I was watching a TV programme on haiku the other day. One of the things they stressed was that because haiku is so compressed (17 mora in Japanese, where a mor

I was watching a TV programme on haiku the other day. One of the things they stressed was that because haiku is so compressed (17 mora in Japanese, where a mora can be though of as either a vowel sound or a consonant followed by a vowel sound in English terms) that you have to be careful of what grammar constructs to use. Grammar does not usually lead to imagery and if you can strip away the grammar, you can have more mora to use for words that evoke imagery. This made me think that haiku, in particular, is good at evoking emotions and imagery that the reader/listener is already familiar with. There are some incredibly powerful haiku that in just a few words can really tug at your emotions. But you need to have already experienced the imagery for it to have any meaning. I find that picture to be similar in nature to a haiku. There is very little in the picture itself, but the elements it has evoke powerful emotions because we know what they mean. The starving child, the vulture sitting ready, the question of "why is the child starving" (war)... You assemble these ideas in your head and it generates a huge number of thought processes and feelings. To me, the difference between such a picture and a haiku is that the picture is not something I have ever seen before. I couldn't imagine it without seeing it first. Someone could write the most poignant haiku about that image, but it would mean nothing to me, who has never seen such a war. But, to the people of that village, I'm sure such a haiku would be incredibly powerful -- possibly even more so than the photograph. They would fill in their own experience in the gaps left by the words. For someone personally familiar with the experience, the photograph might be too real and obvious -- even gauche. I wonder if text is an ideal mechanism for discussing topics for which the the audience already has some experience -- something to relate to and hang on those words. Pictures, on the other hand, are good for describing things that people have not seen before and may not relate to.