The form, and why it suits this war What a haiku is, and what it is not
Read first Six points Written for readers who were taught five, seven, five and were told nothing else.
Haiku: a very short poem, usually in three lines, that sets one concrete image beside another and leaves the reader standing in the gap between them.
In brief
- Three lines, short, long, short. In English, usually fewer than seventeen syllables.
- A season word, called kigo, anchors the poem in a month of the year.
- A cut, called kireji, splits the poem in two. In English, punctuation or a line break does the work.
- No metaphor is required, and no conclusion is wanted.
1. The count
Japanese haiku are built on seventeen sound units called on, arranged five, seven, five. An on is not a syllable. It is shorter, and it counts things an English speaker would not count separately, so seventeen on carry noticeably less material than seventeen English syllables. Translators and editors have argued about the ratio for decades; the working figure most often given is that seventeen on correspond to roughly twelve English syllables.
The practical consequence is simple. A strict five, seven, five in English usually produces a poem that is padded. Most English language haiku journals now publish poems well under seventeen syllables, in a short, long, short shape. That is the shape used throughout this collection.
The schoolroom rule is not wrong, exactly. It is a translation of a Japanese count into an English unit that does not match it. If you are teaching, say that out loud: it turns a rule children resent into a problem they find interesting. the classroom sequence
2. The season word
A kigo is a word that fixes the poem in a season: cherry blossom, first frost, cicadas, the short day. In Japanese practice these words are catalogued in reference books running to thousands of entries, and each one carries associations a reader is expected to bring with them.
English language haiku uses season words far more loosely, and many poets drop them. For Civil War subjects, though, the season word turns out to be the single most useful tool in the form, because this war is unusually well dated. Every major action has a day attached to it, and the weather of many of those days is recorded in letters, diaries and official reports.
So a season word here is not atmosphere. It is evidence. Ripe wheat means early July in Pennsylvania. Standing corn means mid September in Maryland. Frozen mud on a Virginia slope means December. Get the season wrong and a reader who knows the ground will stop trusting the poem, and they will be right to.
3. The cut
Japanese haiku use a kireji, a cutting word, to break the poem into two parts that are then held against one another. English has no direct equivalent, so the cut is made with a colon, a full stop, a comma, or simply the turn of a line.
The cut is what stops a haiku being a sentence chopped into three. Compare these two versions of the same material.
the cornfield at Antietam
Written for this collection. Ground: an example written to be rejected: a sentence in three pieces.
is empty now because
the men who stood there died
September cornfield
Written for this collection. Ground: the same material, cut after the season word.
the rows still standing
where no one is
The first is a statement. The second puts a month beside an absence and says nothing about the relation between them, which is exactly the work you want the reader to do.
4. Haiku, senryu, tanka
Three short Japanese forms are regularly confused, and the difference matters when the subject is a war, because each one is good at something different.
| Form | Shape | Season word | What it does well |
|---|---|---|---|
| Haiku | Three lines, seventeen on in Japanese, usually fewer syllables in English | Usually yes | A moment, seen and not explained |
| Senryu | Same shape as haiku | Usually no | People and their behaviour, often wry: rations, officers, boredom |
| Tanka | Five lines, five, seven, five, seven, seven | Often | Feeling stated outright: grief, longing, a letter home |
| Haibun | Prose passage closing on a haiku | Often | Travel and journal writing: a march, a hospital visit |
| Renga | A linked chain of verses by several hands | In the opening verse | A sequence, a campaign, a shared account |
Wide table: scroll sideways to read it all.
Senryu is named after the poet Karai Senryu, who lived from 1718 to 1790. Much of what people write about camp life is really senryu rather than haiku, and it is better for saying so. short forms beyond haiku
5. The oldest battlefield haiku
The reason a Japanese form sits so easily on an American war is that the most famous haiku in the language is already a battlefield poem. In 1689 Matsuo Basho, walking north on the journey he wrote up as Oku no Hosomichi, stopped at Hiraizumi, where the Fujiwara clan had been destroyed five hundred years earlier. Standing on the overgrown site of their fortifications he wrote a poem that begins with summer grasses.
summer grasses:
Matsuo Basho, at Hiraizumi, 1689. Plain literal rendering made for this page.
all that remains
of warriors' dreams
Everything this collection tries to do is in those three lines. There is no battle in the poem. There is grass, and a season, and a flat statement about what is left, and the reader supplies the rest. The travel journal that contains it was published in 1702, eight years after Basho's death.
6. Where the word comes from
For most of its history the three line poem was not called a haiku. It was the hokku, the opening verse of a longer collaborative chain called haikai no renga. Poets sometimes detached the opening verse and treated it on its own, but the name stayed attached to its old job.
The modern word and the modern standing of the form are largely the work of Masaoka Shiki, who lived from 1867 to 1902 and who argued in the 1890s that the standalone verse should be recognised as a form in its own right, written from direct observation. He called that principle shasei, sketching from life. It is worth knowing that Shiki was born in 1867, two years after Appomattox: the form as we now use it is not older than the American Civil War. It is very slightly younger.
