: Re: Is this a valid haiku? A friend showed me a website for an artist. There is a page filled with haikus he's written. Can someone verify the validity of the following haiku: i don’t really

@Sarah872

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While an English language haiku is not typically constrained to 17 syllables, there are certain traditions that it often follows. Specifically (from the Haiku Society of America's definitions page):

Traditional Japanese haiku include a "season word" (kigo), a word or phrase that helps identify the season of the experience recorded in the poem, and a "cutting word" (kireji), a sort of spoken punctuation that marks a pause or gives emphasis to one part of the poem. In English, season words are sometimes omitted, but the original focus on experience captured in clear images continues.

The poem you shared doesn't seem to contain most of what would make a poem a haiku. However, an argument could be made that it would fit into the senryu category. Per the HSA:

A senryu is a poem, structurally similar to haiku, that highlights the foibles of human nature, usually in a humorous or satiric way.

Haiku and senryu are very subjective, and asking different people what constitutes one or the other will yield different answers. With respect to the poem you quoted, I would say it doesn't fit into either of those categories, and isn't really much of a poem at all -- really just a phrase split into three short lines.

If you want to classify it as something, you could call it pseudohaiku. Wiktionary.org defines pseudohaiku as:

False or free-form haiku; any form of syllabically parsimonious or otherwise pithy poetry, usually, comprising three lines of verse per poem.

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