haiku

a few weeks ago i put some haiku feeds on my google reader, and meh, they're lame, took them off. everyone thinks that 5-7-5 is just fake doggerel, but hell, i like those more. the short moody evocative bits in vogue now seem like amusing sentence fragments that would just be part of the background in good prose writing. i've read a lot of basho and buson, and they didn't seem so... pointless, ephemeral, insubstantial. maybe they gain in translation? (part of the reason why i drag my feet over learning japanese is the fear that when i have full comprehension, the wonderful stuff i hear in anime and j-pop will turn out to be more of the usual banality.)

anyway. i think the big loss is over how people don't seem to do kireji or the "cutting word" anymore. (or the kireji's so subtle that it's barely there at all.) a lot of doggerel haiku are jokes, and you could think of kireji as the punchline, what makes it pop, instead of just being a weaksauce evocative description.