What is haiku?

I had a great time last night giving a talk about my book at the Japan Information and Culture Center in Washington, D.C. The audience as far as I could tell was a mix of westerners with an interest in things Japanese, and Japanese with an interest in haiku. All of the questions were excellent, and I enjoyed trying to answer them, and I especially enjoyed thinking more about the questions in the car on my way home.

Here's one question that came up: What is haiku? It's actually a really good question, and it is one of the hardest ones for me to answer. Often, someone will say, "Oh, it's a seventeen-syllable Japanese poem about nature," or "It's a poem in three lines about nature." But in fact, nowadays most haiku poets outside Japan are moving away from a structural definition of haiku (x number of lines, x number of syllables) and toward a definition based upon content.

In my book, I quote the current Haiku Society of America (HSA) definition of haiku:

A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition.

I like this definition not because it is perfect (after all, there are some good haiku out there with no connection to nature or to the seasons) but because it gets budding haiku poets away from thinking about syllables and lines.

You might be asking what's so bad about focussing on syllables? Well, for one thing, the seventeen syllable bit comes from the Japanese, but in Japan a "syllable" works very differently than in English. (In fact, the actual Japanese term isn't syllable but "sound.") Here's the challenge: In Japanese, all "syllables" are the same length, so seventeen syllables are seventeen "beats." Seventeen syllables in Japanese gives you a rhythm. But in English, the length of a syllable has no bearing on rhythm as it is not equivalent to a common length of a beat. For example, "a" is one syllable, but so is "read." "A" is a short beat, but "read" is a long beat. So if you try to write a seventeen syllable haiku in English, you are really doing nothing to help give a rhythm or beat to your poem -- which is what you would be doing in Japanese, of course.

I think I'll stop there. There's tons of information on this subject on the Web. Next time I sit down to write, I'll address some of the other questions that came up, like do differences in languages beget different kinds of haiku? And if so, how do they differ?