… written because lately I’ve been reading lots of Haikus that don’t conform to the traditional structure. Maybe I’m the old guy on the porch yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. Maybe the world has changed and I’m still stuck in the past. Maybe Haikus are whatever you want them to be now, whatever number of syllables, whatever evolved form of their structure. Maybe they’re just whatever. I know nature as a subject has kind of gone by the wayside when it comes to Haikus, but can we at least keep the damn form intact? If you want to write a short three line poem, that’s cool, that’s fine, but do we have to peddle it as a Haiku when it clearly takes liberties when it comes to the syllabic count? Can we just call it a poem in those cases? Why do we have to try to sell them as Haikus? I know I sound like the Haiku police right now, and I’m not, but just, damn. You feel me?
This rant right here is
motherfucking over, yo!
in Haiku form, too!
David Collante is a Miami based writer, co-editor of Poetry After Dark and all up in his feelings about Haikus this morning.
