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The Question Is Not Whether You Can, But Whether You Should
What's with the proliferation of haiku picture books? And if we're going to have so dang many, can't we make them a little better? A little more, say, poetic?
Earlier today I read a review of an upcoming haiku picture book. The haiku quoted in the review was about as interesting, vivid, and emotional as this one I'm making up on the spot:
It's Sunday evening.
I made biscuits and gravy.
I'll go eat them now.
Except this author probably took more than ten seconds to write it. And got paid to do so.
Any idiot can write seventeen syllables and call it a haiku. But you better say something special in those seventeen syllables.
A haiku should have
more flavor than yesterday's
leftovers, you know?
As if that weren't enough, this week I've read another two reviews of "House That Jack Built" take-offs. Clearly, no one heard me the first time.
Okay, I'm certainly not a PB expert, but how can Haiku work. My perseption of Haiku is a consise, neat little package of 17 syllables that tells its own (complete) story.
A PB is 32 pages of which maybe 20 - 22 have text. That means 20+ Haikus. I don't know. It just seems like putting square pegs in round holes.
Do you have an example of a Haiku PB that does work? I'd love to see how it was pulled off.
You know, Jim, I was just looking in the library catalog (search subject "haiku") and observing that there aren't as many haiku picture books as I thought. I think it's one of those arcane things where it doesn't take too occurrences to seem like a fad.
In the ones I've seen, the haiku are basically vignettes, so the book ends up being more a collection of linked poems than a unified story.
A collection makes sense...I should have figured that.
I don't usually think of the Haiku as humour, but that second one was pretty funny. And now I'm thinking that a Haiku cookbook might be right up my alley...
Now, that's an intriguing thought. I'm all for recipes with minimal ingredients!
I haven't actually been able to handle haiku in English at all after studying Japanese.
I was in maybe my third year of Japanese when one night the teacher put a sentence on the board (in Japanese) and asked us to translate to English. Of course we had a jumble of translations...but the aHA came when SHE translated it into two totally different sentences. One very mundane and factual, the other incredibly poetic.
That's when I got it: Haiku is Japanese. It's a form based on the culture, the language, and the way that culture and language make you think, which is so qualitatively different from English, I can't even wrap my mind around it. So actually, haiku itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense in English. I've seen some that I think are pretty good, but they're only a shadow of what the form can do in Japanese, where the same kanji character has multiple meanings and emotional flavors.
That's essentially what I've heard from other people who have studied Japanese literature. It's fascinating to think about additional meaning/possibility being gained through the characters themselves. Our Roman alphabet is so divorced from its Sinaitic, etc., pictograms of origin, it's basically arbitrary at this point. Not only have we lost that dimension to our writing, I think we (by whom I mean myself and other people who have never studied a language with a non-Roman alphabet) are at a disadvantage to even try to comprehend it.
I can't help wondering if haiku is so popular for the same fallacious reason celebrities write picture books: that it's "easy." That's offensive enough by itself, but then add writers who (as far as I know) have no Japanese heritage or cultural ties writing "haiku" on topics that are completely, IMO, inappropriate and without respect for the form's origins. It seems like cheap cultural appropriation.
I've been reading Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, and he points out plenty of linguistic features unique to the English language that English-speaking poets have capitalized on for centuries. To borrow from Jim's comment above, why put square pegs in round holes, when we've got square holes and round pegs a-plenty?