poetically challenged

I recently finished reading the haiku collection One Summer a Thousand Days by Charles Albano.  It was a very good read, and had a great chapter of scifaiku that I especially enjoyed.

A tanka is a poetic form that is built on the haiku. The haiku’s 5-7-5 syllable structure forms the beginning of the tanka. A second poet then responds with a 7-7 couplet, completing the tanka.

A renga chain is a sort of ongoing tanka, where a string of poets can respond to one another. For fun, I started a blogging renga chain some months back. It has been fun watching the chain lengthen out over the months. Every now and then, someone comes along and adds another link.

Haiku was originally a Japanese form, though it has now been widely adopted into English. It’s basis, according to Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms, is “emotive utterance, an image, and [...] spareness, condensation, spontaneity, ellipsis, and a seasonal element.”

The traditional syllable count in Japanese haiku is 5-7-5. It is a very short, very pointed verse form. In English, the specific breaking of the syllables is not always emphasized, though a count of 17 syllables or less is necessary.

Turco goes on to point out that the haiku is philisophically born out of Zen Buddhism. The roots of this poetic form have made it especially popular in the English speaking world over the past few generations, as Eastern religions have gained a large scale interest and following.