On Haiku: What is It Anyways?

To keep up my literary chops, I frequent online poetry forums and recently found a few threads on haiku.  One poet was offering another criticism on a haiku.  "But your suggestions break the 5-7-5 rule of haiku," the writer protested.  "That rule is outdated," the other wrote, offering a link to Frogpond, a publisher of English haiku: http://www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/index.html

I couldn't help but read dozens of them.  Maybe it's their mystery, images of nature, or my short attention span, but I'm at least for now hooked on haiku.

Japanese culture is high context, meaning a lot is left unsaid but goes understood, and haiku seems to capture this.  I mean, just take this example from Basho, furnished by poets.org:

An old pond!
A frog jumps in--
the sound of water.

Really? What might that mean? On the surface, (pun excused) a frog splashes into a pond. So what? Well, it's an old pond, an old pond that makes the sound of water, and this can be said long before frogs existed or will exist, so I can pull from Basho that the transience of nature has many time spans, most of which we don't see.  All that, from a frog splash.

Note: another translation of Basho's poem replaces "the sound of water" with "kerplop," speaking to the difficulty of properly translating centuries old Japanese.

What I'm starting to see is the idea of compression.  I could write a books about lifespans in nature, the history of elements and water, but would they capture the meaning of nature as well?  Probably not.

Haiku contains specific kinds of words: kigo or season word, Kireji, or cutting word.  These terms seem important to understanding Haiku but don't feel translatable.  Japanese is a pitch accent language and contains words which don't have equivalents in English.  So truly understanding haiku seems to require multilingual knowledge and much as multicultural knowledge.

So for my first haiku:

American autumn.
Cities, beaches, mountains, cornfields--
melting pot.

-Kole Allan M.