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Results of the Nippon 2007 Haiku Contest

from Progress Report 2 (2006)

No Worldcon bid conducted a haiku contest before. But no Japanese bid campaigned for a Worldcon before, either. Of course there was a haiku contest.

I did not judge or enter the contest, but bear a lot of the blame for it. I was asked to report the results. It was an offer I could not refuse.

Haiku are about four hundred years old. In Japan that is not very long. Neither are haiku.

The haiku is a kind of poetry to rouse anyone's sense of wonder. Its three unrhymed lines, of 5-7-5 syllables, communicate a moment. Because haiku are so short, they tend to work by the painter's rule of drawing a brushstroke to show where the mountain isn't. They may be great or small. They may joke or grieve or gleam.

In Japanese literature haiku naturally have a host of rules, for example that one haiku should reveal one season, and that the inner or subjective world, and the outer or objective world, should meet at the end of the first or the end of the second line. The contest did not choose to invoke these rules.

You can read up if you like: try R. Hass, The Essential Haiku (1994); D. Keene, World Within Walls (1976); R.H. Blyth, Haiku (1949).

The administrator and chief judge of the contest was Peggy Rae Sapienza, North America agent for Nippon 2007. Only entries in English were accepted. There were seventeen winners (one is a three-poem set).

The form of haiku on a page can be interesting. In Japanese, the 5-7-5 syllable rhythm is so natural that a haiku can be written in a single line; this allows no enjambment -- an English-language term for making a phrase run across the break of lines in writing. There are no capital letters, and there may be no punctuation. We can use all of these in English.

Haiku means "sportive verse". Some of the great Japanese haiku poets are famous for comedy. The contest did not require science-fiction haiku. Some entries were ambiguous.

The structure of Japanese, and its system of writing, promote a great deal of wordplay. One technique is the use of "pivot words", whose first part looks back to the previous thought, and whose second part looks ahead to the following thought, which is hard in English; see how this entrant approached it with the phrase the stars my destination. That is also the title of a famous s-f novel by Alfred Bester. This technique is much used in Japanese literature; there are poems in which each line is a quotation of a famous poem.

This triplet recalls the three haiku about 16th Century warrior-statesmen who unified Japan: Nobunaga, characterized in Nakanunara koroshiteshi-maé hototogisu, "The cuckoo doesn't sing? Kill it at once" (he destroyed all opponents), Hideyoshi, in Nakanunara nakasetemiseyoh hototogisu "The cuckoo doesn't sing? I'll let it sing" (he made the best of his lot), and Ieyasu, in Nakanunara nakumadematoú hototogisu "The cuckoo doesn't sing? I'll wait for it" (he was a master of patience).

In English we can communicate delicately by stating or omitting "a" and "the". This haiku has a title; in Japanese too, some haiku have titles, some don't.

See the echoes (certainly I meant that) of the "a" vowel in forsaken and maple, the "l" and "v" consonants in leaves and lovely. Great Japanese poems have expressed emotions the author knew as an artist but did not hold, for example a woman writing from the viewpoint of a man.

See how the patterns of emphasis, and natural pauses, slow the second line, so that its shape goes along with its thought. Japanese does not have stress-accents.

The subjective world comes crashing in. Comedy? Tragedy? Both?

Whether or not you entered the contest, maybe you'll write haiku yourself, traditional or otherwise.

Maybe you'll have a look at Japanese culture. Many Japanese take an interest in Western culture.

As for me, I've had fun with this. I hope you all have. On to Yokohama!