Sherlock Holmes haiku
Really might not be for you.
It’s this week’s column.

Any haiku fans out there? 

Long pause.  Crickets chirping. 

Okay, maybe one or two of you. But the form of poetry we call “haiku” isn’t the sort of thing a Western mind easily takes to. It’s basic scheme of “five syllables followed by seven syllables followed by five syllables followed by done” doesn’t have that musical quality we normally look for. No rhymes, no time for much rhythm,  just a very short image or thought.

The Serpentine Muse, quarterly journal of the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes,  holds a literary competition each January that’s never quite the same, yet always has to do with Sherlock Holmes, and this year they’ve called for Sherlockian haiku.  And being newly admitted to that circle, I felt even more impetus that normal to join in the fun. Which was good, because haiku and I have never been on really friendly terms – I’m more the limerick sort. But wanting to do my best, I looked into the matter.

True Japanese haiku are not syllable-based, as the English form is. It’s just that the sound-chunk they use instead of syllables isn’t something we have a word for. Syllables just comes the closest.  Something about that concept stuck with me – playing with sounds. I mean, you can write in the basic syllable pattern, something like . . .

“I have a fancy,”
Fancied  Mister Sherlock Holmes.
A fancy fan, see?

. . .  and it qualifies as an English haiku. But the sounds in it are repetitive and dull.  Better to mix it up with a real range of speech-noise,  like . . .

Cyril Morton will
Electrically romance
A girl we call “Smith.”

Now some would say that one must meditate upon nature or the seasons in a haiku,  but as I pondered haikus still further, I realized that the meditation isn’t really upon whatever subject some authority might point you toward. It’s upon the limited number of sounds and your vocabulary. It’s a meditation upon trying to produce meaning with only seventeen syllables to work with. Sure, any school kid can pump out:

A dog,  Pompey, sniffed,
Tracking odorous anise.
The wheel turns, follow.

It qualifies, but at its heart it is basically replaying a little bit of “The Missing Three-Quarter” without adding any meaning of its own. As a tribute to its Eastern roots, I found that I liked giving a haiku a bit of a Zen koan feeling, a vague mystical almost-sense that seems like it needs to be meditated upon.

The Persian slipper
Full of foot-shaped tobacco
It cannot walk far.

Okay, so maybe that one’s not as deep and koan-like as it could be,  but I’m making these up as I go.  Looking at earlier ones I wrote for the ASH competition,  I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t have used these instead.

But the thing of it is, this little run at haikus has taught me something. Like a lot of art, a haiku may do a lot more for the creator than any audience it might eventually find. Being so short and so simple, the haiku is like a little verbal calisthentic for working the word-muscles in your head. It gives one pause to actually feel out the sounds and sense of words, which I suppose is what all poetry does if you work at it.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver, ASH/BSI