Jeannie Hesse, age 15, of Vancouver, Wash., for her question:
WHAT IS A HAIKU?
Haiku is a Japanese verse form that is notable for its compression and its suggestiveness. A haiku is made up of three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables.
Here's a haiku by the famous Japanese poet Basho (1644 1694):
Now the swinging bridge
Is quieted with creepers ...
Like our tendrilled life.
Traditionally and ideally, haiku presents a pair of contrasting images, one suggestive of time and place, the other a vivid but fleeting observation. Working together, they evoke mood and emotion.
The haiku poet does not comment on the connection but leaves the synthesis of the two images for the reader to perceive.
Evolved from the earlier linked verse form known as the renga, the haiku was used extensively by Len Buddhist monks in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the next 200 years, the verse form achieved its greatest popularity and success.
The rules for writing the brief haiku are strict. Almost always some word must be used that refers to a season of the year.
In addition to the poet Basho, a religious man who found God in nature, other important haiku poets of Japan include Yosa Buson (1716 1783), an artist who dealt with existing things in their concrete immediacy the here and now; Kobayashi Issa (1763 1828), a humanist who was concerned with man, birds and beasts in there struggle for survival; and Masuoka Shiki (1867 1902).
The precise and concise nature of haiku influenced the early 20th century Anglo American poetic movement known as imagism. The practice of writing haiku is still enjoyed today.
Thousands of Japanese poets, and just as many in other lands, write in the haiku format today. In Japan, many magazines regularly publish haiku.
Writing from Japan, here's what Nobel Prize winning Indian author Rabindranath Tagore said about the poetic haiku form:
"Three lines are sufficient both for poets and readers. That is why I have never heard anyone singing in the streets since I have been here. The hearts of these people are not resonant like a waterfall, but silent like a lake.
"All their poems which I have heard are picture poems, not song poems. When the heart aches and burns, then life is spent; the Japanese spend very little in this direction. Their inner self finds complete expression in their sense of beauty, which is independent of self interest.
"That's why three lines are enough."