Silly Haiku

    This is a hai-ku
With se-ven-teen syl-la-bles
    Is-n't it sil-ly?

Of course it is, because all English haiku are silly. Japanese is a syllable-timed language, so counting syllables in poetry makes sense. A name like Yasunari Kawabata is pronounced Ya-su-na-ri Ka-wa-ba-ta, just like the haiku above, and the same goes for most Japanese words. (There are exceptions; for example, I've heard "tsuki" pronounced something like "tski" and Kanetsuka pronounced "kNEtska", though admittedly that was Yorkshire Japanese.) In other words, the rhythm of Japanese is pretty much da-da-da-da-da. English is a stress-timed language, which means the rythm goes more like da-DUM-da-DUM-da-diddly-DUM. That's why limericks sound right and haiku sound wrong, regardless of content.

So all you teachers who keep trying to get children to write haiku … STOP IT! You might as well say "OK kids, today we're going to write a poem where the Qabalistic values of the letters add up to 666." If you want them to write short poems, have them write simple couplets like

There are fascists pretending to be humanitarian
Like cannibals on a health kick eating only vegetarians.

(That was one of my father's favourites, though I don't know if he came up with it himself.) Or how about clerihews? That's a form almost as strictly bounded as the haiku: four lines rhyming AABB, the first line should include the name of a famous person, and preferably the scansion should be a bit wrong. For example,

Yasunari Kawabata
Visited his alma mater
He told them all "You may not know,
But I wrote a famous book called The Master of Go.