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RE: Do Haiku Need to be Three Lines?

in #haiku7 years ago (edited)

Interestingly enough ... I interpret the my son snoring haiku to mean his son's sleeping sounds mimics the sound of hard snow falling on the roof.

For the sake of ultimate brevity ... perhaps it could read so ...

night
snow beats down
my son snores

As English Haiku and a nose thumb at Kerouac, I would write it a little differently and heighten the word play .

slumber falls
the snow beats down
my son saws logs

I wonder with some of these older haiku and their translated version if some word play isn't lost, idiomatic meaning lost.

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That's the great thing about poetry: It is entirely subjective and is open for interpretation. I hadn't considered his snores matching the snow, but that does work well, eh? I should do the Bob Ross thing and claim a happy little accident. ;)

I couldn't say why, but I like using the progressive tence here. Perhaps because he was snowing as I wrote it (and this article). Basho always advised to only write haiku on things you are currently experiencing (seeing or hearing) and I usually hold to that. It makes them feel fresher.

Your rewrite is interesting. I don't fancy wordplay that much, but there is a charm to that.

Oh certainly older haiku had lots of wordplay. If you read my haiku translations I usually point out when it happens. Usually the old haiku poets' wordplay was more allusion to even older chinese poetry or philosophy, noh drama, or Japanese history. For example, butterflies are almost always both literal and also nods to Chuang Tzu and his questions of reality. This kind of wordplay is almost impossible to translate, so I just point it out in my translation notes.

I used to write haiku on a site called Allpoetry ... some of the haiku folks there would come close to cyber throttling over the use of the progressive. They trained me out of it, unless I was being all 'word-fancy' LOL. But there is an emphasis placed with the present continuous that is true. I guess it depends if you are aiming at ultimate simplicity or increased expression. Also I think there is something called the -te formation ... that would indicated if the writer intended a progressive. But I do not write or read Japanese and so that is foggy to me.

Haha oh I wouldn't fit in there well at all. I am more like the free-verse haiku poets in Japan and I don't do well with rules. I do often follow some traditional haiku rules in my own, but if I am told I have to, I will stubbornly refuse. I very much like recent trends in Japan (such as the woman I posted about recently who wrote the paper-rock-scissors haiku) that are introducing more common language to haiku (slang and whatnot) and striping away all the old rules. Poetry should evolve, not be stuck in the past. Typical stubborn yankee, eh? ;)

Yeah many Japanese haijin use the te form, and it would correspond more or less to the progressive. But the funny thing among many strict English haiku poets is that they often make up their own rules and claim they are the traditional ones, but disregard what the Japanese actually do with haiku.