For all of the respect it receives, the haiku form is perhaps one of the most poorly understood here in America.

Step into a high school English classroom and you may chance upon a poetry lesson in which various styles are introduced according to their structure. You will find the limerick, the sonnet, the ballad, and of course the haiku, all dissected by a textbook for proper analysis according to the number of beats, syllables, iambs, lines, and so on. You will also see seats filled with students learning their own definition of poetry: something boring that no one writes and no one reads. The value behind the structure has been hidden by the structure itself.

On asking an adult, who was at one time such a student, what a haiku is, you will hear a response such as: “Oh, that’s the Japanese 5-7-5 poem”. Even this simplistic definition may be more than they remember about the great works of our western culture’s master poets. To Americans, things from Japan are mysterious and therefore interesting, and short things are easy to read and therefore not boring. What a lofty seat the Haiku has carved for itself in the hearts and minds of our people!

The full mechanics of the haiku, a form remembered so well by so many, are perhaps the least dwelt upon during our ubiquitous poetry lesson. Some lessons may stretch as far as to explain that traditional haiku are composed on topics of nature and avoid commentary or human interposition. Very few will also mention that they have seventeen Japanese morae (a measure of length similar to a syllable), they include a seasonal word called a kigo, often chosen from a list, that evokes certain feelings, and that they contain exactly one cutting word (“kireji”) that stands two images in contrast with each other. Not many outside of Japan know all of these rules. So much the better, for if they did, perhaps their passing appreciation for haiku would be marred by the burden of poetic structure.

Actual haiku poets, the only ones who use those rules, understand that the soul of a haiku has nothing to do with them. The haiku is about minimalism. It is about what is left unsaid just as much as it is about what is written down. Above all else, it is about understanding life. Skillful poets take the kigo and kireji and morae, inhabit them, and then immediately move away from them, for they are ultimately unimportant. They are but a starting point. This was the view of the father of the modern haiku himself, Matsuo Bashou.

Poets who wrote English language Haiku such as Jack Kerouac and Ezra Pound understood the form quite well, and their poems are held in high regard even though they do not follow many conventions that had been established in Japan. Notably, they seldom wrote poems that had lines in a structure of 5-7-5. They recognized the uselessness of this convention as it applied to the English language. Even in Japan, a “modern haiku” has emerged, perhaps influenced by the English haiku movement, that pays less regard to tradition while not abandoning it entirely.

To understand a haiku, try this: stop whatever you are doing for a moment and simply experience everything around you. Let the world flow into your mind. Then, reach into it and pluck from it two or three fine details that speak to each other in a language made of the words of all that you see and hear at that moment. Take your exquisite revelation and cast it back into the world on the seat of a human breath, and you will have a haiku.