Haiku.

What is a haiku?Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 Japanese words in three metrical phrases with the number of syllables of 5(first line), 7(second line), 5(third or last line).

Features of Haiku-Haiku originally derived from an earlier form of court poetry, called wakka or tanka, in vogue in Japan during the 9th-12th centuries. Tanka were formed in a pattern equivalent to five lines with syllable counts of 5-7-5-7-7, and often had religious or courtly themes. From competitions in writing tanka gradually evolved a game of writing linked multi-part poems, with one person contributing a 5-7-5 verse, followed by a related 7-7 verse by a different author, often adding up to poems of hundreds or thousands of verses. As this new form, called renga, evolved, ever greater emphasis was placed on skill in writing the important starting verses, or hokku. Poets began to write these verses in advance of renga parties, so that they would always have an impressive offering on hand if called upon to begin the game. Gradually these single verses began to be recognized as a poetry form in themselves, and were collected into anthologies of great popularity. It was only in the late 19th-early 20th century that the most modern of the Japanese haiku masters, Masaoka Shiki, combined the formal name "haikai no renga" with the starting verse name "hokku" to yield the familiar name "haiku". In the decades since, haiku have been absorbed into many languages and cultures, and are now being written and published all around the world.So, what characterizes a haiku today? This is not an easy question to answer. Certainly, the majority of haiku currently written in English do not conform to the 5-7-5 syllable pattern typical in Japanese, nor do they always concern nature topics; however, all of these divergences are matters of ongoing debate within the haiku community. I will attempt to touch on some of those issues here, but even more I will try to give you a sense of the "haiku aesthetic" which unifies the form across time, language, and culture.

Haiku is more than a form of poetry; it is a way of seeing the world. Each haiku captures a moment of experience; an instant when the ordinary suddenly reveals its inner nature and makes us take a second look at the event, at human nature, at life. It can be as elevated as the ringing of a temple bell, or as simple as sunlight catching a bit of silverware on your table; as isolated as a mountain top, or as crowded as a subway car; revelling in beauty or acknowledging the ugly. What unifies these moments is the way they make us pause and take notice, the way we are still recalling them hours later, the feeling of having had a momentary insight transcending the ordinary, or a glimpse into the very essence of ordinariness itself.Such an experience, referred to as the "aha moment," is the central root of a haiku. The act of writing a haiku is an attempt to capture that moment so that others (or we ourselves) can re-experience it and its associated insight. This means picking out of memory the elements of the scene that made it vivid, and expressing them as directly as possible -- that is, the goal is to recreate the moment for the reader, not explain it to them (this is sometimes called the "show, don't tell" rule).Samples of HaikuAncestors the wild plum blooms again.Moving into the sunthe pony takes with himsome mountain shadowMy Own Haiku PoemStanding in the rainnever go till she come :)