None Of You Know What Haiku Are
None Of You Know What Haiku Are
I’m going to preface this by saying that i am not an expert in ANY form of poetry, just an enthusiast. Also, this post is… really long. Too long? Definitely too long. Whoops! I love poetry.
If you ask most English-speaking people (
or haiku-bot) what a haiku is, they would probably say that it’s a form of poetry that has 3 lines, with 5, and then 7, and then 5 syllables in them. That’s certainly what I was taught in school when we did our scant poetry unit, but since… idk elementary school when I learned that, I’ve learned that that’s actually a pretty inaccurate definition of haiku. And I think that inaccurate definition is a big part of why most people (myself included until relatively recently!) think that haiku are kind of… dumb? unimpressive? simple and boring? I mean, if you can just put any words with the right number of syllables into 3 lines, what makes it special?Well, let me get into why the 5-7-5 understanding of haiku is wrong, and also what makes haiku so special (with examples)!