Talk:Haiku

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[edit] 5-7-5 vs One breath

Given that the majority of modern English haijin don't subscribe to the 5-7-5 rule, I modified the first lines and added the "one breath" guideline. ray rasmussen, http://raysweb.net/haiku/

Hisashi Inoue recently put his play about Sex on stage, and in the brochure for this play (The Za, No. 59) he puts a note worth checking. It says that in the early Showa era there was a high-school professor in Japan who wondered "Why 5-7-5?" and he had an interesting experiment with his students: he arranged a random succession of hiragana letters on a sheet of paper, and called one student at a time to a separate room to read the letters up aloud. Since this queue of letters made no sense (i.e. no syntactical break), each student just followed it letter to letter. He kept doing this for five years with about 500 atudents total, and found out that the average number of letters to be read in one breath was 12. 78% of the students took a breath after the 12th letter. This confirms the effect of Kireji (cutting word), which usually sets in after the first 5 or before the last 5 of the 5-7-5: breathwise, 5-12 or 12-5. Koast

[edit] Kigo translation

I assume that the haiku by Basho has the prescribed number of syllables in Japanese, but why, when the kigo got translated, is there no trace of the sense of season? <>< tbc

A frog, according to Saijiki, is a kigo for summer and it is associated with a rainy season in late June to late July in Japan. An image of water, like rain and pond, makes it more definite. So, a kigo is right there but most countries don't have a rainy season and thus it doesn't appear to have a kigo. Revth 05:14, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Error messages

Haiku error messages are mentioned in Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's 1990 novel "Good Omens". Is this the first instance, and were the competitions etc inspired by this?

[edit] Translation removed

I removed this. Nothing I know about Basho or the haiku form or that particular haiku suggest that that's the "meaning of the original", and the translation plainly sucks:

another translation of this poem (which is less poetic, but gets at the core meaning of the Japnesse original a little more clearly) is:

When an old pond

Gets a new frog

It's a new pond.

-- Lament

I've always known this as:

The old pond

A frog jumps

Plop!

-- Tarimo

Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto -

Old pond Frog jump-in Water sound

[edit] Removed kimo and wikihaiku

I removed this:

Post-haiku forms include Kimo and wikihaiku.

Wikihaiku is listed on VfD and according to opinions there does not exist. Angela .

[edit] Another translation

I like this translation of Basho's most well known poem:

Old pond,

Frog jumps in in ---

plop.

I would like to add this. Should I? ZenMondo

I think one or two examples are ok, as long as people don't try adding whole lists of them. Angela . 07:32, Feb 16, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, people get very attached to their favorite translation of Old Pond, it could quickly become an Old Pond collection. It was right to remove the "new pond" 'translation', that one does suck, and is not very "Basho" from what I understand. I like the above translation becuase of its brevity, and how with the onomonopia it dashes the percieved "syllable rule".

ZenMondo

Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto- Old pond Frog jump-in Water sound

[edit] Rajiv Lather

Hi, there is an article about Rajiv Lather, Haiku poet. It has been listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion as he is not considered to be notable enough. If he is considered popular in Haiku circles, maybe you can vote at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Rajiv Lather. Thanks. Jay 12:12, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Three comments

Three comments about the article on haiku.

1) The translations of the two haiku by Basho should have the translators listed. [There is also one haiku on the Matsuo Basho page that is uncredited.]

2) Other well-known authors besides Richard Wright who have written haiku include: Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Dag Hammarskjöld, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.

3) Shouldn't Basho have the macron or circumflex diacritical over the "o" in his name to denote the long vowel? It is shown that way only once in the Wikipedia Matsuo Basho article.

gK 4 Oct 2004

gK, thanks for your suggestions. Since Wikipedia is a wiki, you should feel free to add your improvements directly to the article. See Wikipedia:How to edit a page to learn how.

I added your list of authors to the article, but don't know anything about the translators of the Basho haiku in either article—perhaps you could help?

Regarding Basho's name, due to technical considerations regarding the display of special characters, it is common not to use special characters when keyboard characters will suffice—with certain exceptions, e.g. the first appearance of a foreign-language name, as in the Matsuo Basho article. I don't know that I'd consider it "wrong" for us to write his name either with or without the macron (though I've never seen it with a circumflex), and I can't find a definite Wikipedia policy on the matter. I wouldn't spend time "correcting" the current usage myself, but if someone else corrected it, I probably wouldn't undo their work either. —Triskaideka 18:12, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

In my limitless spare time <grin> I do plan to learn how to properly edit and format a wiki page because I want to edit a few wiki pages (e.g. senryu, haiga and maybe the Basho page), plus probably add a few pages (scifaiku - science fiction haiku). Also, when I use the Wikipedia I keep finding places where there are missing links to other parts of the wikipedia and want to be able to make those quick changes.

I didn't recognize the Basho translation or I would have said who it was. There is a book available that has 100 translations/interpretations or Basho's famous frog haiku. The translation in the Wiki article is probably copywrited, but a single translation as part of a critical/academic discussion should be covered under "fair use". The very few haiku translations that I know about that would be in the public domain are pretty clunky and wordy.

Personally, I'd rather see Basho's raven/crow haiku in the wiki article which I think is more accessible to the average person. It really wasn't until I had been writing haiku for a half dozen years before I really appreciated and understood Basho's frog haiku.

on a barren branch / a raven has purched-- / autumn dusk

trans. William J. Higginson

I would also suggest that the romanji (transliterated) versions of the Basho haiku be included in the wiki article. The romanji frog haiku is:

furuike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto

Makoto Ueda's "Basho and his Interpreters" also includes literal translations, which might be something worth including. It is interesting to see how different the Japanes language is from English.

As for Basho's name. If you look at the Wiki article on diacriticals, you will learn that there are a couple of different ways of transliterating Japanese. The macron is used for double vowels in the most common system (Bash&#333), while the circumflex is less commonly used (Bashô). I've also seen a few cluges, like the Encyclopedia Brittanica website that uses underlines <gag!>.

Finally - I looked at the Rajiv Lather wiki article and also his website. My opinion is that it is a vanity Wiki webpage. There are a large number of haiku poets and haiku journal editors that I would think about including in the haiku article before I would add him to the article.

gK 7 Oct 2004

I added the author's name for the haiku from the winner of the Salon haiku error message contest. I couldn't figure out how to mark that as a minor change. For disambiguation purposes, there probably should be a mention of Haiku, Hawaii, and the creation of a Wiki Stub page for the city.

gK 8 Oct 2004

You can mark changes as minor by checking the "This is a minor edit" box that appears between the "Summary" line and the "Save page" button when you're editing. However, any change that adds content isn't really minor. The minor change flag is for really trivial stuff like fixing a typo or removing a comma.

It looks like the full name of the town in Hawaii is Haiku-Pauwela. In that case I don't know that we really need disambiguation, but since we already had a disambig line in the article, I figured I might as well add the town. Anyone else can set up Haiku (disambiguation) if they like, but again, I don't think it's really necessary; there's not a whole lot of room for confusion between the three subjects.

Regarding a couple of points in your previous comment: first, I wouldn't disagree with you about the Lather article, but it did already survive a vote for deletion. There's no need to link it from this article, though; he's probably not nearly as well-known as the other authors you mentioned. Second, you can change the example haiku to another one if you like, but as the frog haiku is probably more famous, I'm inclined to keep it. It's not terribly important, in my opinion, if readers fail to fully grasp it; in the context of an encyclopedia, we're just telling them what a haiku is, not teaching art appreciation. —Triskaideka 17:04, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

A quick Google Test: "Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii" = 711, "Haiku, Hawaii" = 4,160. Also: I have a News Alert at Google News for "haiku" and news articles always have it as "Haiku, Hawaii" and never as "Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii". Should there be a redirect page for "Haiku, Hawaii" leading to "Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii"?

re: Basho's frog vs. raven haiku. I chose the raven haiku because it is probably Basho's 2nd most famous haiku. However, my point was more a quibble than anything else.

A bigger question for someone who knows Japanese: re: "haiku poet (haijin)". I've seen haijin defined as either "haiku poet" or "haiku master" but don't know which definition is correct.

gK 8 Oct 2004 11:28 PST

Regarding a redirect for the town, redirects are cheap, as they say, but I'm starting to wonder whether the two names refer to exactly the same place. See my comments at Talk:Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii. —Triskaideka 15:35, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] "mailing list" vs. "e-mail list"

A minor quibble, perhaps, but: I changed the term "mailing list" to "e-mail list" in the External links section, and it was soon changed back. Why use a term that has multiple meanings ("mailing list" often refers to postal mail) instead of one whose meaning is more immediately obvious? I'm not aware of anything objectionable about the term "e-mail list".

I suppose it's debatable whether tinywords is best described as an e-mail list at all. I'm sure many users simply visit the web site each day to read the haiku. Perhaps we should call it a "A haiku-a-day web site", or something like that. —Triskaideka 21:43, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi, I changed "e-mail list" to "mailing list" because the latter is a generally accepted term and the former isn't (I have never encountered it before. Google gives a bunch of hits but many of them are about [i]lists of email addresses[/i], and that's probably how I would interpret "e-mail list" without context). --lament 22:51, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The mailing list article you linked actually raises the point that electronic mailing list may be a preferable term. —Triskaideka 16:31, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] misc comments

a couple of comments:

I'm not convinced that it's appropriate to start talking about English haiku as early as the 2nd paragraph; I think the article could be improved by focusing initially on Japanese haiku, and then grouping together the stuff on non-Japanese haiku into a section further down the article.
it would be nice to know the literal meaning of the kanji for "haiku" (given as 俳句) (posted by 80.229.160.150)

Well, this is the english wiki -- the japanese article presumably has less of an english-language focus. (posted by User:Tlogmer)
- But this is an encyclopedia. Haiku has a roughly 400 year history as the most commonly written poetry form in Japan, and is still a very big part of the Japanese culture (there are daily haiku columns in every major Japanese newspaper, for example). English-language haiku only started to become developed in the late 1950's, and even today a major English-language haiku journal will only have a few hundred subscribers. The Japanese Wikipedia may not even discuss non-Japanese haiku (there is a vocal traditionalist faction in the Japanese haiku community that believes that haiku must be written in Japanese), or may only discuss it briefly (haiku is written around the world with one strong haiku community in the Balkans, for example). BlankVerse ∅ 20:25, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  - OK, fair enough. (Maybe I'll try to track down someone who speaks japanese and copy some of the content over.) Tlogmer 06:02, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ezra Pound

User:Dumbledad added Ezra Pound to the list of Non-Japanese haiku poets. While he and the other Imagists admitted they were influenced by haiku, I don't think that they ever called any of them poems haiku. On the other hand, I've read one modern haiku expert who argued that Pound's famous "In a Station of the Metro" (at least in its last revision) was a genuine haiku. I am still not convinced, so I am asking what others think. BlankVerse ∅ 11:24, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

I added Ezra Pound because he was so clearly influenced by haiku, and his influence in turn was so important for C20 poetry in English. I do believe that his poem "In a Station of the Metro" (http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=212) is a particularly fine haiku: though the form may break the rules, the spirit is clearly there. And, as User:BlankVerse points out, it is a famous poem, so Pound's omission felt weird. Dumbledad 10:11, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Because he is not considered a haiku poet, I think that a better solution might be to remove him, but then add a section on "Haiku in English" starting with the early translations by Lafcadio Hearn and others, and then adding a paragraph on the influence of haiku and tanka or the Imagists and Ezra Pound. That way we might even add in the "metro" poem to the article. After that, there is a l-o-n-g pause before the works of R. H. Blyth and his influence on the Beat poets. BlankVerse ∅ 10:48, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

I'd agree that Pound does not really belong here, despite his own influence on the Beats (especially Snyder) and on others who did write haiku in English. Even the Metro poem is a haiku in the sense that a 15-line poem could be a sonnet. Filiocht | Blarneyman 12:48, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

The "Metro" poem has a kigo (season word) in "Petals", it has a break or kireji with the semicolon, it has the juxtaposition of the faces and the petals...it is a haiku. Although a good poem, I wouldn't call it a good example of haiku, but it is still haiku. BlankVerse ∅ 13:14, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Maybe Cid Corman should be added to replace Pound? Filiocht | Blarneyman 13:07, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

I wouldn't necessarily call it replacing Pound, but I don't think that Pound belongs, but Corman does belong. BlankVerse ∅ 13:14, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Reorganization

I've deleted some of the non-haiku nonsense that had been recently added to this article and I've started reorganizing things. I won't be spending a lot of effort on the Haiku article until I am satisfied with the Kigo article, but hopefully this reorganization will help jumpstart the improvement of this Haiku article.

One more new section that I think needs to be added is one titled "Non-Japanese Haiku" (and the new "Haiku in English" section should then be turned into a subsection). There is a long history of French haiku, a small number of Spanish poets who have written haiku, and roughly within the last decade a strong community of haiku poets in the Balkans that can be mentioned in this section, just for starters. BlankVerse ∅ 16:05, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

I think Pound's poem should be left out. It's too good a poem for this section.

[edit] morae = one phonetic character?

Having read the article and the entry for morae and some other links it still isn't clear to me whether the rule is really 5/7/5 phonetic characters (katakana or equivalently hiragana).

Or perhaps lengthened vowels are considered one mora instead of two? Is the 'n' sound without a following vowel a mora? 'N' the only lone consonant in Japanese. Is a glottal stop ('っ') a mora? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 63.105.65.5 (talk • contribs) 23:16, 15 Jun 2005.

The best answers that I've seen to you question about Japanese characters in haiku are in the "Stalking the Wild Onji" article listed in the External links in the Haiku article. Lengthened vowels, like the "ō" in Bashō, get a count of two. I don't know the answer for the glottal stop. BlankVerse ∅ 11:15, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Lenthened vowels are counted two.

"ō" in Bashō is a double vowel and a double vowel has 2 morae, so Bashō has 3 morae total - he would spell his name "HaSeO" (3 characters / 3 morae). And 'n' sound is followed by a nasal sound which I'd consider a vowel, so it counts as a mora. A glottal stop may not be a mora but consumes the same amount of time as a mora, so I count it. Koast (Japanese)

[edit] Very confusing

I find the organization and content of the Haiku article to be quite confusing for just a few reasons.

1. Although the beginning of the article makes a fairly clear distinction between haiku and hokku, a very large number of references in the article use the word hokku. In fact, haiku and hokku often appear to be used interchangeably. It is entirely unclear to me whether this is intentional or inadvertent. In any case, a large part of the article appears to be about a subject *other than* haiku.

2. There are almost no examples -- whatsoever! -- of haiku in, or translated into, English (other than a jocular "internet" haiku on death, taxes, and lost data,which is characterized as not following most of the traditional rules for haiku in English). It is absurd for an article on a form of short poetry to include almost no examples of its subject.

3. Of the seven important haiku writers cited at the end of the article, fully three of them are entirely pre-20th century -- the century in which the article states that the haiku form was first invented. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 207.69.138.8 (talk • contribs) .

I agree that this article still needs lots of work. One problem is that many people who edit this article who often do not know much about haiku except for some of the garbage that can be found on the internet or the little they remember of haiku from grammar school. Another problem is that there are people who have their own, eccentric views on haiku, and that is the problem with much of the discussion about hokku in the article. There was a anonymous editor who fairly recently added a bunch of material that uses the word in a very non-standard way (my interpretation of their meaning is essential haiku in the style of Basho at his most conservative, rather than the traditional meaning as the opening stanza of a renga).

As for examples, unless one of our bilingual editors wants to help translate some haiku, we would be violating the translator's copyright to copy a translation of an entire poem without permission (even if it's only a three line poem). There are some pre-1923 public domain translations of haiku, but most are verbose, awkward, or have other problems.

As for only three Edo Period poets, those three stand to far above any of their contemporaries that everyone else would be listed as minor poets. I would almost rather see a list of the four major poets (add Shiki), and then two additional lists of Edo Period, and post-Edo poets.

If you want to help improve this article, I would really appreciate the help. If you need any help in learning how to edit on the Wikipedia, just contact me by leaving a message on my Talk page. BlankVerse ∅ 17:46, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

The non-standard ideas about hokku that were added to this article are from David Coomler, or someone influenced by him. For a more mainstream opinion of his ideas, see this review of his haiku book in the haiku journal Modern Haiku [1]. 4.232.105.201 01:33, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

I guess I can provide some translations - meaning I'll make them. Or I can submit some out of the Blyth's translations that I found faithful to the original, in terms of both rhyth and meaning. Is Blyth's copyright still alive? By the way, I found David Coolmer's comments on Basho's old pond hokku in Google's cash and they were "standard" from my Japanese point of view. I still know little about this guy, though.

--Koast 10:34, 28 November 2005 (UTC)koast

[edit] epic haiku

There's no treatment of epic haiku in the article. A famous example is:

 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt

but there's tons of google hits for other approaches to the concept. Can anyone do it justice?

[edit] Haiku vs hokku

So I just rewrote/reformatted the article along the following lines:

The first verse of a haikai renga is a hokku
Once it stands alone, it's a haiku, regardless of when it was written
waka covers all old Japanese poetry, only tanka has the 5-7-5-7-7 structure

This is in line with the Japanese version:

俳諧連歌の発句が独立したものであると考えられており、さらに起源を遡り、短歌の上句に由来すると言われることもある。

The Japanese version also covers pre-Shiki haiku poets as 江戸時代の俳人 ("Edo era") and post-Shiki as 近代の俳人 ("modern era"). Jpatokal 03:18, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

>only tanka has the 5-7-5-7-7 structure

Tanka and tanrenga (short renga) have the structure.

--Koast 10:09, 28 November 2005 (UTC)koast

[edit] Old Pond Translation

How about this version :

old pond -

the splashing of water

when frogs jump in

who says it was just one frog? usually around the old irrigation ponds of Japan, there are frog families and they tend to all jump at the same time ! ha ! Basho lived in a rural area with wet rice fields (and millions of frogs) all around his place.

A Japanese Friend

..................................

I posted a brief commentary on Basho's 'old pond' hokku in the article page a few days ago, and now it's removed; I agree it wasn't appropriate for that section, but also do believe Kai Hasegawa's interpretation was remarkable. So I'd like to srart a discussion here on Basho's best-known hokku.

An old pond;

A frog jumps in—

The sound of water.

Do you guy's think there's any notable sensation in this?

I guess this is R.H. Blyth's translation. There are many others with this typical 1 - 2 - splash pattern, perhaps obsessed by the convention of three-line translation.

The original doesn't have a verb, and the frog's jump is combined in a noun phrase, like "The sound / of a diving frog" (tr. Kenneth Rexroth). There's no visual description of the frog. The Blyth-type translation may appear more dramatic to some people, but it certainly blurs the original's poetic focus.

Hasegawa's note as I posted says that the pond is an image that arises in Basho's mind, as he hears the sound of water (he guesses that a frog jumped in). Presumably neither the pond or the frog is in sight at the beginning. This reading made the hokku's sensation much clearer to me.

As this hokku in the West is perhaps best known of all hokku/haiku and as more and more people are looking up for infos on the web today, I think the choice of translation in this article affects the future of hokku/haiku. I personally don't think the Blyth's translation is genuine at all.

--Koast 10:12, 28 November 2005 (UTC)Koast

I couldn't subscribe to Blyth's translation with two breaks, and replaced it with my own which I believed to be as literal and faithful to the original as possible.

--Koast 10:12, 28 November 2005 (UTC)Koast

I'm going to have to think about the new translation. I am so used to seeing versions of the haiku that are similar to the old translation. Both Makoto Ueda's and William Higginson's versions, for example, are not too different. I don't have my Blythe volumes handy, but it turns out that writing the haiku that way probably goes back to Lafcadio Hearn's 1900 translation:

Old Pond—frogs jumped in—sound of water

(found in The Classic Tradition of Haiku, edited by Faubion Bowers ISBN 0-586-29274-6)

If nothing else, if the translation is going to have an article, it probably should be "the" instead of "an", since the poem referred to a specific pond near Basho's hut (as I understand it). ^Blank ^Verse 11:30, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

I've checked both Ueda's and Higginson's translations: as you say, they're not too different from Blyth's. Hearn's translation you've put, published in his Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), has the same 1-2-splash structure. In Basho's original, as is usually the case in most hokku and haiku, there's only one break (kire). So there should be only two parts to the hokku, and the order of these parts doesn't necessarily represent time progression. There's no active verb; the frog's jump is combined in a noun phrase which centers on the sound of water.

A Basho disciple Shiko records in his Kuzu no Matsubara that Basho came up with the latter 7-5 part, "kawazu tobikomu" (precisely, "kawazu tobitaru" then) first, that he rejected Kikaku's suggestion to put "Yamabuki ya" for the first part and chose "Furuike ya". The sound of water evokes an old pond; the pond is not a setting but an active object of sensation, as the exclamatory kireji "ya" confirms. This hokku has a structure similar to that of another Basho classic, "Shizuka sa ya iwa ni shimi iru semi no koe". So the article for the old pond should rather be "An".

Hope this makes the matter clear. Regards, --Koast 20:21, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] An apt response to vandals

I've just corrected a bit of missed vandalism on here. An apt response to vandalism on this article would be to send the following haiku to the vandal:

You take pleasure in

The trashing of others' work

Need to get a life.

Maybe then they'll get the message. Jamyskis Whisper, Contribs 00:41, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] sakura

The sakura bloom

The orchards sweet aroma

Waves of white & pink

[edit] Comment

This page is very detailed. I would, however, reconsider basic definitions; for example, not all haiku contain kigo, not all senryu is humorous, senryu can contain kigo. There are also many innovative forms of haiku: you've touched upon one, but failed to recognise it as 'haiku noir'. The links section lacks in online journals that publish this and other new forms, such as Haiku Harvest, Triptych Haiku, and Lynx. I think it could be more balanced.

[edit] Elaboration on various rules

Wouldn't it be appropriate to add another section elaborating the various rules about length, structure and content applied when writing haiku? i.e a list of the traditional rules, variatioins thereof, later changes etc? I know the article has a lot of good information about both haiku poetry both regarding historical origins and contemporary usage, but an individual section elaborating and clarifying the nature of various rules applied, differentiating between original, "authetic" rules (or lack of such rules) and later developments (like free-verse haiku etc.) would be nice. It would help clarify this aspect of haiku poetry; there seems to be a lot of confusion, disagreement and arbritrariness concerning writing "proper" hakko/haiku. The reason I'm asking and not doing it myself is because my knowledge on this matter is too limited. Anyway, I hope I'm not making too much of an ass of myself here. Mogura 22:33, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Section On Basho

The information provided about Basho in this heading is contradicting to other information in the Wikipedia about Matsuo Basho and the section about Haiku. It states that Basho had no disciples, then goes on to tell you that his Disciples carried on his school. I don't understand what that is supposed to mean.

68.218.180.71 21:08, 13 November 2006 (UTC)Maciader

Basho did indeed have disciples. He mentions them frequently in his prose, especially in the Narrow Road to a Far Province, a prose/hokku book describing Basho's late life journey across the extremities of northern Honshu. Accompanying him on this journey was a disciple of Basho's, one whose hokku appears in the book. --Bentonia School 10:30, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Morae or on?

Mora is not a traditional Japanese word, and Japanese haiku don't really count morae, since the introduction of the concept of morae to Japan significantly postdates the flowering of the Haiku. I put the word "on" into the first paragraph defining a haiku; I'd like to invite anybody with a better understanding of contemporary Japanese vocabulary to correct this. Since "on" isn't in Wikipedia, I'll also put a brief stub in under "onji", and link it to mora. Geoffrey.landis 17:06, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Morae = onji (an obsolete Japanese term last regularly used by the Japanese roughly 80 years ago that is now only used in English-language books on haiku) = hyouon moji (modern Japanese). ^Blank ^Verse 01:09, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Agreed; I mentioned that explicitly when I wrote the short Wikipedia article for onji, but if you wanted to elaborate, it would be useful to have better information. I put the Wikipedia listing under the term "onji "instead of "on" so that English-speakers trying to find a definition of this elusive word used in discussing haiku could find it (if I filed it under "on" I would have to put a redirect page from "onji" anyway); also partly because "on" has so many meanings in English, the meaning would be almost invisible at the bottom of some disambiguation page. It would be nice if a native Japanese speaker would correct this section; I am writing based on information based entirely from translated sources. Geoffrey.landis 15:07, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, there is almost nothing that is available in English. The best information that I know is in a haiku mailing list that I can't quote from because of the mailing list's rules. ^Blank ^Verse 15:00, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Anishinaabe

I've added 'First Nations' to the section that mentions the Anishinaabe People. The article previously stated simply 'Native Americans', which is not the ethnical term used for Native Peoples in Canada. The Anishinaabe range spreads widely into central Canada where they are not referred to as "Native Americans", but as "First Nations". --Bentonia School 10:26, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Examples

Perhaps some better examples are needed. Traditionally, a haiku follows the 5-7-5 rule. The Japanese haikus break this rule when translated in to Enlgish. I'm thinking that an English haiku should be added that does follow the 5-7-5 rule, as to not confuse the readers. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 206.207.175.164 (talk • contribs).

If you look at all of the leading English-language haiku journals, such as Modern Haiku, or Heron's Nest, you will see that almost none of the haiku that is being published in English has 5-7-5 syllables or 17 syllables total. This has been true for roughly thirty years. To include English-language haiku that was specifically 5-7-5 would not be representative of modern English-language haiku. Blank Verse 14:07, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sadakichi Hartmann

I'm afraid that the reversions of "strange things" removed some very real information from the page. First, haiku writers are indeed called haijin by the Japanese. Second, Sadakichi Hartman was one of the earliest, if not the first, to write haiku in English. Information about Haiku doesn't begin and end with English language sources, ladies and gentlemen. Changes are in order. Also, I believe it's Wikipedia policy to inform the writers in question when reversions are contemplated. Not only was this reversion wrong-headed it was also illegally done. Jesse Glass Sadakichi Hartmann added again. Jesse Glass

[edit] Wonder Haiku Worlds

To the editors of this article:

I would like to propose that Wonder Haiku Worlds [2] be added to the external links list on this article. This website is quite relevant to haiku, as it is the only interactive community portal active in haiku and related forms such as photo haiku, senryu and tanka. It is also the only other active photo haiku forum (other than photo haiku gallery). There is a great deal of useful, general information for haiku writers in the form of essays, articles and a directory of links. The editors of the website are reputed in haiku circles (especially Narayanan Raghunathan, who has been published in most popular online magazines and has several books in print). We are acknowledged by the World Haiku Club and World Kigo Database, and extensively linked to both sites.

Shyamsanthanam 14:40, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

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