Senryu and Haiku

By Mike Orr (Sluggo)

Many moons ago we published excerpts from a Salon contest for computer-related haiku. I read them again recently and they're still as hilarious as ever. To make Linux a little more fun, I'd like to start a column of reader-submitted senryu and haiku. (The difference is explained below.) Here's my own mediocre set of poems to start things off, with some help from The Answer Gang.

Authors: HS=Heather Stern, JOR=Jimmy O'Regan, K-H=Karl-Heinz Herrmann.

If you seek fame and fortune (or at least fame), send your Linux-related haiku to and you may see them in the next issue. Read on for background and guidelines.

Senryu vs. haiku, and the syllable myth

Astute readers will notice these are really senryu rather than haiku. A haiku is traditionally about a season of the year. A senryu has the same form but is dark humor. Most of what has been called haiku in the Unix and Perl worlds is senryu.

The second thing to note is, the 5-7-5 syllable thing you learned in school is rubbish. I was taught that a haiku is a poem with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. That was just a trick to get us to learn syllables. In the original Japanese form the 5-7-5 are not syllables but morae. A mora is a linguistic unit smaller than a syllable, which doesn't apply in English well. 'cat' has two morae, does that make sense? So haikus with 5-7-5 syllables end up being longer than the form intended. To keep to the spirit of the original, author William Higginson and others recommend approximately eleven syllables total for American English, and six stressed syllables for British English. (The difference is because American speakers "give fuller value to each syllable than British speakers do. Their tone is more even. British speakers emphasise some syllables, swallow others to nothing, and their sentences come out with lifts and dips like the flight of a sparrow. In consequence, American poets can make successful use of syllabics as the basis of a rhythm, and many have done so, but British poets have not. British speakers use a stress-patterned prosody.") Note that 11 suggests 3-5-3 syllables, and 5+7+5 = 17.

Guidelines

Here are some general guidelines for LG senryu/haiku:

• The main goal is to be short and sweet, to express a complete thought in as few words as possible.
• Poems should have three lines of approximately eleven syllables total / six stressed syllables total.
• Line breaks should be at natural pauses. Do not add filler words to reach the magic 5-7-5 number, or worse, break the sentence in an awkward place.

Poems that break in awkward places suck ass. This would be rejected.

• It's better to delete words than add them.
• The most important thought (the climax) normally goes on the last line. The other two lines set the stage.

To add elements of traditional haiku:

• Include a season word (spring, summer, fall, or winter) or a word associated with a season (awakening, suntan, harvest, snow).
• Make line 1 or 3 very different, so that two consecutive lines go together, with a greater pause around them. In Japanese there would be a grammatical particle at the break (like verbal punctuation), but English has no such thing.
• Include some Zen philosophy.
• Often line 1 sets the scene, line 2 introduces the character, and line 3 shows the action.

Other poems

Here are some hilarious haiku cartoons (non-Linux): 1 2 3 4 5 6

Mike is a Contributing Editor at Linux Gazette. He has been a Linux enthusiast since 1991, a Debian user since 1995, and now Gentoo. His favorite tool for programming is Python. Non-computer interests include martial arts, wrestling, ska and oi! and ambient music, and the international language Esperanto. He's been known to listen to Dvorak, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Khachaturian too.