. Cherry blossoms is a common kigo. Cherry blossoms do bloom in the spring, but Japanese culture centers this spring phenomenon in a way most other cultures do not.

Take my haiku at the opening of this newsletter:

thump, thump, thump, thump, thump
basketball pounds the pavement
in time with my heart

Is there a season word? There is not an official one. However, in my family basketball is a summer and fall kigo. My kids play basketball all summer long in the driveway. The WNBA, which several of us follow, has a summer season. The NBA, which we also follow, starts in October and runs until June. My children have all played youth basketball at one time or another, and that always starts in the fall.

Even if you count basketball as some type of season word, is this poem about the seasons or nature? Does it count as a haiku¹?

Japanese has a separate poetic form called senryu that deals with human nature usually in a humorous or ironic way. It is also a three-line poem with the 5-7-5 syllable pattern. To the extent senryu exists at all in English, it also has a home in the big tent of English Language Haiku.

I believe this poem to be a haiku. It may not be a great example of the form, but it is recognizable to readers as a haiku, and I intended it to be a haiku. In the end, I think the test of whether or not something is a haiku will be a matter of taste. If I were to be the judge of what counts as a haiku, I would use a three-part test:

1. Does the poem match any of the many, many common forms of English Language Haiku?

2. Did the poet intend the poem to be a haiku?

3. Does the reader recognize the poem as a haiku?

Any poem that meets at least two of the prongs counts as a haiku.

While definitions do matter in poetry, they matter far less than the content of the poem itself. The first rule of poetry is to break the rules.

English is not a precise language. We now use haiku to mean whole lot of different kinds of poems. This is a wonderful opportunity to bend or break some rules and create more poems that make people feel things.

If there is no feeling, why even bother to write a poem at all?

Haiku Prompt

My greatest poetry weakness is my overreliance on my eyes. The haiku in today’s post is one of my few sound-based poems. Here it is one last time:

thump, thump, thump, thump, thump
basketball pounds the pavement
in time with my heart

In this poem, I also worked to introduce some uncertainty. Is the “thump, thump, thump, thump, thump,” of the first line the ball or my heart, or both? The poem is born out of experience. My den is in the front of the house, and I often hear the kids dribbling the basketball in the driveway, though I cannot see them from my desk.

I also wrote this poem in response to a middle school English teacher insisting to one of my children that “thump” is not onomatopoeia².

Now it’s your turn.

Write a haiku built around a sound. Feel free to use any form of haiku you desire. Please share your haiku in the comments.

Be the poetry you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason

1. I think humans are a part of nature and that the more we understand all of our doings to be part of the natural world, perhaps, the better we will treat our planet better.

2. The hell it isn’t! My child and I decided not to correct the teacher since the issue did not affect their grade and life is too short to be confrontational when you can be petty instead.