I'm a haiku snob

Several days ago, The Boss attended a week-long conference in Atlanta where he stayed in a hotel that professes the use of haikus as the anchor for their communications and advertising, "the math behind their voice". The hotel has strategically placed haikus everywhere, from hotel lobby to bathrooms, in its multiple locations throughout the U.S. The Boss called one day and in the midst of our daily check-in ritual, he read a haiku about hotel room towels. The chain even has a web-page allowing visitors to their website to create their own haikus. You pick the season (summer, winter, etc), one element (earth, wind, etc), and the mood (joyful, relaxed, etc). The website will then spit out a haiku related to the hotel that you can enjoy or forward to a friend.

The Boss calls me a haiku snob because I laughed in what he deemed "a dismissive manner" at the haikus that the hotel presented. I gladly accept that term. Haiku snob. First of all, I won't presume to know everything there is to know about haikus -- in fact, I know less about haiku the more I study them. I won't presume that just because I can count 5-7-5 syllables in a triplet means that I can write a haiku. I certainly won't presume that I know enough about the haiku to consider it "the anchor" for my communications. There are certain things we often easily underestimate and one of them is the complexity of the haiku form.

That is not to say that the haiku masters (Issa, Basho, Buson, etc) didn't write playful haikus -- many of them were generated in that exact same spirit (remember the one of the horse pissing in the snow?) -- but they did much more than count syllables in each line.

I went onto the hotel's website and found this poem:

from humid summer
to room of wintry wonder.
air-conditioned joy

I know ours is not the world that Issa or Buson inhabited. It has changed so much that we are forced to reinterpret and create the haiku in such different ways. However, I still can't justify writing a haiku about things like towels air-conditioned rooms. I'm not a haiku snob so much as a haiku novice. There is much, much more to the poem. That's because sometimes it reaches Nothingness.