WHR 2025 – Editors Choice

World Haiku Review Spring 2025

Mt Fuji Above the Clouds – painting by Susumu Takiguchi

Editors Choice

sidewalk cracks a smile for the daisies

Edward Cody Huddleston

 
Let me come clean from the outset that I do not normally value a one-liner as a useful haiku form. This one by Huddleston is therefore definitely an exception.

Why do I not think much of one-line haiku? First and foremost, I simply have not encountered any examples of it worth even glancing at since early 2000s, except for some rare freak occurrences, say 7 or 8 on a scale from 1 to1000. It would be easier to prospect for a gold nugget. This empirical evidence has been more than enough to put me right off this practice. It also serves as proof that my view is not based on prejudice or lack of experience judging from the vast number of one-liners I have had to read for the last 25 years.

Another simple reason for my rejection is the fact that so many one-liners are no more than simply putting three liners into one. The reader still has to do an irksome job of working out the invisible breaks to try to make sense of the poem. This hinders his/her comprehension, let alone appreciation. Breaking up a one-liner into (usually) three independent/interdependent parts and reading them again and again to try to understand the surface and in-depth meanings is after all not much different from a three-liner. What then is the point? The same can and do make it difficult for the reader to appreciate kireji if there is one in the one-liner.

So, why have we started to be bothered about one-liner haiku? An innocent and naïve answer could be that some non-Japanese poets looked at (printed) haiku written by the Japanese and concluded wrongly that English haiku should also be written in the one-line format to look like the genuine Japanese haiku, or to look unlike traditional English poems (which is constructed in lines). There was a ‘cult’, or linguistic sensor around the early part of the 2000s among American-led haiku leaders to reject in English haiku anything, even a hint, which reminded them of traditional English poems. In the formal, or traditional formats especially artistic ones, the Japanese haiku have rarely been written in one line but in two, three, four or even ten lines

To write haiku in the three-line format is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements of English haiku and early pioneers who invented it cannot be praised enough. It has many advantages which have helped the development of English haiku and which the readers of this magazine hardly need to be told. It is therefore very difficult to beat it as a haiku form, which probably sealed the fate of the one-liner haiku in the estimation of this editor. There are other reasons why the one-line haiku is not recommended, which shall not detain us here.

So, back to the haiku of the Editor’s Choice. Its first impact is the good visual effect. Daisies are found everywhere in the world and have universal popularity, causing immediate fondness in the observers’ heart. Sidewalk (pavement in British English) is also a universal feature and closely connected with people’s daily life, a very apt thing for haiku-writing, including familiar damages to it such as unrepaired potholes or swell caused by trees’ root systems. The combination of the two gives the haiku unmistakeable sense of familiarity, warmth, humour, brightness and joy of the arrival of spring. Good choice of words makes it flow naturally and read well without causing awkward hindrance to comprehension so common in one-line haiku. One’s understanding of the haiku is instant and clear. Three liner would have made it less so.

This haiku is an extremely rare and shining example that one-line haiku can sometimes strike gold but it is still more akin to a miracle than to a routine occurrence.

• WHR 2025 – 100 Haijin part 13
• Mountains of Japan
• WHR 2025 – Haibun
• WHR 2025 – Vanguard Haiku
• WHR 2025 – Shintai Haiku