About this blog:
Haiku-A-Day is a project by me, Matthew Bendert, designed, first and foremost, to give me a darn good reason to write each and every day. As the name of the site implies, I’m planning on publishing at least one haiku per day for the next six months (starting in early October 2009). I’ll be publishing all my own work, in a few different media, trying my best to keep to a consistent schedule and plan ahead when I’m going on vacation.
What is this “haiku” of which you speak?
A “haiku” is a traditional Japanese form of poetry featuring seventeen syllables, usually organized in three lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively. Since I don’t speak or write in Japanese, we shan’t be doing that.
Instead, I am using a more contemporary, anglophone definition of the form which holds that an English-language haiku is a short poem of seventeen or fewer syllables in three lines. As with the Pirate Code, we poets like to see things like formal definitions more as guidelines than actual rules, so four line haiku or slightly more or less than seventeen syllables are certainly possible.
For more on what other people think “haiku” means in contemporary English-language poetics, visit the Haiku Society of America’s definitions page.
