Do You Haiku?
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007I worked with junior high school students on haiku poetry today.
Actually, I’ve been doing quite a bit of haiku lately, as it’s part of our poetry unit. It’s an easy form for the kids to write, though their free verse poetry is so much more compelling.
Do you have a favorite haiku? Neither do I.
Frankly, I think haiku is lost to the ear of the English speaker. Haiku is a Japanese language form, and it doesn’t translate well into English. The 5-7-5 pattern of syllables sounds different in Japanese, which uses a largely consistent consonant-vowel syllable construction.
English speakers don’t hear syllable counts; we hear stress patterns and rhyme schemes. Take the wildly popular limerick. There’s no syllable counting in limericks. A limerick has a stress pattern of 3,3,2,2,3 with a matching rhyme scheme. Two limericks could have a radically different syllable count and still sound correct.
Generally there are two unstressed syllables per stressed syllable, but even that’s flexible. In fact, we could take out all of the unstressed syllables and it would still kind of sound like a limerick:
Man From France
Did Quick Dance.
Asked Why,
Would Cry
“Ants In Pants!”
But if the stress pattern or rhyme scheme were different, we wouldn’t accept it as a good limerick. On the other hand, if a haiku were a syllable or two off in either direction, we’d agree it wasn’t a haiku, but our ear wouldn’t hear the problem.
Anyway, I’m still going to teach haiku, but that needed to be said.