H²O: Haiku, Haiga & Origami. All explanations are in the links to Wikipedia… just click on each word

The art of Haiku is difficult! The challenge is to capture an instantaneous piece of life.

Haiku is a most difficult art!

How to catch in 17 syllables what you feel at the very instant? The words must be meaningful, beautiful and full of expression! They should be both a snapshot of what you see and what's inside you. My opinion is that it should be like a tremendous title of a great and big novel, browsing in few words the whole story. For example, the title "Gone with the Wind" has this poetic evocative power. Writing a haiku is even more difficult if you wish to express all together the ambient mood, sounds, colors, scents, etc. Rhythm may be added to that list! It's why metrics play an important role in Haikus. The classical Japanese metrics is 5-7-5 (verses of 5 and 7 strokes). But, in Western Haikus, I mean in English and in French for me, it's good to consider other metrics, especially those that either break the symmetry or the rhythm.

However, it's not just an image, it can't be a series, it's an only ONE poem reduced to few syllables! Moreover, it must express colors, odors, sensations, feelings, sounds an all that is insiside the writer's mind and body at the very instant he shoots the scenery.

My opinion is that, In some cases, the metrics adopted by the author could be more important than the words. Below is my personal catalogue of metrics.

- The first three syllables should define the setting or the background.

- The second verse may be either a description or an action

- And the rest closes the story…

I love the “5-7-5” rhythm because it’s probably, according to me, the quietest and the closest to music…

The one-word and monosyllabic second verse could be an onomatopoeia marking a brutal event, which allows building a story. There was a world before the event and another one after.

Etc. etc.

Luckily, there's no convention to codify the number of paintbrush strokes for a haiga! But it could be an excellent initiative to try: on the below sketch, I drew a trio of musical instruments in only one stroke of paintbrush with black-ink.

Whereas haigas are the painted versions of haikus, they should ideally be some kinds of photographic snapshots. But as your tool is not a camera but a paintbrush, it's a most difficult challenge! It takes a lot of time to achieve a haiga, even when it's a simple landscape, even when it illustrates a haiku.

Both techniques have spread out of the Far-East Asian borders, even inspiring recognized artists: I recently learnt that Jack Kerouac has written Haikus.

Consequently, the “Asian way” – I mean culture, education, social conventions, etc. – which goes together with the original works, does not appear in the westernized genre, which does not use ideograms.

An origami is a folded piece of paper representing a figure, which could be either an object or an animal or a plant. Although this art is completely separated from haiku and haiga, you may mix them and paint little haigas or write haikus on the plane spaces of the sheet of paper that will become an origami…