on craft

After writing haiku for over fifteen years, I have begun to feel a late-bloom adolescence coming over my style.

Up to this point I have lovingly clung to the classic five-seven-five form, but lately I have felt constrained by its limitations. There is simply more I wish to say than its rigidity will allow.

Having recently met with haiku forms consisting of two lines only and where the poet is under no obligation to meet the syllabic allowance for each line, I have seen a freedom allowing for more versatile expression. Having permission to add and drop syllables and even whole lines, when meaning and rhythm require it, has appeared to me to be a door thrown wide.

So from here on there is only one rule: I will never exceed seventeen syllables. That is all. I place myself under no further restraint.

This does not mean, however, that I will no longer be writing according to the classic haiku pattern. Far from it. I expect I will never outgrow the sense of perfection I feel implicit in the five-seven-five syllabic structure. That this structure inversely corresponds with the feminine hourglass form is, I believe, no accident. Woman is the crown of creation, after all. Anything reminiscent of her outline—even its inverse—seems predestined to command attention, respect and return.

If this strikes the reader as too strange a theory, then perhaps they can tell me how Cassiopeia was ever seen in a simple zig-zag? It seems to me that men have always seen pretty women everywhere, and have never required much external, formal excuse for meditating on them and enshrining them in myth...

men will never cease

to be their mothers’ sons.

nor will married men

cease to return to their wives.

barring some fatal

change in nature, men mark time

by woman's hourglass.