haiku is a gorgeous form. i researched haiku recently and saw a lot of discussion about the sonic aspect of haiku, but this cultural context is really fantastic. you can do so much with them. have you read etheridge knight's haiku?
I love haiku and it’s expanded version, the Tanka. I agree, it less about the syllable count and more about the expression of an emotion captured in a fleeting moment of time.
I've written several haikus before but I've missed the mark on most of them content wise. I learned haiku at a community college but we were only concentrated by the 5 7 5 syllable rule and not the spirituality part of it.
When I first learned it we also only focused.on the syllable count, which is too bad because you miss part of the art form of a poem when you strip it down to something so bare. Especially when syllable count isn't even relevant to the original style at all 😅
I always wondered why English IPA doesn't capture the full range of unique vowel and consonant sounds. Perhaps there would be way too many? For example with: IPA: bidz [beads] vs. IPA: bits [beats] The "i" vowel sound is not quite the same between the two. It's slightly more elongated for "beads" by human speakers (although robots read it like the same sound). Like "b-eee-ds" vs. "b-ee-ts". Even IPA pronunciation keys fail to show us these nuanced differences. One of the things that makes Japanese so simple (although nowhere near as rhythmically complex) as English is that our syllables (which only have around 110 unique sounds) are all roughly the same length in sound. So "a-yu-mi" takes pretty much the same time to speak as "o-su-shi", "ma-gu-ro", "o-sa-ke", "ha-na-bi", "ka-ta-na", "sa-shi-mi", "pa-n-da", "etc. English seems so complicated. "Sa-ga" is so much shorter than "cra-zy" which is still shorter than "squan-dered".
Thank you!! It needs to be said in school and taught this way. It’s horrible how disconnected from the culture it is. Ugh! American education has really made haiku a joke :/
