Short, but not brief,
Neal

Yours,
Michael McClintock
President, Tanka Society of America

Randy Brooks, editor of Mayfly, adds one more thought to the distinctness of haiku as more than any ol’ short verse:

“There is a misconception about Haiku – that it is remotely related to the 5-7-5. The most characteristic thing about haiku is there’s a silent pause in the middle. You get one image and then there’s this pause, this silence, and then you get this second image.”

Water is water and tea is tea,

Neal

The essence of a haiku, I feel, is in bringing the magic of the moment, “the reveal”, to the reader. In whatever form, whatever season. So many haiku I read now are just a sentence broken into three lines. No cutting word, maybe a seasonal word thrown in, no “reveal”. Cute, but not haiku — to me. If I “see” something, and can formulate a reveal on the spot — brilliant. Often I am not brilliant, but I take notes and come back later, so I may not finish something in the same season. This one haunted me for years until I found the right sequence:

Autumn dusk
Crows fly home
Random particles of night

So your other point: is haiku not not poetry? Well, why wouldn’t it be if it gives us a special glimpse, an insight into the mysteries that surround us?
Perhaps Blyth says it best:
“Haiku has a wide range that includes all science, all fact within it, and goes beyond it, pointing with no uncertain finger to the ground of being, the living tie that binds all things together in one. When we attempt to explain it, we say it is a mystery, but to the poet there is a region beyond wonder, where the commonplace and the wonderful are not distinguished, where the thusness of things is bright with a light that never was on sea or land, and yet is oddly always there. … Here is an interpenetration of substance and mind in which life flows unimpeded through the poet and through the things equally.” — R.H. Blyth

Neal

Yes 5-7-5 is a form…..not poem, much as pentameter verse, but a vehicle to compress your thoughts and still show meaning. Right or wrong it is what you see, hopefully you will feel it also.
Fletch

Thank you for affirming the difficulty of writing good poetry. At a time when there seems to be more writers than readers, some blame for the amount of bad poetry could be laid, as you note, at the World Wide Web door. My mother-in-law (who loves me very much and I love her) knows that I write haiku, so she emailed me this from The New York Times:

A New Yorker’s Haiku

They amble slowly,
Gazing at the tall buildings.
Move! I’m late for work.

Hmmm… I can see the fingers counting as it was composed: 5 – 7 – 5 : “Got it.”

I will leave for another day comment on the related form, senryu, which targets human nature, often our foibles. In any case, when I read this “haiku” from The New York Times, I thought, “There we go again — one more example of haiku reduced to clever word smithing.”

Charles Trumball, editor of Modern Haiku, reminds us of the miracle that is haiku: “two concrete images that create new and unexpected resonance.”

Amicus poeticae,
Neal Whitman

Like all poetry since the advent of the World Wide Web, we’ve been exposed to so much poorly written Haiku, we sometimes forget just how “poetic” it really is…