Today’s haiku challenge:
My style is the five/seven/five syllable structure. Here are my 10 haiku poems:
please drive me to the
precipice, let me dangle
there a bit to feel.
please drive me to the
precipice, to learn to float,
if for a moment.
please drive me to the
precipice, burn the edges
into my cold skin.
drive me up the wall.
a sanity perspective.
a perched bald eagle.
drive me down long roads
with you again. Sensual
times melt horizons.
on depression drive
driven to no drive, only
survival pushes.
on depression drive
it’s a long and windy road;
no outlet in sight.
anxiety drive.
a blindfolded passenger
and smoldering tires.
my drive to fix us
a congealed blood bond now, left
to dry evermore.
I drive toward the
moon hoping to ride a beam
away from this spot.
I will observe that if you stop counting syllables (which is null in English because we can’t “hear” the form), you could do something like this:
I drive toward the moon,
hoping to ride a moonbeam
into heaven.
Counting syllables does nothing poetic in the English language. In this example there is alliteration with the three m’s in moon and moonbeam. There is alliteration with the h’s in hoping and heaven. And there is assonance with to/moon and beam/heaven.
This is just an example of how an English can rise above the level of flat prose. Counting syllables forces poets to add and subtract words artificially, often resulting in awkwardness (the antithesis of poetry) or flat prose.
Most of the better haiku poets I know have abandoned the 5-7-5 form in favor of choosing the best words possible.
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Great insight and thank you for sharing, Michael! I’ve been meaning to do an extended post about haiku poems and such.
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Brett, it never hurts to talk about such things.
It bears noting that when the Italian sonnet was introduced to the English language, the meter and form changed because of differences in the two languages. English villanelles are quite different from the original French villanelles. And so on.
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