Nazi UFO's and 5-7-5 haiku

[ChristopherSea]

Yes, billie's got some good points there.

Like I said, syllables come about sixth on the list, i.e. not that important.

But haiku should be short. And to start with you need to get a feel for their length.

Earlier Billy mentioned:
"Personally I'm of the "if it can be spoken in a normal breath" school of thought.:

And that's MUCH better than counting syllables. Of course, some people have longer
breaths than others. So a good rule of thumb is:

A haiku should take about 3 to 7 seconds to speak out loud in a relaxed (but not slow)
voice using proper pauses at the ends of the lines.

The Basho pond one: (translated by Robert Hass)

old pond
frog jumps into
the sound of water                 (9.5 syllables using short/medium/long method)

Should take about 5 seconds.


The one Billy mentioned: (using Robert Hass's translation instead of the one Billy used):

first cold shower
even the monkey wants
a coat of straw                 (11 syllables using short/medium/long method)

Takes about 5 as well.


Yep, much better.


P.S. Some translators use only lower case and few, if any, punctuation marks because written
Japanese has no upper case and very few punctuation marks. (? and ! are expressed
with sentence structure and "." with a space.)

Thanks Ray and Billy! You are our resident Haiku 'Nazis.' I never call mine haiku, perhaps because I still incorporate some abstraction and I like to have a title. Sometimes a title can serve as another line. My newest one has 'trance' it it, which is possibly too abstract for traditional. It is still 5-7-5, but I may get more comfortable with less. I think for some of us composing in 5-7-5 and then taking another look for further brevity might work best.