I Do Not Get Haiku, and I Am Not Going to Fake It
I don’t understand haiku and I’ve never written one. But instead of pretending to love it, I went looking for what its fans see. That turned out to be worth doing.Share on X
Haiku has never grabbed me the way a good story grabs me. I look at a frog and a pond in seventeen syllables and don’t feel much, and I’m not going to stand here on National Haiku Poetry Day and pretend otherwise.
But there’s a difference between not liking something and dismissing it.
A whole lot of serious writers, for many centuries, have found something real in haiku. When that many people who clearly know what they’re doing love a thing I don’t get, the honest move is to ask what they’re seeing that I’m missing. So for April 17, that’s what I did.
Watch: How to Write a Haiku | Beginner Friendly Poetry Tips!, Reedsy
What the People Who Love It See
When I stopped dismissing haiku and started asking about it, the answer surprised me. The point of haiku isn’t the syllable count. The syllables are just the container. The point is capturing a single, precise moment so cleanly that it opens up in the reader’s mind.
A good haiku is supposed to do one thing. Freeze a moment of perception, usually something small and concrete, and let the reader feel the larger thing behind it without naming it. The form is tiny on purpose, because the smallness forces the writer to choose the exact right image and trust the reader to supply the rest. It’s the opposite of how I usually write, where I explain and build and develop. Haiku says almost nothing and points at everything.
I still wouldn’t call it my thing, but I understand now that it’s not as simple as it looks. The simplicity is the hard part.
The One Thing Even a Skeptic Can Steal
Haiku is the most extreme compression exercise in writing. You don’t have to love it to learn from it. Every writer needs to know how to say more with less.Share on X
The skeptic still gets paid, because you don’t have to love haiku to take the single most useful thing it teaches, compression taken to its absolute limit.
A haiku gives you maybe a dozen words to land an entire moment. There’s no room for a wasted syllable, a hedge, a throat-clearing phrase, or an extra adjective. Every word has to carry maximum weight or the poem collapses. That’s the most concentrated version of a skill every writer needs, no matter what they write. Most prose is padded. Most sentences carry passengers, words that ride along doing no work. Haiku is allergic to passengers.
Trying to write one, even badly, even once, forces you to feel exactly how much weight a single word can carry when you make it.
I’ve argued before that writing one bad poem makes you a sharper prose writer, and haiku is the most extreme version of that exercise. It strips writing down to its smallest unit and asks whether each word deserved its place. You can carry that question straight back into your novel, your blog post, or your business book. Does this word deserve its place? Haiku makes you ask it about every single one.
Why I Still Probably Will Not Write One
My conversion has limits. I understand haiku better now than I did, and I respect it more. I still probably won’t write one for fun, because my brain wants story, momentum, and room to move, and haiku offers none of those.
That’s fine. Not every form is for every writer, and pretending to love what you don’t is its own kind of dishonesty.
But understanding a form you’ll never adopt is still worth the effort. I learned something about compression by taking haiku seriously instead of dismissing it, and that lesson cost me nothing but a little humility.
You can respect a craft without practicing it. You can learn from a form without loving it. That’s a more useful relationship with haiku than either empty praise or lazy mockery, and it’s the one I’d recommend to any writer who, like me, just doesn’t feel it.
How do you mark National Haiku Poetry Day?
If you love haiku, this is your day, and you don’t need a skeptic’s permission to celebrate it. Read the masters, write a few, enjoy the form that speaks to you. It’s good that it works for you, even if it doesn’t work for me.
If you’re a skeptic like me, try the experiment anyway. Write one haiku, badly, just to feel the squeeze. Pick a small real moment, give yourself the three lines, and force every word to justify its spot.
You probably won’t produce anything good, and that’s not the point. The point is the compression, the sensation of having almost no room and making each word count. Carry that feeling back to whatever you write.
Then take a paragraph of your own prose and cut it with the same ruthlessness haiku demands. That single transfer, from the smallest poem to your normal writing, is the reason a haiku skeptic should still show up on April 17.