notes on 5-7-5

notes on 5-7-5
(or, tangled up in haiku)

by Glynne Walley

Haiku, strictly speaking, has a lot more rules than just 5-7-5, and three "lines" aren't essential. Most haiku in Japanese are printed in one line; because of the strict 5-7-5 pattern, the reader knows where the breaks should come. There's also a lot more instances of the sense spilling over from line to line than was common in traditional English poetry.

Other rules are that there should always be some word that tips you off as to the season in which the poem is set; and there should usually be a sort of exclamation, an "oh" or an "alas" sort of thing, breaking the grammatical continuity between the first and second or second and third lines. On top of this, most haiku, traditionally, are supposed to betray a deep consciousness of the poetic tradition, incorporating imagery, phraseology, or other conventions that tie the poem to poems past. Serious haiku practitioners in Japan usually stick very closely to voluminous handbooks and dictionaries that tell them how a word should be used, in what "season" of poem, and what other words should accompany it.

All of this of course refers to haiku as thought of in Japan, and I say this not to sound pedantic but just to make the point, fairly obvious, that haiku as practiced in the West sort of diverges from the way it's conceived of in Japan. This is only right and proper, I think. It's called cultural adaptation and it happens all the time, all over the world. But it means that, in the case of English haiku, we don't need to stick strictly to a 5-7-5 format, especially since we're already breaking so many of the other rules.

Haiku in the West seems to stem as much from the San Francisco Zen-Beat tradition as from its original Japanese practitioners. Accordingly, haiku here is usually much, much less concerned with interpreting and preserving a centuries-old poetic tradition than with apprehending and presenting a "universe in a grain of sand" type of cosmic insight, very much in the Zen way of thinking. The spirit is also much more iconoclastic and innovative as a matter of principle than it usually was in Japan (there was plenty of irreverence and iconoclasm in the great haiku masters, but usually within a context of much more respect for tradition, and mastery of it, than the average citizen of a late-capitalist, television-driven nation like the US or Japan can even imagine).

Anyway, to get back to the 5-7-5 question, I've tried my hand at translating haiku and other types of traditional Japanese poetry, and I think that, in English, 5-7-5 is if anything too many syllables. Japanese words, on average, have more syllables than English words, and verbs in particular, since they have agglutinative endings, get pretty long, so it's not at all uncommon for one line of a haiku to be taken up with a single word. The result is that a Japanese 5-7-5 poem is much more concise than an English poem in 5-7-5, if you can believe that. After all, how many direct, visual English words can you think of with seven syllables? In other words, I find that most English haiku are too wordy, pack far too much meaning into the poem.

In my view the idea of a "haiku" in English is about as meaningless/ful as the idea of a "sonnet" in Japanese. You can do it, but already it's not the same, so you might as well experiment. The exact line measurement, since it's based on a different language with different characteristics, should be the first to go.

Consider this Dylan verse from Never Say Goodbye:

Matthew Zuckerman, who used to post here fairly often ['here' being the newsgroup rec.music.dylan], once suggested I look at this as a haiku, and once I did I decided it was about the best English-language haiku I'd ever read. It concentrates on a single, sharply observed scene in nature, evokes it with a minimum of words, evokes the season and the setting perfectly, refrains from extraneous philosophical commentary. It's just beautiful. Note the perfectly poised expectancy: the wind isn't blowing yet, but it's about to, and when it does it will obliterate the footprints. But for the moment, the speaker can still see them -- and while the speaker is never mentioned in this verse, the perspective suggested in the last line, of someone looking down on the lake from a hillside above it, puts him, and us, right there. Fantastic. (There are a lot of very evocative passage in Dylan's lyrics, of course: what makes this so easy to consider in isolation like this is how different it is in tone, subject matter, and meter from the rest of the song. That, of course, lends it a lot of impact within the context of the song, too, as the speaker goes from the still contemplation of the first verse to the headlong emotional rush of the rest of the song.)

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