Haiku – The Top 11 No No’s

• A Title – Haiku are untitled. A successful haiku speaks for itself; in this age of the World Wide Web where a subject heading points you to a particular posting, the first line of a haiku is the title.

• The overuse of ‘I’ -  Wherever possible, place emphasis on the image, not the person.

• Over compression – When revising make sure the chopping out of words, especially the articles ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ don’t leave you with an ungainly poem. 

• Padding -  In such a short form, every word counts. Don’t add words to pad out a haiku, perhaps because you wish to achieve the 5-7-5 pattern. The requirement for 5-7-5 is far less these days; just remember the whole poem is less than 17 syllables.

• Redundancy – Use strong words and avoid redundancy.  For example, ‘winter frost’- both words identify the season.

• Tense – Haiku moments are now. The present tense keeps us within the moment thereby reducing weak past or future tense words such as ‘have’ and ‘will’.

• Overuse of punctuation – Avoid the full-stop (period). A full-stop often destroys the illusion of the single moment in a continuum that haiku is; the only punctuation used in haiku usually, is the colon, dash or ellipsis. Even these are used sparingly. Most haiku have a break or pause in continuity usually at the end of line 1 or 2 so, in general, punctuation are not required.

• Capitals – Unless it’s a proper noun like a place name, there are no capitals in haiku, even for the first word of each line.  Capitals and periods destroy the continuum of the single moment which is what haiku is.

• Adjectives and Adverbs – Use these sparingly and avoid ‘very’, ‘much’, ‘many’ ‘few’ and all inclusive words like ‘all’, ‘never’, ‘everyone’.

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haiku – the nitty gritty

• Abstractions – Strong haiku have concrete imagery that allows the point to unfold without stating it flatly.

• Show don’t Tell - As with all poetry, haiku benefit from show not tell. Instead of ‘I stood in the mud’, ‘the mud seeped through my toes’.

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