Everything I learnt about about good poetry, I learnt from haiku. As many of you know haiku is word for a three-line poem form introduced into the literary lexicon in the 19th century by Masaoka Shiki. He was not the inventor of the form, though, as it had already existed, if only in the form of the first stanza in a renga (which merits its own separate entry).
My own interest in haiku poetry started way back in the early 1990s when I came across a volume containing the most famous Japanese haikus translated into Polish (my native language) by one of the most important poets and a Nobel prize laureate - Czesław Miłosz. I immediately fell for this brief but no insignificant poems and started digging up everything I could about this poetic form, which was not easy in times before the Internet. It was by reading more and more of poems like these that I learnt what I appreciate in poetry in general and what makes good poetry in my opinion.
Here are the 10 things I learnt about good poetry from haiku:
My today's haiku:
a summer noon -
an abandoned high heel shoe
lying in tall grass
{I'm not completely happy with it - the repetition of a / an in lines 1 and 2 annoys me but its a start... I'll walk you through my process of this haiku in the next post.}