Why Hay(na)ku

I like the work itself to get the first chance to argue for itself. At http://eileentabios.blogspot.com/, then, you will find these links to a panoply of hay(na)ku:

Mark Young, Rachel Kendrick and others at the Group Blog "As Is" at http://as-is.blogspot.com/ as well as "As Is-2" at http://as-is-2.blogspot.com/

Jill Jones at http://rubystreet.blogspot.com/

Malaya T'shai at http://tamageneris.diaryland.com/

Benito "The Wily Filipino" Vergara at http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/

Tom Beckett at http://vanishingpoints.blogspot.com/

Shanna Compton at http://www.shannacompton.com/blog.html

Barbara Jane Reyes at http://bjanepr.blog-city.com/

Joseph Garver at http://www.jgarverhaynaku.blogspot.com/. Joseph's doing some intersting things with longer runs of hay(na)ku, and I like how he breaks out of the form if the poem tells him to.

Rhett Pascual's hay(na)ku-dedicated blog at http://hay-na-ku.blogspot.com/

Then Eileen, mother of hay(na)ku, at http://chatelaine-poet.blogspot.com

Why me? Why now?
Every word counts. That's hard to resist in The Age of Logorrhea.
The form encourages paring, discourages padding.
Lines shaped by word count rather than syllable, engendering more rhythmic variety among poems and within the poem itself.
Enjambment abound, bounds.
Poems start small, grow taller, taller, then hunkerdown, dip, curtsy, until they build toward tall at the end. I read the sea there, gentle tides. (I'm so damned land-locked right now, I read the sea just about everywhere.)
They often arrive on my tongue before I can even locate pen or paper.
And if you've had the chance to read some of the poems found through the links above, the form's not so rigid that it breeds sameness. Mark Young's hay(na)ku do not read like Joseph Garvey's.