To the Lighthouse: To Be or Not to Be a One-line Haiku?

                                        before after and inside me snowflakes drifting

                                       or

                                       before after
                                       and inside me
                                       snowflakes drifting


The standard meter of classic Japanese Haiku is 5-7-5 sound symbols. In English language haiku, the common practice is to begin a new verse line after each metrical unit. However, as early as 1971, in Haiku Magazine, 5:2, Michael Segers published, arguably speaking, the first one-line English language haiku, "in the eggshell after the chick has hatched." 1 Praised for its pleasurable ambiguities, this "aesthetically innovative" form was later advocated by translator Hiroaki Sato and talented poet Marlene Mountain (Allan Burns, Montage, August 30th, 2009). Sadly, today there are only a handful of articles about one-haiku; among them, Marlene Mountain’s  "One-Line Haiku," William J. Higginson’s  "From One-line Poems to One-line Haiku," and Jim Kacian’s "The Way of One" are, relatively speaking, widely read. However, none of them deals with this issue from the perspective of the employment of cutting, except for a brief mention in Kacian’s article (“A third way Western languages can exploit the one-line haiku to novel effect is through the use of multiple kire, or cutting words. Certain critics, such as Hasugawa Kai, feel that kire is the most critical poetic technique exploited by haiku”). 2 Marlene Mountain’s article mainly talks about the issue in the context of the aesthetic evolution of her writing career, showing a lot of her haiku examples. William J. Higginson’s resourceful essay gives a historical view of monostiches in the Western poetic tradition (mainly the French one), and then proposes a typology of one-line haiku, which is based on the degree of the smooth flow of a poem or on the number of (forced/marked) pauses. In “[his] efforts to regain something of what is attained by the original Japanese practice, “ Jim Kacian “has discovered some effects that, for a variety of reasons, are not available in Japanese: ‘one line - one thought’, ‘speedrush’ and ‘multistops.” In his article, Kacian says nothing about how to distinguish one-line “haiku” and other “one-line poems.” Most importantly, there is a big gap/structural issue completely neglected in all these articles: for the same poem text, why does a one-line haiku work better than its three-line twin? 

Below is an in-depth review of a one-line haiku, which demonstrates how to make this aesthetic and structural decision (Peter Harris, ""In a Sea of Indeterminacy: Fourteen Ways of Looking at Haiku," A Companion to Poetic Genre, pp. 285-6):

More rain the sisters slip into their mother tongue

Modern Haiku, 37:3

Scott Metz

Metz employs an unbroken line here in a way that generates velocity and a sense of simultaneity that is in tension with its subtlety. But if it were broken into three lines --

More rain
the sisters slip
into thier mother tongue

-- the pun on slip would have dominated and diminished the poem. As it stands, the single line puts the focus the elusive implications raised by the poem as a whole. What has the rain to do with the sisters returning to their mother tongue? Does it liquidity induce a fresh access of native fluency? Is the rain metaphorical, some fluid quality of language that increasingly permeates their intimate conversation? Is the "mother tongue" metaphorical, implying the sisters are like the drops of water dissolving in their origins? Are the sisters slipping rain into the mother tongue as one "slips" a drug into a cocktail? Though there is no way of proving it, one is tempted to say that this degree of semantic openness becomes more likely if, as Metz does, one focuses exclusively on the haiku form.

Notes:

1 In his essay mentioned above, William J. Higginson emphasizes that it's van den Heuvel who first published the one-line haiku in a small letterpress chapbook called EO7 in 1964.

    a dixie cup floats down the Nile.

"This is certainly one of those poems that goes by so fast the reader hardly notices it, until, stopping short, one grins at the irony of the discarded cup and the great monuments of ancient Egypt juxtaposed, and laments the follies of humankind. I would almost call this a one-line senryu, rather than haiku, except for the bite of that river carrying us into deep time."

2  In his essay, William J. Higginson does briefly discuss the use of cutting. However, like most English-speaking haiku poets, he understands a cut as a syntactic break through the use of punctuation. For more information about cutting, see To the Lighthouse: Three Formulations about the Use of Cutting (in the classic Japanese haiku tradition),To the Lighthouse: Cutting through Time and Space (new/the fourth formulation about the use of cutting), and To the Lighthouse: Re-examining the Concept and Practice of Cutting .