Though its brevity might make you believe otherwise, the verse form known as
haiku has a long and honorable history. Now popular all over the world and a form we often think of as simple enough to teach schoolchildren, haiku is a highly respected art in Japan where it originally developed.
From Hokku to Haiku
The small three-line poems known as haiku were originally known as
hokku and were part of longer poems. Looking back several hundred years, you'll find that the Japanese enjoyed a poetic form called the
renga. This was a communal form of creating and reciting poetry. Different poets would contribute stanzas, called
tankas, to the longer
renga. The honor of starting the
renga would go to the most honored poet, and the first stanza, which established what the rest of the poem would be about, was called the
hokku.
Fact #1: Google lists 83 million pages when you search for the name "William Shakespeare." Of course, this figure is not totally accurate, but it does present a statistical curiosity of Shakespeare's popularity around the world. This surpasses the returns on searches for literary heavyweights like Ernest Hemingway (11 million) and H.P. Lovecraft (3 million), and even contemporary darlings of the writing world like Stephenie Meyer (4 million) and JK Rowling (6 million).
