Burnt Orange Report

Haiku Thursdays

By Jim Dallas

In order to promote the arts and literature, I will now be posting once weekly in the form of a haiku:

Haiku is one of the most important form of traditional japanese poetry. Haiku is, today, a 17-syllable verse form consisting of three metrical units of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Since early days, there has been confusion between the three related terms Haiku, Hokku and Haikai. The term hokku literally means "starting verse", and was the first starting link of a much longer chain of verses known as haika. Because the hokku set the tone for the rest of the poetic chain, it enjoyed a privileged position in haikai poetry, and it was not uncommon for a poet to compose a hokku by itself without following up with the rest of the chain.

Largely through the efforts of Masaoka Shiki, this independence was formally established in the 1890s through the creation of the term haiku. This new form of poetry was to be written, read and understood as an independent poem, complete in itself, rather than part of a longer chain.

This will also give me practice in case the Kicking Ass blog ever has another haiku contest.

To celebrate the inaugural week of Haiku Thursdays, here is part one of the HTh triple-shot:

Bush in a nutshell:
Major-league a-hole using
little league logic