Meet Scifaiku

Last month, I was busy writing poetry for the Poem-A-Month challenge over at Poetic Asides. One day, we had to write a haiku.

Haiku is not my favorite poetic form. It looks like it should be easy, but it is deceptively challenging. Historically, in Japanese, haiku were written with the first line having five syllables, the second line having seven, and the third line with five syllables again. But as I wrote in my anti-haiku:

a difficult form
even with 5-7-5
this is not haiku

Modern English-language haiku are usually shorter than 17 syllables. And you can have 1, 2, and 4 line haiku in addition to the 3 line version. Traditional haiku poems often capture a peaceful (or Zen-like) moment, commonly include a season, and provide some kind of comparison or insight. Ideally, they include an aha! moment which draws the reader into the experience.  Like I said, I find this type of poem hard to write. There’s a lot to consider when writing haiku. So, I was cruising around on the Internet, reading anything I could on the subject, and I discovered scifaiku.

What is scifaiku? Simply put, it's science fiction haiku. The term was first coined in 1995, when Tom Brinck wrote The SciFaiku Manifesto.

According to Brinck, scifaiku explores science or science fiction themes. The poems don't have to adhere to the traditional 17 syllable form of haiku, in part because so many science terms are long and unwieldy and eat up a lot of syllables. However, scifaiku should still be brief and get to the point.

I like scifaiku. Instead of a Zen-like moment, scifaiku poems explore things like alien encounters, the vastness of space, or thoughts about stars. You could even write a poem like this:

her green tentacles
wrap around my tender wrist
i love my new pet

Photo credit: Lenny Montana
through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

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Updated 2/28/18. I’ve been writing haiku for nearly 9 years now and wanted to revise my definition.
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