Lune (poetry)

Lune (poetry)

A Haiku in English is a short poem which uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition. It is a development of the Japanese haiku poetic form in the English language.

Contemporary haiku are written in many languages, but most poets outside of Japan are concentrated in the English-speaking countries.

Some of the more common practices in English include:

• use of three lines of up to 17 syllables;
• use of a season word (kigo);
• use of a caesura or kire represented by punctuation, space, a line-break, or a grammatical break to compare two images implicitly.

English haiku do not adhere to the strict syllable count found in Japanese haiku, and the typical length of haiku appearing in the main English-language journals is 10–14 syllables. Some haiku poets are concerned with their haiku being expressed in one breath and the extent to which their haiku focus on "showing" as opposed to "telling". Haiku uses an economy of words to paint a multi-tiered painting, without "telling all". As Matsuo Bashō put it, "The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of."