Haiku Sonnet: Poetic Form
Learn how to write the haiku sonnet, a combination of the haiku and sonnet poetic forms. Find the guidelines and an example poem here.
We're getting close to open submissions season for many college-affiliated literary journals. I haven't submitted much since early spring, but I did receive a few nice and personalized rejections--the kind that let me know I was super close...just not close enough. And so, it's time to get back to sending my work out, but first...
Haiku Sonnets
The basic premise of the haiku sonnet is simple: 4 3-liner haiku plus a couplet of either 5 or 7 syllables adds up to 14 lines, the same number of lines found in a sonnet. The only mention of this form that I've been able to find is a poet named David Marshall.
So to write a haiku sonnet, you really have to know how to write haiku. Here are two posts from Poetic Asides on the topic:
- Haiku: Easy or Hard? from August 6, 2007. And a follow-up...
- Haiku Revisited with comments from Michael Dylan Welch from August 8, 2007.
And if you want a refresher on sonnets, check out Poetic Form: Sonnet.
Note: For haiku poets who believe in writing one-liners, this same concept could be applied to the haiku sonnet by combining 14 one-line haiku.
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Play with poetic forms!
Poetic forms are fun poetic games, and this digital guide collects more than 100 poetic forms, including more established poetic forms (like sestinas and sonnets) and newer invented forms (like golden shovels and fibs).
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Here’s my attempt at a Haiku Sonnet:
patience, by Robert Lee Brewer
adults gather next
to a STOP sign & wait for
children to escape
from my rocking chair
i examine them all &
hold the weight of clouds
on a yellow bus
the driver makes many stops--
the children must wait
the front lawn needs mowed
though not as bad as the back--
it will have to wait
time waits only for those who
know to hold the weight of time
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
