Nazi UFO's and 5-7-5 haiku

[ChristopherSea]

The poetic trickery drove him away.

It is a shame we can't get a message to him some how to let him know that he was wrong. Is anyone on the site a medium?

i;m a large

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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.

if you're trying to do a haiku call it a haiku, if you try and do a senryu call it a senryu, if you just want to write and enjoy it for the sake of it, call it a faux yu like ray. they all work.

trying to write a haiku but passing it off as senryu is a bit of a cop out .

as for the nazi stuff, it's all just POV and all helpful as long as you're discerning with what is said, google really can be a friend. and make sure you (everyone ) voices their opinion on this or any other form of topic on the site.

No, you guys know what you are doing. The 'Nazi' was actually a compliment in that you can direct others on form and tradition, like poetry police (informing us of the rules and proper execution)! Nazi was also in the title of the thread. I personally like to do 'no-ku' short forms for several reasons: to preserve snippets for potential elaboration into longer forms later and to try to say something using a restricted number of words and lines (a little poem that perhaps speaks volumes). I always welcome input on them (thanks for looking over mine), while knowing that mine don't adhere to form as I mentioned above. It's not a cop-out if you never make a claim to haiku or senryu.