image from: sarahjmartin.blogspot.comI find the form of the haiku intriguing and challenging. Like another Japanese art-form, the bonsai, the haiku, too, demands a cruel twisting and pruning. But like a bonsai plant, a well-written haiku is personified perfection : emotion, personal image, collective idea and form come together--like Blake's description of the tiger--in "fearful symmetry." Unlimited power, harnessed and restrained, compacted into an impossible density that nevertheless embodies grace and effortless movement.
Like the best beeda of pan or kacha golla sandesh, the haiku poem melts in the mouth quickly, gone before you realise it, before you've had nearly enough, leaving you craving for more even when the texture of it, the flavour of it, the memory of it lingers on and on, tingles, brings alive every cell in your mouth and makes it feel, well, deliciously different for a very, very long time.
For just a 17 syllable literary form though, there are too many alleged rules that one is supposed to follow. In fact, some of those rules are so contradictory, there's no way one can follow all of them! However, I have found that most people who write haiku poetry in English tend to follow some basic tenets:
A haiku poem must have 2 distinct parts--the "fragment," which is short and either line 1 or line 3 and the "phrase," which is longer and thus either lines 1 and 2 or lines 2 and 3.
I write haiku to discipline my craft and condense it. I find that when I write poetry, I prefer compression of expression and the older I become, the less I want to say and the more I want it to mean.
I'm waiting for the day I'll be able to make a haiku out of my life.
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