This is exciting! So a new friend of mine, Michael Welch, is a prolific and knowledgeable haiku poet. I asked him if he had read that Beth Lapides book that I was so happy about finding a few months ago. He’d heard of it (not read it), but has a different notion of what haiku actually consists of than most of us Americans who learned from our fourth-grade teachers that it’s a poem with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third, and little else.

So here’s the additional information I had already gathered through being a poetry fan: that 5-7-5 is sort of a bad translation from the original Japanese form (hence there are plenty of lovely haiku that don’t stick to that formality). That haiku are more about concrete imagery than emotional description. That what really defines a haiku is that little “aha” moment that fits compactly into the three lines–a little mental jump that the poem helps you make.

But! My understanding was still far short of what a haiku really is! Michael’s essay in haikuworld has shown me different. Key bit of understanding that has changed the way I read haiku, and I had to read the essay twice before it sunk in: a haiku depends upon a comparison between two distinct things (usually with a pause or caesura between them), and the “aha” in a good haiku should come from lingering on the two disparate images until the link between them becomes apparent.

Wow! Just looking back at the haiku examples in the essay that way, my perception of them shifts, and they become hundreds of times more awesome. How did I not get this before? This is a whole poetic form that I had mostly dismissed as boring–I sigh to think how many brilliant little insights I have totally overlooked in my life by simply not knowing what to look for in the haiku I encountered.

Hurrah for a new analytical toy!
Alissa