Jazz Haiku

This is the third week of the Our Lost Jungle Poetry Form Challenge. This week, Khara House challenged us to write haiku. If you review the guidelines Khara laid out, you will see that she didn't restrict us to the 5-7-5 format. However, she did have us stick to the traditional subject of nature. (By the way, I have mended my ways. I turned my haiku in early.)

About two years ago, I took a jazz poetry workshop from Glenn North, the poet-in-residence at the American Jazz Museum. In a post I wrote shortly after the workshop, I noted that haiku is a large segment of jazz poetry. Since then, I have noticed that jazz haiku is rarely mentioned in general discussions of haiku. I think it should be because, as Etheridge Knight said:

Making jazz swing in
seventeen syllables AIN'T
no square poets job.

So, here is one original piece:

Sarah started at
the Apollo, but finished
Sassy and too soon.

In June, I took a jazz poetry workshop and found out that haiku is a large subset of jazz poetry. I remember haiku being part of the poetry unit in school. I wasn't particularly interested in it then, but I am really enjoying it now. In case you need a refresher, a haiku contains 17 syllables broken into three lines of 5, 7 and 5. The two I am posting today have one similar line, but I think the overall ideas are a little different.

Team Up

Collaboration
Transfer the feeling to sound,
feeding each other


Expression

Master musicians
express their feelings in sound,
the true jazz poets