Writing Haiku Poetry

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Table of Contents

• This poetry prompt focuses on short-form Japanese …

  • The Traditional Japanese Form

    • Haiku Prompts: Your Turn!

  • Imagist Haiku

    • Imagist Haiku Prompts: Your Turn!

  • Beat Haiku

    • Beat Haiku Prompts: Your Turn!

  • Senryu and Gendai

    • Senryu and Gendai Prompts: Your Turn!

  • Archive

This poetry prompt focuses on short-form Japanese poems: haiku and its variations. Unlike most of our prompts, which begin with freewrites, I'm going to walk you through a few different ways of approaching the haiku form.

I love haiku (whose plural is, by the way, haiku). I think they're gorgeous, meditative, insightful, and mysterious. I also think the form is woefully misrepresented outside of Japan. When haiku are taught in English-language curricula, people simply learn that the poem is "5/7/5" syllables, and so any 17-syllable tercet is automatically a haiku. This is far from the case.

You're going to write a bunch of haiku by the end of this article. But first, a brief history of the form.

The Traditional Japanese Form

The haiku form came out of the Japanese poetic tradition, but it wasn't firmly its own form until the 1600s. I detail a bit of the history of the form at this blog article on the topic. Essentially, haiku poems were first hokku that summarized extended linked-verse poems in the Japanese tradition. Hokku did not officially become haiku until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, in which the West forced Japan to open its trade with Europe and the United States. The haiku form found some interest among Modernist poets like Ezra Pound (famously a Sinophile; famously, also, a fascist...)—but it was The Beats who really popularized the form in America.

The traditional haiku form has a few requirements:

• 17 onji, arranged in a 5-7-5 format. Onji are to Japanese what syllables are to English, but Japanese is a tonal language, and so onji quantify tonal variations, which are slightly distinct from syllables.

• A kireji, or "cutting word." Haiku poems have a "cut" or rift that occurs midway in the work, cleaving the poem in half while also unifying the poem's juxtaposed images. In English, the kireji can also be an interruptive bit of punctuation, such as the em-dash (—).

• A kigo, or "nature word," often referring to one of the four seasons. All haiku are about nature. Haiku poems that do not incorporate natural imagery are not called haiku. More on this in a bit.

• Two juxtaposed images, whose juxtapositions are resolved in the poem's moment of insight.

Here is an example of the traditional Japanese haiku from Bashō, arguably the most important haiku poet from Japan.

First, let me identify the poem's formal qualities:

• Juxtaposed images: "old silent pond" and "A frog jumps".

• Kireji: "Splash!"

• Kigo: "A frog" (More on this below).

What is this poem about? It's actually about the changing of the seasons. In the Japanese poetic tradition, frogs are symbols of the Springtime. A lot is lost in translation here, but the "old silent pond" represents a pond Wintered over, and the frog's (or Springtime's) splash is the sudden melt and transition of the seasons. So the kireji here is essential because it highlights the suddenness of seasonal change. "Silence again", thus, is a moment of insight: Bashō points to the meditative nature of nature itself outside of these moments of transition.

Haiku Prompts: Your Turn!

Write at least 3 haiku using the tradition 5/7/5 form. Use a seasonal word and a cutting word, and juxtapose two natural images. Try to surprise the reader through careful observation and juxtaposition. Don't feel obligated to employ traditional Japanese imagery, but you can reference this saijiki for some traditional kireji words and images.

Imagist Haiku

Haiku's first proper introduction to English-language poetry came through the Imagists, a Modernist movement that privileged imagery over other aspects of the poetic craft. (Here's a prompt on Imagist poetry if it interests you.)

Ezra Pound was a prominent Imagist and an admirer of Chinese and Japanese poetics. You can see their influence in much of his shorter work. This poem, for example, is not strictly a haiku, but its concision and vivacity are emblematic of the haiku tradition:

Another thing the Imagists admired about haiku was its ability to generate epiphany. Through the close and careful observation of nature and the natural world, unexpected insights, almost divine in nature, could strike the poet—and be reproduced in the reader's consciousness. Now, Modernist haiku poets deviated from the traditional form sometimes by not incorporating seasonal elements into their work, and so sometimes their poems are not technically haiku, but are more in the senryu or gendai tradition. Keep those terms in mind, as I'll define them towards the end of this.

These qualities are apparent to me in the haiku of Richard Wright, a poet who, though not strictly an Imagist, was certainly a Modernist and utilized the craft of contemporary poetry to showcase the qualities of Black and urban American life.

Here are a few:

Though the setting of this poem isn't clear, it captures a sense of urban loneliness—of being alone in a sea of strangers.

If this haiku struck you as being a bit bawdy or humorous, that's because it is.

Wright's radical incorporation of urban and crass elements in modern life paved the way for contemporary poetry to be much more honest about civilization and its brutalities.

Imagist Haiku Prompts: Your Turn!

Depict a moment in time, an epiphany, when you become suddenly aware of reality through something simple, striking and absolutely ordinary.  “In a brief moment, one sees a pattern, a significance he or she has never seen before.”  Write about moments which come from your life experience and observation—the common and the ordinary under the light of your eyes and ears. Do not avoid city life if it's relevant.

Beat Haiku

The Beat Poets, in many ways, liberated the haiku form for English-language poets. Their contributions to the canon are essential for writing contemporary haiku.

The Beats were a group of poets in the 50s and 60s whose countercultural influences were necessary for resisting the normative trends of mid-century America. Like the Imagists, the Beats were also interested in Eastern philosophy and spirituality. They also opened the door to poetry being vulgar, political, and eclectic—features ultimately associated with Postmodernism, too.

Their primary contribution to the craft of contemporary haiku is this idea, probably from Allan Ginsberg: A haiku should be spoken in a single breath.

In other words, the qualities of haiku that contribute to its length, namely its 3 lines and syllable count, are irrelevant to the English-language canon. Haiku should still be attentive and  juxtapose, but this can be accomplish in 1, 2, or 4 lines; in 10 syllables or 20, so long as it requires only one squeeze of the lungs. Additionally, Kerouac advocated for haiku that strived towards some form of enlightenment—this word being used with a Buddhist sensibility in mind.

Beat-era haiku was also much more interested in the mind and the unconscious.

Here are some examples of that Beat ethos in haiku:

Ginsberg's translation of Bashō here seems a little odd in its wordiness, but it captures his approach to haiku: meditating longer on what's meditative in the poem, allowing for that "deep resonance" to be more richly felt.

I love this haiku's moment of surprise: it embraces something traditionally felt as inconvenient, especially in urban life, as a locus of purification.

Here you can see the colloquial in conversation with the spiritual. I love that bold "w/" taking place in a poem, somehow both reverent and irreverent, and the poem's final lines feel like perfect window of di Prima's capacity for insight.

Beat Haiku Prompts: Your Turn!

The following prompt is the same prompt that Ginsberg often gave to people trying to write haiku. Try your hand at 3 or 4 of these!

Line 1: What is your neurotic confusion? (Something that obsessively confuses you.)
Line 2: What do you really want or desire?
Line 3: What do you notice where you are now?

Senryu and Gendai

I mentioned that haiku has to involve nature to properly be haiku. If we want to deviate from this tradition, there are two alternate approaches to the form that might interest you:

• Senryu: A 3-lined poem which, in place of observation of the natural world, instead observes human behavior and pokes fun at human foibles.

• Gendai: A poetic tradition from post-war Japan that observes politics, urbanity, war, and other aspects of modern life. Where traditional haiku are symbolistic, gendai haiku sometimes employ metaphor and simile.

Here's an example of senryu, from Karai Senryu:

Karai Senryu is the form's namesake, and he wrote many of these poems throughout his life (1718-1790).

Here's an example of gendai poetry, from Kaneko Tōta:

Now, these distinctions—haiku vs senryu vs gendai—come with a lot of gray areas. What if I write a haiku that's funny? What if my gendai mentions the autumn leaves?

I don't think these categories need to be strictly adhered to. If you write a meditative 3-lined poem that doesn't cleanly fall into these boxes, you can still call it a haiku or a senryu. But I do think it's good to understand the traditions you are writing within before you write within them, as the prevailing ideas about haiku—a tercet of any topic in 17 syllables—strike me as reductive and striving for easy poeticism.

Senryu and Gendai Prompts: Your Turn!

Write a haiku that explores something interesting about modernity. It can be political, or simply set in the present day.

If you like the craft of short-form poetry, check out this prompt as well!

https://poemancer.com/writing-short-poems/

Archive

Check out our full archive of prompts at the Poemancer website!