furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto
an ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the splash of water
– Matsuo Basho, 1686
Haiku are a very short form of poetry. Originally they were the opening stanza of a longer collaborative poem, written by two or more people, called renga, and they were called hokku. In the seventeenth century, however, the haiku acquired a life of its own at the hands of haiku masters like Matsuo Basho. Its modern name, haiku, was given to it by Masaoka Shiki in the late 1800’s.
A Japanese haiku has 17 on, roughly corresponding to syllables, in a pattern of three lines of 5, 7, and 5 on. The haiku should contain a seasonal word (kigo), and also a ‘cutting word’ (kireji) which separates the different images in the poem. English haiku generally follow the same pattern, but are sometimes shorter than their Japanese cousins.
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