When children learn about haiku in elementary school, they often try writing their own three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables. They may reflect on their love of pizza, their disdain for homework or the glory of the goal they scored in their last soccer game.
And while this varied subject matter may seem to stray from haiku as we’ve come to know it today — minimalist verses about cherry blossoms, waning moons, dewdrops on blades of grass — Adam Kern, a professor of Japanese literature and visual culture in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, would say the kids’ approach comes closer to the true essence of haiku.
“We tend to think of haiku as Zen nature poetry,” says Kern. “But it turns out, that only accounts for a small portion of what was actually written.”
There are so many misconceptions about haiku, a poetry form with a long and fascinating history, that Kern wrote a myth-busting book about it. In The Penguin Book of Haiku, published last year by Penguin Classics, Kern included more than a thousand examples of haiku, to show that the poems can be political, crude, mischievous and funny.
“I wanted to reclaim haiku from what it has become but wasn’t in its own day,” he says. “The vast majority was satirical. And some were what I call dirty sexy haiku.”
Even the poets working in the heyday of haiku, from the 16th to 19th centuries in Japan, are not who we commonly think of today. Nearly half were women, Kern says, and very few poets, female or male, were writing in seclusion.
“Haiku was never individualized poetry until the 20th century,” Kern says. “It was always written collaboratively, in groups.”
During Japan’s Edo and Meiji periods, 1600-1868 and 1868-1912, respectively, poets partook in “linked-verse” practices, taking a writer’s last stanza and using wit, wordplay or a pun to launch into a brand-new haiku.
Kern’s scholarship, and book, can come as a shock to even dedicated haiku aficionados.
“This is not your grandma’s haiku book,” Jay Rubin, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, wrote for GQ magazine. “It is bound to ruffle many feathers with its insistence on distinguishing between pre-modern haiku as a communal art of linked comic verse and the modern invention of haiku as a Zen-inspired minimalist stand-alone poem of 17 syllables.”
The topic also surprises students when Kern lectures on haiku in his courses. But the professor uses it as a learning opportunity that transcends the printed page.
“Right now, we’re moving away from romanticism and selfish individualism,” he says, citing increasing interest in practices like collaboration and crowdsourcing. “This model of collaborative haiku composition can actually be a model for us.”
Kern, who’s served as emcee of the Greater Dane County Advanced Learner Network’s annual haiku competition (reading 3,000 haiku submissions from fourth graders), says he hopes Americans begin to consider haiku as a collaborative group game rather than individual “Zen” poems.
“It’s like reading a sonnet but picking out only a couplet,” he says, “or discussing a trailer instead of the movie.”