Comments on: Haiku for everyday life

By: sheila

sheila — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:27:42 +0000

I’m a student and very uncreative
any suggestions on writing great haiku’s?
thanks

By: Lekhni

Lekhni — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:56:51 +0000

Vijay: You should. Would love to read yours.

kalafudra: That’s a good one. You are right about the not-making-sense part – I did read some haikus yesterday which did not make much sense to me. Like this one by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. You’d think he was making fun of haikus:
Sick and feverish
Glimpse of cherry blossoms
Still shivering.

By: kalafudra

kalafudra — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:52:42 +0000

My favourite Haiku ever (although probably a senryu):

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
Refrigerator

By: Vijay

Vijay — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:10:21 +0000

Hey so cool.. I have been writing Haikus as well… should put it up on my blog…

By: lekhni

lekhni — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:31:23 +0000

I loved the Gujarati haiku he has quoted. He does seem to advocate the more lax “17 syllables in any 3 lines” approach. Certainly, this calls for more research and a “haiku for dummies” post Are you writing it?

By: Shefaly

Shefaly — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:19:57 +0000

Lekhni: You may like to read the comment by Vivek Khadpekar on my post with the atrocious haiku. More enlightening. Worth writing a ‘Haiku for dummies: a cross-cultural perspective’ type of post for

By: lekhni

lekhni — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:15:20 +0000

Thanks for that tip. I didn’t know any of that, and I was quite horrified to find my haikus turning into senryus.
So I went online to find out more about this elusive kigo that will change my low-born senryus into twice-born haikus. I am happy to report that I found this tutorial, in a website named “Haiku for people”. (Who else writes haiku? Goats?)
I am glad I found the “people” version. It says that a kigo is basically any word that describes the season in which the haiku is set. So I am happy to report that 3 out of 4 of my verses are haikus – “snow”, “Wimbledon” and “monsoon” take care of that. Quite unintentional of course. The fourth verse is possibly the goat version.

By: Sumant

Sumant — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:03:25 +0000

Technically, what you’ve written is not haiku, which has rules far more rigid than just 5-7-5 ‘onji’. There’s the ‘kireji’, which we don’t use in English because the concept of a ‘cutting word’ doesn’t exist. The ‘kigo’, or ‘season word’ is more critical; it is quintessential to the haiku. Perhaps even more so than the 17 syllables, which result in much longer poetry in English than in Japanese. 5-7-5 poetry that do not contain kigo or kireji are known as senryu.