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muttwatch haiku

Haiku 101

Haiku is relatively new, having been introduced by Masaoka Shiki late in the 19th century as a revision of the older hokku, the opening verse of a linked-verse form of poetry. Traditional hokku held to a pattern of 5-7-5 morae, Japanese phonetic units only slightly similar to syllables, the phonetic units of English. Traditionally set in one of the four seasons, the verse normally contained a major grammatical break at the end of the first 5 or second 7 morae.

As haiku was adapted to the English language, several "rules" became common, such as the 5-7-5 syllable pattern and several rules were relaxed, such as seasonal thematic elements. In English, haiku has pretty much become a poetry free-for-all, with poets adopting their own sets of rules and tending to stick with their own choice of formatting.

Welcome To The Machine

Although syllable-counting adds a sort of rhythm to the verse, syllables are a most imperfect representation of the written word. Syllable formation is closely tied to dialect, with words having varying numbers of syllables depending on where the speaker is located. Because speakers of English can rarely agree on syllable numbers, the task of teaching a computer how to count syllables becomes exponentially more difficult.

After researching various methods of syllable counting the Muttwatch programmers settled on using the Text Statistics module of PEAR/PHP. This codeset, by George Schlossnagle, provides a solid foundation on which to build the syllable counting tool. The author uses regular expressions to define the counting parameters; any mistakes revealed through use can be corrected by the judicious modification of the counting script.

Before settling on the PEAR-based tool we experimented with the formula offered by Alice Horning in 1987 in which she theorised that dividing the total number of alphabetic characters of a submitted passage by 3.1127 would yield an accurate count of the passage's syllables. We attempted this with haiku-length submissions and were invariably greeted with a wrong answer. It seems this formula only works satisfactorily with longer verse.

So, the Muttwatch Haiku Analysis Machine may make some mistakes when determining the syllable count of the submitted verse. If this occurs please take the time to send us a report of the counting discrepancy. This will help make our machine more accurate and the world a generally better place.

Words we know don't work: buried, anyone

Get In Line

Because we can institute any rules we wish and because haiku in English is illegitimate anyway, we hereby respectfully outline the "rules" by which our machine operates:

1. All Muttwatch haiku must consist of at least one sentence. Please use proper punctuation.
2. All Muttwatch haiku must consist of 17 total syllables as determined by our machine. You may use as many complete sentences as you wish, but always only 17 syllables in total. The syllables need not fall into any rhythmic pattern.
3. All Muttwatch haiku must have a Flesch-Kincaid score of no greater than 70 to be considered for publication. Some haiku penned by The Operators may fail this test but were included anyway because, let's face it, they are the Gods of our world.
4. Although any verse meeting the previous requirements may be submitted to The Operators for consideration, we will NOT publish any haiku that do not conform to the canine theme of the site. Make your haiku about dogs, or sleeping, or killing bunnies, etc. to have the best chance at publication.