Resources

by Adele Kenny

The Haiku Connection: Countering the Misconception of the Syllabic Nature of Haiku
Teacher & Writers magazine, Volume 12, Number 2, pp. 12-13 (1982)
Grades: 1–6
Genre: Poetry

Adele Kenny is a poet and nonfiction writer. She has published in over fifty small press, educational, and regional periodicals. Currently she is creative writing specialist for the Rahway Public Schools, Rahway, New Jersey, conducting workshops for students and in-service for teachers. She is also poetry consultant for the Middlesex County Arts Council and New Jersey Committee Arts for the Handicapped.

The Haiku Connection:

Countering the Misconception of the Syllabic Nature of Haiku

Haiku poetry, which has its origins in an older Japanese form called hokku, has become increasingly popular in American schools since the 1950s. Almost any textbook offering lessons in poetry mentions the form, and whole handbooks have been written to aid in its instruction. Children respond amazingly well to the directness and clarity inherent in haiku, and there are no figures of speech or clever devices required for haiku composition. For young children who have trouble conceptualizing things they have not actually experienced, haiku is not concept oriented; its focus is things, here-and-now realities that even very young schoolchildren can re-create from their own experiences. I am reminded here of the third-grader who wrote one snowy day:

walking to school
in snow-
heavy boots!

He knew exactly what he was writing about, and his readers readily identified with it. In addition, he had made the connection between nature and human nature which often characterizes strong haiku.

Haiku poems have a quality that has been called “evocative” and “elusive” at the same time, and although it is a particularly demanding and difficult form to master, its practice has some valuable and satisfying applications for elementary school students. However, a question arises at the outset regarding the content and definition of “haiku form,” and any serious discussion must be prefaced by some defining. Under the instruction of the late Bill Higginson, haiku poet and editor/publisher of From Here Press, I learned what haiku is not; and what haiku is not is what the teacher usually believes it is! Contrary to common belief, haiku poems are not comprised of a syllable pattern of 5, 7, 5 set into a triolet. This definition of haiku is a Western-world adaptation and, although often taught as such in our schools, it is a mistranslation of the Japanese jion or onji, which have been mistakenly equated to the Western concept of the syllable. The 17 jion found in many traditional Japanese haiku do not equal 17 syllables.

By the time I became creative writing specialist for the Rahway Public Schools and an artist-in-residence for the Middlesex County Arts Council, a good many classroom teachers had had years of experience in teaching 5,7,5’s and calling them haiku; most of the textbooks concur with their teaching. A lot of the haiku I was given to read were “cute,” cluttered with sentimental generalities, and padded with superfluous words in obvious efforts to make the 17 syllables. What struck me most, however, was the potential for good haiku and the interest in the form that I was seeing in classrooms throughout my district. I wanted to help move the kids toward a better understanding of the form defined in The Haiku Anthology (Anchor/Doubleday, 1974) as “unrhymed Japanese poems recording the essence of a moment keenly perceived.” This would be a rough idea to present, particularly for a guest teacher conducting poetry workshops in a number of schools, faced with the problem of undoing prior teaching and, more than likely, offending the classroom teachers with whom I was trying to establish a comfortable working relationship (essential for keeping my job). Of course, I could simply follow the old, “when in Rome … ” policy with certain teachers, which I did, in true cowardly fashion, for about a year. The teachers loved my “haiku” lessons, and the children wrote some fairly sensitive poems (laced, however, with far too much use of “a,” “and,” “the,” and “beautiful” in order to fit the form). I wasn’t terribly happy about the whole thing though. And it finally occurred to me that it needn’t be an either/or situation, that I might successfully (tactfully) present both definitions and capitalize on the controversy in the process.

I started by discussing the 5, 7, 5’s with which most of my classes were already familiar. With younger children I used haiku as an extending activity in reading, having them practice word-recognition skills by clapping out the syllables in poems they had written. Later I went into a bit of haiku history, explaining that the Japanese haiku from which our variety evolved are usually shorter, use fewer words, deal with images, and don’t have to contain 17 syllables. At this point I read some translations from thistle/brilliant/morning (haiku by Shiki, Kekigodo, Santoka, and Hosai), and some more from The Haiku Anthology (English-language haiku but far from 5, 7, 5’s). We talked about images, how they create mental pictures with as few words as possible, and in an exercise in compression, the children wrote images like the following:

footprints in the sand (Kerri C.)
wind blowing snow (Derek W.)
the sound of crickets at night (Robert F.)
dead trees (Jimmy G.)

Younger students, first-, second-, and third-graders, clapped out the syllables in their images. We talked about the differences between, “there are footprints going all over the sand,” and the more direct, “footprints in the sand.” We discussed “throwing away” extra words and making every word we used count; 5, 7, 5’s were, at least for the moment, forgotten. Older children, fourth grade and above, began to consider the differences between sentences and phrases. We explored the importance of our sense perceptions and how we react to them. In subsequent workshops, moving closer to real haiku, we talked about writing two images which connect somehow. After more reading from The Haiku Anthology, the children began to make some real haiku connections:

a green Christmas tree
in snow
-Randy H., grade 2

a flower
rising
from dirt…
-Earl R., grade 2

Falling bricks
echoing
in a dark alley.
-Lisa K., grade 4

Eggs cracking
over a pan …
-Corri F., grade 4

blackboard:
fingernails scraping.
-Kelton H., grade 6

red apple
falling,
brightening dark ground
-Eddie V., grade 6

At the end of each writing session, children were encouraged to share their haiku through oral readings. We even got into some oral interpretation as students experimented with tone, inflection, and volume; and during these readings, the importance of punctuation (or lack of it) was illustrated.

The workshops in haiku continue to be excursions into the intrinsic beauty and intense simplicity of an Eastern style. They are also points of departure for practice in a wealth of skill areas. The un-5,7,5s I have been teaching are widely accepted now in my school system, even by teachers who had previously thought that anything less than seventeen syllables could not be a haiku. The connection has been made!

Suggested Bibliography

Henderson, Harold, translator. An Introduction to Haiku.
Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1958.
Informative commentary, great reference.

Higginson, William J. “Japanese Poems for American School Kids? or Why and How Not to Teach Haiku.” From The Whole Word Catalogue 2, ed. Bill Zavatsky and Ron Padgett. New York: McGraw-Hill Paperworks, 1977.
My own first source, a how-to approach.

Lewis, Florence C. Haiku. Portland, Maine: J. Weston Walch, 1977.
“Starting” section is quite good; however, a 5-7-5 approach is given in later chapters.

Sawa, Yuki, and Shiffert, Edith Marcombe, trans. Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry. Tokyo and Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972.
Excellent samples of Japanese poems, especially good for older students.

Shiki, Hekigodb, Santoka, Hosai. Translated by William J. Higginson. _thistle/brilliant/morning). Paterson, New Jersey: From Here Press, 1975.
Kids really enjoy these haiku.

Van den Heuvel, Cor, editor. The Haiku Anthology: English Language Haiku by Contemporary American and Canadian Poets. Garden City, New Jersey: Anchor/Doubleday, 1974.
Indispensable; contains many fine poems and helpful definitions