Word: haiku
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That is a haiku, a 500-year-old Japanese poetic form whose first and last lines always have five syllables, its middle line seven. Today, grade school teachers in the U.S. are turning to it as a new tool to teach English composition. Asked to write their own haiku (pronounced high-koo), children find that its precise rules and free content pose delightful puzzles, with solutions limited only by the flexibility of their vocabulary and the fetters on their fancy...
...most part, haiku in English have been either translations of old Japanese poems or originals that closely imitated Oriental terms and themes. Convinced that the form had other possibilities, Mrs. Maeve O'Reilly Finley, a bouncy, Irish-born fourth-grade teacher in the innovation-minded public schools of Newton, Mass., began writing her own versions of haiku for her students in 1962. Her Haiku for You, a thin volume of 101 haiku for children, was published this summer...
...Finley's haiku deal with such close-to-childhood subjects as kites, tadpoles, animals and birthdays. They also deal with modern communications...
Poetry in medieval Korea was an aristocratic art that was practiced principally in an aristocratic form: sijo. The word means "time rhythm," and it describes a flexible tercet that has the form of a syllogism and the force of a heroic haiku. Yi Bang-won and Jong Mong-ju addressed each other in sijo, and over the next five centuries their example was emulated by thousands of eminent statesmen, generals and courtesans. A vast literature of sijo resulted, and even these stiff translations by Inez Kong Pai suggest that it is a poetic form whose recognition by the West...
...being has just set foot on the moon. But what's this he's carrying? A paintbox, some drawing paper, a few garden tools, three kimonos and two bottles of Scotch. He shouts a soundless "Banzai!" into the wastes of the Sea of Serenity, dashes off a haiku or two, and quickly builds himself a Zen rock garden. The inscrutable Nipponese have beaten Russia and the U.S. to the moon...