Slides introducing haiku

1. An Introduction

2. Haiku = “play verse”

4. A Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three
lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking
images of the natural world.
A poem in English written in the form of a haiku.

5. Haiku
• Haiku is not about the content of the
experience but the quality of the
experience
• In a good haiku, both the language and
the mind of the poet become
transparent to the reader
• Haiku communicate and share an experience
• Haiku present small dramatic moments that the author
has found in common, everyday occurrences
• Haiku invite us to pay attention, to look at something
closely

7. A short history of haiku
• Haiku begins in the great age of renga
(“linked verse”)
• Renga is a genre of Japanese collaborative
poetry
• Number of poems/stanzas linked grew to
be as many as 50, 100, or 1000
• The beginning link of a renga was called a
hokku and the internal links were called the
haikai
• The beginning link was written by an
experienced poet, and it was always
written in 5-7-5 syllable form

8. On a withered branch
A crow is perched:
An autumn evening.
Basho
What silence!
The voice of the cicada
Penetrates the rocks
Basho
The early summer rain,
Gathering it and fast
Mogami River.
Basho

9. Key Aspects of Japanese Haiku
•Brevity and elegant simplicity
•5-7-5 syllable structure
•Traditionally has two rhythmical units; often marked by a cutting
word called a kireji
•Must contain a season word (kigo, key-go)
•Haiku are written from direct experience, not knowledge
•Written in the present tense (focus on the here and now)
•Imagistic; focus on sensual images (presents “the thingness of
things”)
•Omit features of normal grammar

10. • 5-7-5 structure
• brief and elegant
• reference to season
• written in present tense
• direct experience
• thingness of things
• imagistic
On a withered branch
A crow is perched:
An autumn evening.
Basho
What silence!
The voice of the cicada
Penetrates the rocks
Basho

11. kajitsu
The ka is the “beautiful surface
of the poem”
The jitsu is the “substantial core”
Japanese Zen poets
devised ways to discuss
the kajitsu or formal
aspects of a poem
SURFACE & CORE

12. karumi
(“lightness”)
“In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the
verse, and the joining of its two parts, seem light as a
shallow river flowing over its sandy bed.”
Basho urged his
followers to “seek
beauty in plain, simple,
artless language” by
observing ordinary
things very closely.
Basho

13. in the meadow
the cow’s lips
wet with grass
the zoom-lens effect
Penny Harter

14. rippling waves
with the wind scent
beat together
Basho
Sensations

15. Most of the emotions we have are brief: they appear
suddenly and vanish. They are part of the swift life of
the intelligence.... A brief poem does without the
scaffolding of secondary ideas. Because of this, it
moves more swiftly than the longer poem and with
more intellectual exhilaration. . . . In the brief poem . . .
the poet takes the reader to the edge of a cliff, as a
mother eagle takes its nestling, and then drops him.
Readers with a strong imagination enjoy it, and
discover they can fly. The others fall down to the
rocks where they are killed instantly.
Why Short Poems?
In his essay “Dropping the Reader,” Robert Bly offers some
thoughts on the benefits of reading a short poem:
“