Thanks, Vocal, For Redeeming My Middle School English Class

The location: an unnamed middle school.

The time: an undisclosed year somewhere between 2000 and 2016.

The setting: English class, Friday afternoon.

It was that hazy part of the school day afternoon where freedom is so close, yet the minutes on the clock are ticking by at a supernaturally slow pace. Everyone is drowsy, and barely anyone has been paying attention to whatever random poetry style the teacher has been talking about for the last half-hour. Such is the way of after-lunch classes. I can barely keep my eyes open, and judging by the nodding heads of my classmates, I am not alone.

The teacher, sensing the collective inattention, is visibly irritated at the intrepid few who have already begun packing up their backpacks, despite the fact that there are still twenty minutes left in class. She smiles, not kindly, and makes her announcement: “For HOMEWORK,” she begins, finding joy in the emphasized, horrible word, “each of you will write a haiku about you: your life, your hobbies, your family, anything that has to do with you. Remember, the first and third lines have to have five syllables and the second line must be seven. This will count as a quiz grade, so DON’T FORGET.”

And with that, we bustled out of her classroom and into the weekend, groaning about the unfair homework assignment hanging over our heads. Even if it took most of us five minutes before class Monday to complete our poetic task. Being eternally clever middle schoolers, the resulting haiku were variations of the same things:

My name is Hannah.

My favorite class is English.

I have one brother.

I like to play sports.

I am a cool quarterback.

John smells like armpits.

I can’t remember what I wrote. I doubt it was much different than what any of my peers wrote, but we had to learn somehow. With that assignment completed, I proceeded to go about my life and educational career without thinking about or encountering haiku in any way, shape or form for [an undisclosed number of] years.

Until the High-Ku challenge.

I have no idea what exactly shifted, but all of a sudden I couldn’t stop writing haiku. Most of them weren’t great. Or even good. But I became obsessed with the format, the beauty of the tight boundaries of seventeen meager syllables to evoke emotion. It only got worse with the Blue Haiku challenge. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve written, shouting haiku after haiku into the void of anonymity. I write them in my head, during my lunch break, using voice-to-text on my commute home. I catch myself counting the syllables of texts I send, of my speech pattern, my fingers drumming a staccato rhythm. It has been endlessly entertaining to see how many directions I can take a single idea, how many haiku can be derived from one thought. I find such beauty in what is carefully selected to be communicated in the haiku itself, but also in what is left unsaid, the power of the limited syllable count to create feeling from the possibility in the unspoken.

It has been addicting, and it has been redeeming. I may never have thought about haiku again, except for this challenge, and that would’ve been a pity. I hope my own haiku are at least somewhat removed from the likes of my middle school self, but even if not, the sheer amusement of both haiku challenges has been a pure joy. So thanks, Vocal, for redeeming my middle school English class. And sorry, former teacher, for not appreciating what you tried to teach us. I just wasn’t ready for the mighty power of the concise haiku.