Totally in agreement with your reasoning re the context of haiku definitions, too.

Recently, at a ‘general audience’ poetry event in support of the Yarra River’s Heron Island, I had time to read out one ‘long poem’ and a series of haiku (on the theme of ‘rivers’) Just as I begun the haiku series, a bloke in the second row with a very loud voice interrupted with , ‘What is haiku?’ Yikes! I only had time for about a 5 second answer! But in that context, that was all that was required, thank goodness. This is what came out::

‘Haiku, in the English language, are very short poems adapted from a traditional Japanese form of poetry. Their focus is usually on the natural world.’

(then I quickly began to read, before any more questions came)

Lorin

If I’m introducing haiku in English to a group of people, and I don’t want them to become totally exasperated with me, a simple definition of haiku is important.

If I’m reading a collection of poems by people who usually know what they’re doing, and the editor has deliberately included work that challenges a simple definition of haiku, a simple definition is not that helpful to me. But if i then get into a conversation about this collection and talk turns to whether a poem is a haiku or not, our respective definitions become important in the conversation.

If I am an editor of Poetry magazine, my working definition of a haiku might be “A kind of brief poem we do not publish unless the work seems to fit with the other poems we’ve selected for that issue. It might help if the work was by someone we’ve heard of, like Tomas Transtromer.”

Christopher asks: “How can [editors] begin to assess whether a submission of haiku is good AS HAIKU?”

I would say they can only do so the same way as everyone else, through the hard work of becoming fluent in haiku and its traditions.

Most people assume that music, poetry, and other forms of art cannot be simply defined. But if you suggest the same thing about haiku, people often get cross.