Haikus: A retrospective, and an apology

Six months ago, I published ‘An argument for haikus’. It was a piece written in a burst of energy, while tipsy and overstimulated, and is to this day still one of my best performing pieces! I was so proud of it, especially as it was my third post on this website.

For those who never read it, I wrote an article arguing that the minimum word limit in the ‘Poets’ community should be decreased. I had plans to start a haiku project, and got irritated seeing a message pop up when I tried to submit seeing that my post wasn’t long enough and so might be rejected. To me, it felt like gatekeeping an ancient art form. And so, inebriated, I wrote about it.

The response to the post was largely supportive. Many other poets felt that haikus deserved a space in the ‘Poets’ group.

Evidently, so did Vocal.

A month or so after I posted my article, Vocal released its first haiku challenge. I was surprised and smug seeing the challenge arrive in my email, thinking I had really made an impact. Although I didn’t participate in the challenge, due to not being able to afford Vocal+, I greatly enjoyed seeing people swell and participate. Every day I saw haikus being reposted on the Vocal Creators Instagram page. My egotistical artist brain saw a correlation between this trend and my original article, and I was happy.

Until less than a month later, the next haiku competition was released. I was surprised that the team at Vocal had decided to do the same medium two poetry competitions running. Whilst it can be argued that any challenge allows poetry to be submitted, the haiku is an inherently poetic medium. I was beginning to worry that the haiku market was being over-saturated, that people would become bored.

Fortunately, the next poetry challenge - released in the same month as the ‘Blue Haiku’ challenge prior - encouraged competitors to ‘Write a poem inspired by a crazy dream.’ I’m sure many of the Vocal poets breathed a sigh of relief, seeing their word count allowed to be increased again. Before the haiku trend, the only medium-specific challenges Vocal released were either general short stories, or one sonnet challenge almost a year ago. It is clear that setting out guidelines (or restrictions) for creators is not something Vocal tends to do.

Yet less than a month after the previous poetry challenge, another haiku one was released. And then, most recently, another haiku challenge - the Time Capsule Haiku challenge. The first and second place entries for this most recent challenge were genuinely beautiful, and encapsulated the brevity and power of a haiku quite nicely.

However, if you search ‘haiku’ into Vocal in general, you are met by a litany of poems bemoaning the constant onslaught of haiku-based challenges.

It’s quite evident that a certain section of the Vocal user base is a bit fed up with haiku challenges.

Whilst in the Poets community there are still haikus being published that are engaging with the brief and having fun with the genre, the constant push of haikus to the general userbase through the Vocal+ challenges appears to have been met by backlash. This can be seen in the articles that were published a month or so ago complaining about the constancy of haikus everywhere.

More recently, Vocal has promoted limericks as its poetry genre of choice. This resulted in an astute observation from Misty Rae, linked here. I can only hope that their prediction is incorrect, and we don’t become overwhelmed by limerick challenges.

The Vocal team did respond to the complaints around so many haiku challenges, claiming that they love how they are analysed, how they allow the judges to spend more time with a poem. Stephanie J Bradberry does an excellent overview of that here. ‘sleepy drafts’ further questioned why Vocal continued to push haiku challenges, an idea optimistically explored here.

My perspective - in a shallow, egotistical way - was originally that Vocal pushed haikus following the sudden blow-up of my article pushing for them. The comments were certainly proactive, demonstrating that a certain section of Vocal’s userbase was eager for something new! But I can acknowledge now that perhaps Vocal just pushed these challenges because of the beauty of an underutilised medium.

However.

In doing so, the Vocal team oversaturated the Poets community and the general information feed or the average Vocal user. Haikus were everywhere, and were now underappreciated and even bemoaned by more than ever before. I see what Vocal was trying to do but to turf out so many haikus so quickly has caused more of a negative reaction than much enthusiasm for the style.

In hindsight, perhaps it would have been better for Vocal to test the waters with one or two haiku challenges… not filling the past three months with them. Over-repetition is the death of a trend.

I would also like to end this article with a self-serving apology. If my original article - linked here - was in fact the catalyst for so many haiku-based challenges spamming our feeds as we went into 2023, I’d like to apologise.

I would vow never to write something while tipsy again, but well, who would I be as a writer then?

Feel free to leave your thoughts below; are you fed up with the haikus, immune to them, or still enjoying them? Be mindful that excess support for one specific genre might result in a tidal wave of it swamping the front page for the next few months!