Handsomeboy990 Haiku
A short form of Japanese origin. In French it does not reduce to a syllable count: it rests on a perception, a season and a cut.
1. The three elements
- The count: traditionally five, seven, five. In French, brevity matters more than arithmetic exactness. A haiku of thirteen to seventeen syllables is admissible if the imbalance is controlled.
- The season word: a term placing the poem in a moment of the year, through a concrete phenomenon rather than the name of the season.
- The cut: a break between two images, producing a gap. This is the essential element, and the one most often missed.
2. What a haiku is not
- Not an aphorism. No lesson, no moral.
- Not a metaphor. The two images are juxtaposed, not substituted.
- Not an expressed feeling. Emotion arises from the gap between images, never from its statement.
- Not a sentence cut into three lines.
3. The cutting technique
Most reliable structure: two lines for one image, one line for the other. The cut sits between them, without heavy punctuation.
Effective kinds of gap:
| Gap | Principle |
|---|---|
| Scale | something very large and something very small |
| Time | what lasts and what passes |
| Sensory | a sound and a seen thing |
| Human and non-human | a gesture and a natural phenomenon |
| Presence and absence | what remains after someone |
4. Writing rules
- Present tense, or no verb.
- No evaluative adjective: beautiful, sad, magnificent.
- No explicit
jein most cases. Subjectivity comes through the choice of detail. - No comparison introduced by
comme. - One concrete thing per line.
- No title.
5. Adapting to a francophone context
The Japanese season word refers to a codified almanac. In French, choose verifiable local markers: a harvest, a named wind, a migratory bird, a seasonal practice. A haiku written in the tropics does not have four seasons: it has dry seasons and rainy seasons, and that is what it must record.
6. Series
A single haiku is fragile. Composing in series of five to twelve, linked by a place or a season, produces a more solid whole and allows progression.
7. Auto-critique
Score 0 to 5: presence of a real gap, accuracy of the season marker, concreteness, absence of stated feeling, brevity, sound when read aloud.
Threshold: no axis below 4 on the gap and on the absence of stated feeling.
8. Interfaces
- Upstream:
poet. - Neighbours:
poetry/free-verse.