About Haiku: the poetry

Haiku evolved from hokku, which were the first verse of a longer form of Japanese poetry, but they evolved to be independent poems. Haiku consist of three phrases containing five, seven and five on (sounds).

Traditional Japanese haiku always contain a kireji (cutting word) at the end of the first or second phrase, and a kigo (season word) for the season in which the haiku is set. More modern Japanese and English haiku don’t always use these.

In English there are no direct equivalents for on or kireji, so instead we use syllables and punctuation: dashes, commas, semi-colons, colons and ellipses. Syllables can be a lot longer than one Japanese sound, so an English haiku of seventeen syllables may be much longer than a Japanese haiku.

See the very thorough Wikipedia article about haiku for more detail.

About Haiku: the blog

This blog is the means by which I’m keeping track of a project. The project is to write a haiku for each bible study and sermon that I attend (or as many as I can).

The purpose is to summarise what I think are the main points of the bible passages and topics. I hope this will help me both remember them and let them shape my thinking, for making godly and wise decisions in the future.

I’m not a haiku purist. I will probably break the rules occasionally; not in syllables, but the kireji will vary and some chapters may have multiple verses (I’m not sure if any Japanese haiku have multiple verses or whether it’s only the longer forms they evolved from).

It would be cool if I eventually compiled a whole haiku bible, as well as haiku series on various doctrine.

About the author

My name is Kristen. I’m a member of St Andrew’s Anglican Church, Wahroonga (Sydney, Australia).
You can find out more about me (and my alias, kristarella) on my main blog kristarella.com.