I’ve been writing haiku for close to ten years now and managed to publish a book of them in 2018. Admittedly though, some (most) of the early ones weren’t that good. I like to think I’ve gotten better at it but how do you judge your own work? I do that by comparing what I do to the work of other writers whose haiku I admire. What I find interesting about haiku is that it seems simple to write, and at the same time, very difficult. Take the famous haiku by Matsuo Basho that has been called, “The Old Pond”:

The old pond-
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.

Basho is considered to be a haiku master and this poem, his very best. But when you look at what he wrote it’s easy to think, I could have written that. And it’s true, someone else could have written that haiku. But they didn’t, he did. And it just happened that way. Sometimes inspiration strikes you and a great haiku just pops into your head. And you think, this is the best thing I’ve ever written. It has style, it has form, it has all the right words exactly in the right places, it’s perfect. And then, for a hundred different reasons, it doesn’t get read by the right people for you to be noticed as a great haiku writer. Or it’s the only one you wrote that was that good, or, like I said, a hundred different reasons for you or me to not be the next greatest haiku writer. One of the reasons Basho was such a great haiku writer is that he dedicated his entire life to it. Who among us can do that?

But is getting noticed by your peers (or poetry lovers) the reason why you write haiku? If it is, I daresay, that might not be the greatest motivation. And furthermore, the haiku you write will be subpar. For a person to write great haiku, it must come from the depths of your soul. It must come from the heart, and the emotions and, well, I have to say, it must come from somewhere I haven’t discovered yet because I’m not getting recognized for my writing. However, that’s not why I write haiku. I write it because I love it, I love to read it as well as write it. And sometimes, I think, I come up with some pretty good ones. But what I think doesn’t matter. As with any type of writing, it’s what the reader thinks that matters. If people don’t like it, it’s not going to get read. But again, that’s not why I write. I enjoy writing, I enjoy the process, and the cooking up of ideas, and the final result on the page. I’ve had no formal training in writing and yet, I do it anyway. And so can you. You can write haiku.

There can be mountains of meaning in three little lines. Putting those lines together into a meaningful way is your job as a haiku writer. Making them say what you’re feeling while being restricted by the rules is the tricky part. Now having said that, you know if you’re a haiku writer, that the rules are bendable, if not outright breakable. But to bend or break them in a meaningful way is part of the tricky part.

So, it’s easy and it’s hard all at the same time. And my advice? Just write. Just do it. And read. Get as many haiku books as you can and read them all. The important part of reading haiku is learning what others did. How they formed their lines, the words they used, punctuation or no punctuation, 17 syllables or more, or less. See how their work flows or doesn’t. Just learn from what you’ve read and apply that to what you write. You might ask, “Am I not just standing on the shoulders of those who came before me?” And you would be right, you are, because no one does anything alone. Everything we know, we learned from someone else. Teachers, parents, strangers, and friends. Everyone teaches us something. So go out there and learn it!