Slender Flames: The Poetic Craft of Haiku (Craft & Cadence)—Mark Rico

By Mark Rico

In 2003, I lived and taught ESL classes in Osaka, Japan. That summer began my love of the Japanese aesthetic, fittingly illustrated by the poetic tradition of haiku. Ever since returning, I’ve tended these slender flames—even when other poetic inclinations were only cold ash. For that reason, it’s my pleasure to offer a craft discussion of this form that we Westerners struggle to grasp with our souls. In this essay, we’ll look at haiku’s rich history—its classical roots and modern branches in both Japan and the West. Then, we’ll explore what a haiku is and what it is not. And, because we’re made to create, I’ll leave you with a challenge to set alight your own haiku.

What you’re about to read goes against everything they teach you in “how not to be boring and annoy people” class. No one likes a pedant, they say. But sometimes, the pedant serves his purpose. We’re all better artists when we understand our medium. Don’t worry: it’s not all rules.

Writing haiku poetry is a practice of observing universal truths1 without saying them. Using nature and subdued expression, we point to what is evident.

It’s up to each of us to find our own “why.” For some, cultivating habits of attentive observation is a large enough—and rich enough—reason to write haiku. The vast majority of this essay can be understood and applied agnostically.

But every reason I have depends on what I believe about God. So, here’s my personal “why.”

“The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.”2

I believe that God made the world as a panorama3 to display His divine character and eternal attributes,4 that we are called in His image5 to clearly bear witness to it,6 and that haiku poetry can be one of the most eloquent songs7 in a Christian poet’s repertoire.

That said, now we can explore haiku’s origin story.

Haiku began as the opening stanza (hokku) of renga, a collaborative, syllabic linked-verse form that was usually one hundred stanzas in length. A good hokku demonstrated the “link and shift” technique that still defines haiku today. The hokku had a specific job: to set the tone, establish the kigo (seasonal word or phrase), and offer a shift in attention—all within three short lines. These lines followed the traditional 5/7/5 structure, comprised vertically of on, or sound units. For example, “haiku” is two on: hai and ku.

Haiku was first written separately from the renga form in the sixteenth century. Then, in the late seventeenth century, Matsuo Bashō composed many hokku that stood on their own. While he still wrote linked verse, he treated the opening stanza as a complete poetic insight, promoting the “single moment” philosophy that would endure for centuries. One of Bashō’s most famous haiku demonstrates his emphasis on the natural world:

old pond—
a frog jumps in
water’s sound

That last line is often simply translated as “plop” in line with what seems to be Bashō’s intent. In that poem, “frog” stands as the kigo, indicating springtime with its new life.

Chiyo-ni, writing a century later, offers another moment:

morning glory—
the well bucket entangled,
I ask for water

Bashō is recorded as writing, “The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.” Whether apocryphal or not, that quote gets at the nature of haiku. These poems don’t explain or summarize; they just offer. That habit of observation without comment remained a pillar of the form, even as haiku itself changed shape.

In the late nineteenth century, Masaoka Shiki modernized haiku and tanka through revolutionary critical essays, writing many haiku along the way that pushed the boundaries that had previously been recognized. It was he who renamed the stand-alone hokku as “haiku”—a shortened version of the Japanese phrase haikai no ku, which means “light verse.” To his credit, he convincingly redefined haiku as a modern poetic genre, formally freeing it from linked verse and emphasizing realism. In his essay, “Haiku on Shit,” Shiki made much of haiku’s ability to beautify the mundane and even the disgusting. He wrote,

“In this jumbled world of ten thousand things, there are things that are beautiful, things that are ugly, and things that combine beauty and ugliness. However, if we attend to beauty, we can find almost nothing that completely lacks it.”

In paying attention to the humble and unlovely, Shiki also opened the door for haiku to look closely at other aspects of life.

Early in the twentieth century, haiku evolved to become even more flexible—less bound to nature, season, or structure. Taneda Santōka wrote:

I pick up grains of rice
spilled by a sparrow

The sparrow here is an embodiment of everything a haiku should be: small, familiar, and simple. Notice that Taneda has made himself the recipient of this humble creature’s generosity. The image carries deep meaning, especially when you consider that Taneda spent the last sixteen years of his life wandering around Japan, an alcoholic Zen Buddhist priest who never knew where his next meal would come from. He was dependent on the humble creatures of the world, like a good haiku depends on them.

Writing later in the twentieth century, Kaneko Tōta brought generational tragedy into the form without leaving its constraints:

anniversary of Hiroshima—
tofu beaten
in the dark

Pressing water out of tofu is not a social activity. In this dark solitude, Tōta was mourning one of his closest friends, who had died of radiation exposure.

What all of these poets had in common—from Bashō to Tōta—is that they used image, brevity, and juxtaposition to carry meaning. That same logic shaped haiku as it moved across cultures and languages.

Meanwhile, western poets increasingly sought the primacy of “The Image” over the wordiness characteristic of Victorian poetry. Haiku found a warm welcome in the current that swept Imagism along. Think of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”:8

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

It’s not a haiku, but it observes two linked and shifted images. As Pound wrote, Imagism upheld three principles: “Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’” using “absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation,” and writing like a “musical phrase” and not like a “metronome.”9 He also gave us this proposition: “The image is the word beyond formulated language.”10

Later, poets like Gary Hotham and Peggy Willis Lyles developed a contemporary approach to haiku without importing Western poetic devices. Here’s Hotham:11

pulling weeds—
the feel of the earth
letting go

Where some modern haiku poets have distilled haiku to one or two lines in English, Hotham and Lyles overwhelmingly retain a three-line structure to approximate the three vertical lines of Japanese on. As Hotham writes in his essay, “Why Haiku?,” he feels that “at least visually—and even when read aloud the lines make one pause, giving some space to the sounds. Perhaps the space around a word or between phrase [sic] is like water on seeds or boiling water poured on tea leaves.”12

Lyles writes like a kindred spirit of both Hotham and the Japanese greats:13

empty porch swing
creaks in the wind—
late summer

Through poets like these, English-language haiku found its own path—not by mimicking the Japanese exactly, but by learning what to preserve: immediacy, compression, silence.

So, what actually defines a haiku? It turns out it’s not simply the 5/7/5 syllable rule most of us learned in school. That comes from a misunderstanding of the original Japanese on, which are shorter and lighter than English syllables.

If you write lyric or narrative poems, haiku may feel underwritten. That’s the point. It’s a practice of “not saying” and insists on the world over the self.

Instead of a syllable count, haiku depends on the following:

• Concrete language: Metaphor, simile, and commentary do not serve this form. If you use them, you’re likely writing senryū.

• Fragment and phrase: Most haiku divide into two parts. One sets the scene, and one deepens or shifts it. (old pond— / a frog jumps in …) These can be two images placed near each other without explicit connection. The poem lives in the tension between them.

• A break or shift in perception: In Japanese, this is marked by a kireji, or “cutting word” after the first or second line (not in the middle of a line). In English, we use punctuation, line breaks, or simply juxtaposition. Many poets use an em dash or a semicolon. That “cut” is not just a pause. It’s a hinge to swing the reader’s attention.

• Season words (kigo): Sometimes, a holiday will serve—or an event that is associated with the season, like “first frost” or “bare branches.” This is not a binding requirement, as Taneda Santōka demonstrated. However, it is part of what gives haiku its identity. Following his example (sparrow) and that of Kaneko Tōta (tofu), at least include an element from the natural world.

In his collection of essays, Favorite Haiku, H. F. Noyes writes, the season word “was a trigger word releasing a world of shared feelings.” Later in that same passage, he continues:

“Though such a focus is not by any means solely dependent on the humblingly broad referent of season, it is still of vital importance to the ‘selfless’ aspect of the finest haiku that we feel the wonder and awe of seasonal changes that make the world startlingly new, overwhelming our ordinary small-minded concerns.

“If we listen, we will discover that everything has a true voice; and when we see with the heart, as Bashō did, we become aware that all things have their fulfillment. The inner eye and ear will lead us, without the necessity of kigo, to the creation of haiku well worth sharing.”14

Consider this example, one I wrote as part of a series:15

dry season—

on the breeze

petrichor

• It offers concrete sensory imagery, avoiding abstractions and generalities.

• It includes kireji, kigo, and linked images without commentary.

• The space around the words gives the reader opportunity to pause. Note that I use a broken structure to intentionally manipulate the “breath” after the kireji.

Haiku proves that brevity doesn’t have to mean limitation. A slender flame can provide surprising heat if tended well. If you haven’t yet experimented with writing your own, I’d challenge you to give it a try. That’s not because it’s necessarily better than any other form, but because writing within these constraints offers something we can all use: a setting to sharpen the attention, revealing the ephemeral now that undergirds all our rushing and striving.

Sit outdoors and observe one moment in time without explaining it. Then cut it in half. Do that again. Then cut it even further and see what you’ve added by subtraction.

As a practice, I’ve found that haiku can be useful to clarify thoughts about what really matters. For Christians, the focused act of distilling an image into its most precise expression can be a meditative way to “see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living”16 and recognize the work of His hands.17

There is truth in every tick of the second hand—God’s first book, His character revealed through nature. And there is beauty in the most mundane setting.

It’s our task to see it and bear witness.

Mark started writing poetry because his mother showed him how to see. He writes now because his father showed him how to live intentionally. His work has most recently appeared in Clayjar Review, Calla Press, and Inkwell, and he lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with his family. You can find him at Mimesis Kinesis on Substack.

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The original unabridged version of this post first appeared on Mark Rico’s Substack, Mimesis Kinesis. Used with permission.

Photo by Marc Ignacio on Unsplash