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RE: Do Haiku Need to be Three Lines?

in #haiku7 years ago (edited)

Yup, modern Haijin are definitely moving away from the constrictions of syllable and line count which is awesome for the vitality of the genre. Personally nothing jars worse than a forced 5-7-5 format.

Do you write much yourself? :)

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Somewhat, but I think we still have a lot of poets in the English world who insist on being exactly 17 5/7/5. Fortunately the divide here isn't as bad as in Japan where we have had the two haiku camps (traditional, must follow all rules, and free-form) for about 100 years now and they still don't get along very well.

I do write a lot. I try to do at least one a day. I post them sometimes on here. More often I am translating older ones from the Japanese and posting that.

I just checked out your profile. I see you wrote about Santoka. Excellent! He is one of my favorites (and one that many Japanese folks know of so he's good to memorize). I have translated a few of his haiku for past Steemit posts. I should go back to him more.

Yeah, Santoka is pretty much my favorite haiku poet. Very sparse style with a lot of hidden depth :). Cool, well, I'll keep an eye out for your other haiku posts.