Do You Haiku?
I worked with junior high school students on haiku poetry today.
Actually, I’ve been doing quite a bit of haiku lately, as it’s part of our poetry unit. It’s an easy form for the kids to write, though their free verse poetry is so much more compelling.
Do you have a favorite haiku? Neither do I.
Frankly, I think haiku is lost to the ear of the English speaker. Haiku is a Japanese language form, and it doesn’t translate well into English. The 5-7-5 pattern of syllables sounds different in Japanese, which uses a largely consistent consonant-vowel syllable construction.
English speakers don’t hear syllable counts; we hear stress patterns and rhyme schemes. Take the wildly popular limerick. There’s no syllable counting in limericks. A limerick has a stress pattern of 3,3,2,2,3 with a matching rhyme scheme. Two limericks could have a radically different syllable count and still sound correct.
Generally there are two unstressed syllables per stressed syllable, but even that’s flexible. In fact, we could take out all of the unstressed syllables and it would still kind of sound like a limerick:
Man From France
Did Quick Dance.
Asked Why,
Would Cry
“Ants In Pants!”
But if the stress pattern or rhyme scheme were different, we wouldn’t accept it as a good limerick. On the other hand, if a haiku were a syllable or two off in either direction, we’d agree it wasn’t a haiku, but our ear wouldn’t hear the problem.
Anyway, I’m still going to teach haiku, but that needed to be said.
October 10th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Thought provoking post, but maybe not for the intended reason.
My question: why do we incorporate THAT particular stress pattern and rhythm for every limerick, regardless of syllable count?
For English-speaking Americans at least, I wonder if we just assume that every limerick we see should conform to the FIRST limerick we ever learned, “Hickory Dickory Dock.” I’m curious as to whether people who weren’t raised here look at limericks the same way.
The plots of limericks are fairly consistent as well. Lines 1 and 2 are exposition. Lines 3 and 4 are action, and (in my experience) are always the shortest lines in the poem. Line 5 is resolution and/or commentary.
October 10th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
You raise an interesting issue. If the form is flexible, at what point does it stop being a limerick? Is my creation above a limerick? I’d say no, but your milage may vary. Could fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter be a limerick? Probably not. So if it’s a word that means something, what does it mean?
The American Heritage Dictionary says “A light humorous, nonsensical, or bawdy verse of five anapestic lines usually with the rhyme scheme aabba.” So if it’s not anapestic, it’s not a limerick? Yet it’s the rhyme scheme that gets the “usually” modifier. Very interesting.
Consider the opening lines of three popular limericks:
None of these is anapestic, and the last one is perfectly amphibrachic. But is that the crucial factor? The somewhat new genre of the Thursday Morning Riddle, as defined by me, is made up of “four anapestic tetrameter lines,” yet here and there, every now and then, I add a weak ending. So obviously I’m not a stickler there. The question remains.
And any time I’m able to provoke thought, I’m not picky about what form it takes. Thanks for your comment.
October 10th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Thanks. If only there were a place outside of the United States that has a history with limericks…
None of these is anapestic, and the last one is perfectly amphibrachic.
You lost me at “anapestic.” Even though I was an English major, poetic meter (really, poetry in general) is not one of my strengths. Last year I tried to use meter to explain why I hated The Fray, and I ended up calling it “whining in spondaic tetrameter.” It’s at the end of this:
http://nhmehta.blogspot.com/2006/12/i-tunes.html
I doubt I came up with the right term. I was going for the opposite of an iamb in eight syllable lines.
October 10th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Iamb = Unstressed Stressed
You know that one. Shakespeare used them in his sonnets and throughout his plays. The opposite is a trochee.
Trochee = Stressed Unstressed
Anapest = Unstressed Unstressed Stressed
The Thursday Morning Riddles are anapestic.
Amphibrach = Unstressed Stressed Unstressed
Spondee = Stressed Stressed
Examples here if you’re interested.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:33 am
So back to haiku – if you’re still teaching your students, there was a great Season II episode of The Avatar in which, much like a poetry jam, some students in Ba Sing Se were having a spontaneous Haiku…I don’t know what else to call it…duel. They might really appreciate it! The content wasn’t traditionally Haiku (more like trading insults), but the form was perfectly observed, and when one of the competitors accidentally added an extra final syllable, he was very unceremoniously ejected (and hence lost the duel).
October 11th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
I don’t know the show, but that scene sounds like a lot of fun.
When I was in college, my friends and I used to have similar showdowns with limericks. Again, the purpose was to insult each other. Usually we would scribble them on each other’s doors, but eventually we had timed contests with judges.
I was undefeated.