NANO ZEN

As is evident to anyone browsing through my blog, I like to write haiku. I typically write in response to some event, image, thought, or emotion; I’ve done it while road running watching sun rises, walking along the water front, driving in the car seeing distant mountains, sitting in a café watching the world pass by, walking Baka, in reply to comments & other haiku, and sitting on the balcony watching sunsets. Essentially any where and any time I feel in the moment.

The other morning I was out walking Baka a little earlier than usual, trying to re-establish an early morning walk or road run routine, especially now that day light savings time has kicked in. One thing I love about spring is the coolness of the air combined with the scents of trees and flowers. The feeling of newness, like that new car smell, or the paper & ink scent of a new book, or perfume on skin after a shower. The world around me in spring, especially after rain and/or during the early morning feels cleansed.

Haiku is a form that appeals to me a lot, the short simple expression of sense, time, image, and emotion. I’ve written many more lengthy poems in the past, mostly pretty cheesy ramblings of love sick youth, but I still keep them as a reminder of who I am. I’ve kept a journal of all my writings since about fifth form and in this past year I’ve taken to sharing them here along with other thoughts.

twitter, which is suppose to be a micro-blogging site (though sometimes it feels like the world’s largest IRC chat channel) can be an unusual yet interesting source of inspiration; humour, wit, emotion, flippant, images, references. One interesting site, twyric, has taken to presenting twitter tweets and identi.ca posts with #tanka, #haiku, #poem, and others hash-tags and combining them with images from flickr. Very well done.

Yep. My haiku don’t try to adhere to the junior school definition of the English 5-7-5 haiku. I read some place once that Japanese haiku actually can vary between 12 and 17 syllables. This is probably because the Japanese onji, phonetic units, do not correspond 1-to-1 to an English syllable. I came to realise on my own a couple of years ago, before I even read further on the topic for this article, that some haiku just felt more natural using shorter expression; sort of like writing an essay in 140 characters or less. Trying to adhere to a strict traditional 5-7-5 form sometimes seems too forced, unnatural, and unbalanced.

Below are just some articles I found that support the idea that English haiku do not necessarily have to follow the 5-7-5 syllable pattern in order to qualify as haiku. It’s nice to know that I can draw a blue rose if I want too and still call it a rose, something of beauty.

• Seventeen syllables – the great haiku myth
• FORMS IN ENGLISH HAIKU; KEIKO IMAOKA
• dagosan’s Haiku Primer
• The Truth About Haiku