Sweet, hot, spicy, cool;
the jazz band’s tunes fill me with
the taste of music.
© Copyright 2019—Present, Jenise Cook, All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
Republished: 2 September 2019, Spillwords Press
First Published: 29 July 2019, House of Haiku (on Medium, RIP)
Image Credit: Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash.com
The Story Behind this Verse
“Lagniappe” (pronounced lah-nyee-ap in Louisiana French) means “extra” or something nice added. A key example from the region describes bakers adding a 13th item to a baker’s dozen, such as a 13th beignet [wiki] added to a dozen purchased. I added a little extra to this haiku.
Rules. Poetry. The two don’t seem to go together. Many readers are so used to free verse they may not realize that guidelines and much study of poetic structure create the poems they love. And, this applies to Japanese haiku verse.
Traditional Japanese haiku does have structure and guidelines. I won’t go into details here, but if you’re curious feel free to search the internet. In English-language haiku, the debates continue (some are heated discussions) on what “official” haiku verse in our language should look like.
Sigh.
In this verse, though, I did attempt to capture the spirit of Japanese haiku.
Your Turn
If you can identify what I did in this verse to try and evoke the spirit of Japanese haiku, let me know in the Comments.
Note: When you write a comment, I’ll respond. To view my response, make sure you get notified via email by selecting the checkbox for “Notify me via e-mail if anyone answers my comment.”
Thank you for reading. Come along on my adventures.
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