When you, as a haiku poet, need to convey any kind of positional information about your image, a preposition becomes vital and necessary.Īs a normal part of speech a preposition can absolutely start any fragment or phrase in haiku when it is necessary. How could we accurately convey some important details about our images without prepositions? Without the prepositions in, on, by, under, how would we be able to accurately picture the image that the haiku poet is portraying? What is your mental image of a flower on the water? What is your mental image of a flower under the water? The only difference between these phrases is the preposition. Think about this, there is a huge difference between a flower in a field and a flower on a field or a flower by a field or between a flower on the water and a flower under the water. This is a powerful and necessary part of speech. The preposition comes before the noun and shows its positional relationship in the setting (the direction, time, place, location, and spatial relationship). So, as Walden University put it in one of their articles about grammar and prepositions:Ī preposition is a word or group of words used before a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to show direction, time, place, location, spatial relationships, or to introduce an object. The term preposition is made up of two words, pre and position pre meaning before, and position meaning the position or spatial relationship. In fact, prepositions have some incredible power as a necessary part of speech and once you learn some of the greatness of this power you will love properly placed and powerful prepositions in your haiku. Never beginning a phrase or fragment in haiku with a preposition is a self-imposed significant limitation and false. When I heard this I thought that since prepositions actually begin phrases when properly used, they must mean that they would never start the phrase part of a haiku in the fragment / phrase structure with a preposition. Someone recently told me regarding their haiku that they would never begin a phrase with a preposition. Seriously, I'm going to absolutely avoid unnecessary nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs as much as all those other parts of speech because they are unnecessary. (1) And furthermore, doesn't it stand to reason to not use any unnecessary words at all no matter what part of speech they are? If the original guidance for haiku was to cut out unnecessary articles, particles, markers, prepositions and conjunctions, then by sheer logic there must be necessary articles, particles, markers, prepositions and conjunctions too. This has led to the pitfall of telegraphese or caveman speak in haiku. What happens often is that in the zealousness to be a good anti-preposition (and anti-small word) haiku poet, the beginner ends up cutting out and eliminating necessary and essential articles, particles, markers, prepositions and conjunctions. So the typical beginning haiku poet places limitations on themselves and may even go unnecessarily out of their way to avoid articles, particles, markers, prepositions and conjunctions. That's because the admonition to cut out unnecessary articles, particles, markers, prepositions and conjunctions has magically transformed into the manifesto and mandate to avoid and limit all use of the same. Prepositions have gotten a bad rap in haiku.
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