Christina Stind’s Reviews > The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan > Status Update

"Make rules for yourself and follow them exactly, or break them completely, outgrow them and find new ones. We are all students and no one 'really' knows how to write a haiku.”
Jane Reichhold

‘A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature of the season intuitively linked to the human condition.’
Haiku Society of America 2004 definition

‘Why would you expect your first haiku about your stone lantern to succeed? You must write and write and write. After you write a hundred haiku about your lantern, maybe then a good one will emerge. In the meantime, you must keep writing. There is no room for impatience in haiku.’

‘[D]uring the Occupation the Ministry of Education simplified the writing system, bringing the number of Chinese characters in use in Japan down from about ten thousand to less than two thousand. /…/The Ministry of Education did an especially poor job of it. Not only did they do away with the richness of our writing, but they were very sloppy in the way they simplified the characters.’

Our lives are linked with the annual blossoming of the cherry trees. When we view the cherry blossoms, we are likely to recall previous visits to the cherry trees. It might have been with one's mother, who is now deceased. Or with a husband or wife who is no longer there. We see the blossom and we long for those we have loved.

‘A whole set of words and phrases exist in Japan for describing cherry blossoms and cherry-blossom viewing. This is true for no other flower in Japan, not even the plum blossom.’

[A] haiku is a piece of one's soul, and all souls should be treated with equal dignity.

The important point is to seek a natural rhythm in your language, and work your haiku from there.

The seventeen syllable, five-seven-five structure is an essential element of haiku, but it is also true that this pattern is a natural rhythm of the Japanese language. Haiku, like all poetry, is sensitive to the rhythm of language. As the five-seven-five structure is quite common in Japanese, it is familiar and pleasing to our ear.

When you read a haiku or are writing your own, you need to think of language in a different way. A haiku is only seventeen sounds, so each word has to count. /…/ [S]ome words, in addition to describing an object or event, are also associated with a season. For example, a dandelion is associated with spring. Falling leaves are associated with winter. We call these kigo, or seasonal words.