a quote . . .

What strikes me as essential are that a haiku be: (1) brief (as long as it needs to be, as short as it can be); (2) a concatenation of words (this is, after all, a literary art, and the words of a haiku are not the experience it contains; on the other hand, the words of the haiku are another and new experience); (3) an opening (to something, though not always the same thing, but always larger than the flat description would be by itself). – Jim Kacian

a quote . . .

Issa has objectively captured the essence of the moment: one of sudden beauty—and after, when all that’s left is the remembering. That is what a firefly is. That is what a genuine haiku is. This haiku has “the grave elegiac music which stays forever in the listening mind.” – anita virgil

haiku is

Haiku is the intellect of the heart putting words to the ‘je nais se quoi’ of the soul

a haiku is . . .

Give a haiku-poet a half-dozen grains of sand and you will get back a mountain veiled in moonlit fog.

a haiku is . . .

When a handful of words are placed together in such a way that allows the reader to feel, in the silent spaces between them, the breadth and depth of the universe . . . that is a haiku.