The Spirit of the Stairwell

Over the last week I have had figuratively tens of emails about my regular column – The Haiku Review.  There are, it turns out, hundreds of rules a haiku must honour before it is worthy of that title. A hundred tiny hoops for the poor tyke to jump through, contorting its syllables into grotesque shapes to facilitate safe passage. Does it have a season word or kigo? Does it have two distinct phrases? A caesura? Concrete images? An ‘A-ha’ moment? Seriously, google it, it’s insane.

And my first reaction to this onslaught was to simply ignore it completely. For me haiku is about capturing a moment or a feeling with absolute precision. That’s why it’s so perfect for reviews, you can show how something made you feel- surely a brilliant resource when everything else about critical appreciation is so subjective and open to debate? I like this description from dreamsmith.org:

People often link Haiku with Zen. ‘The Haiku Moment’ is a moment of Zen-like awareness. We all have them from time to time. We suddenly see the world with great clarity. We see details that we don’t normally notice. And if we’re lucky, we note some special significance in the ‘insignificant’ details we usually ignore. The moment passes, but we’re left with something special. We then capture that moment in a short poem, preserving it and (we hope) its special message.

Perfect. So why complicate matters with a load of ancient rules? Surely all they can possibly hope to achieve is to crush the spontaneity of the creative spirit on which ‘the haiku moment’ relies? Especially when contemporary English haiku are a bastardisation of a Japanese art form and the rules in question largely contradict each other anyway. Also, it just seems like too much damn work.

But then I thought – rules are good sometimes, if nothing else it gives me something to break when I feel like it. So with that in mind I have come up with a set of 13 rules that I am going to stick to from this day forward (probably). They may not be definitive, they may not result in perfect haiku but they are mine and I like them.

Here they are:

1. Seventeen syllables written in three lines divided into 5-7-5.
2. Write what can be said in one breath.
3. Use a season word (kigo) or seasonal reference.
4. Use a caesura (break) at the end of either the first or second line, but not at both.
5. Have two images that are only associative when illuminated by the third image.
6. Limited use of personal pronouns.
7. Use of sentence fragments.
8. Attempt to have levels of meaning in the haiku. On the surface it is a set of simple images; underneath a philosophy or lesson of life.
9. Use of puns and word plays.
10. Write of the impossible in an ordinary way.
11. Telling it as it is in the real world around us.
12. Use no punctuation for ambiguity.
13. Capitalize the first word only.

Also, from now on, comments on The Haiku Review should only be phrased in Haiku format following these rules. And feel free to add your own reviews of films, books, comics, music, art, people, food etc.

A new era blooms
horizons scudded with clouds
a blinking cursor