A Haiku How To

Hello Sweet Meats, I thought I’d offer up a quick haiku how to post. Now if, like me, someone gives you a rule book and your immediate reaction is to cross your arms and mutter, “pft, make me,” well, that’s fine. This is more general info for the curious

than it is hard and fast rules for Horror Haiku Club. Horror is, after all, largely about breaking rules and making a mess of things. Weird fiction belongs here, so do weird haiku.

Without further ado, some junk about haiku.

The haiku form comes from Japan, but I’m not going to go into its history as I have not the expertise for that. I bring it up only for context as there are some accepted differences between traditional Japanese haiku and modern day English haiku.

Form: In English we write haiku in three lines with a syllable count of 5-7-5. It’s a little different in Japan. I’ve been doing some research this week and it turns out Japanese haiku is written using what are called on. These are somewhat like our syllables, but not exactly. For this reason many English Haiku writers don’t strictly follow the 5-7-5 syllable rule and consider content more important.

Content: Haiku traditionally tries to encapsulate a moment of wisdom or realization about life through observation of nature. As horror haikuists most of our haiku will be more spirit of the law than letter of the law here, but that’s ok. In traditional Japanese haiku a kigo or nature word that denotes a season is required, along with two juxtaposed images, and a kireji or cutting word. Kireji are supposed to surprise the reader and tie the two juxtaposed images together. Here’s a non-horror example I found by a poet called Bāsho:

An old silent pond…

A frog jumps into the pond,

Splash! Silence again.

Splash! serves as the kireji. I won’t lie, I usually forget or can’t get a kireji to work. It is what it is, you know. In the poem above, old silent pond represents winter, and the frog (the kigo), juxtaposing winter, is spring. The last line brings the two together. One last bit of haiku how to, you should be able to utter the entire poem in one breath.

So that’s it! A little bit about haiku that you can stuff into your word hoard of a brain or toss out the window, as you like.