This blog is for everyone who likes to read or write haiku related to anime and manga. It started with a chance comment on the Anime & Manga Research Circle list, but although its genesis was random its intent is focussed.
If you want to post your own haiku, please leave them as comments, along with the signature you want to use. I will post them under that signature.
There are only three rules for posting:
Haiku offered for posting must be based on anime or manga, that is, animation and comics from Japan.
Haiku offered for posting must not break the law of the United Kingdom, or of simple good manners, in terms of content or mode of expression. Writers may parody or poke fun at anime or manga titles, but any aggression or denigration directed at a particular person or group will not be posted. “Hate haiku” is and should remain a contradiction in terms.
Haiku offered for posting must be original, and offered with the permission of the author. If your haiku is posted on the site without your consent, contact me and I’ll take it down.
HAIKU
If you’ve found your way here you probably already know that haiku is an ancient Japanese poetic form.
Haiku are poems of seventeen syllables, often but not always arranged in three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. They usually contain a nature or season word, a striking image that indicates or arouses a feeling, and are based on observation and experience of nature. One Western writer and haiku scholar, Patricia Donegan, thinks that haiku should be spoken in a single breath. Brevity and observation of nature are the soul of haiku.
There has always been debate around the ‘proper’ form and how far it can be stretched – some masters like Santoka believed that precise form was not so important as concentration of emotion. Of course, many Japanese haiku need not be translated into precisely seventeen English syllables – but this doesn’t prevent us from using seventeen syllables in English to make a haiku. (Personally, I try to keep to the three-line, 5-7-5 format: but the first haiku I ever made is structured in four lines, 5-4-4-3, and remains one of my favourites after more than fifteen years.)
So please enjoy the anime and manga haiku posted here, and submit your own haiku for posting.
