Lemuel Reilly's Brief Dissertation of Haikus, in which both their brevity and foreign composure mark them as an important poetic form

Most people formally know the haiku as a contained and epigrammatic poetic construction, limited to a first line of five syllables, a second line of seven, and a final third line of five. This form allows the haiku to contain thoughts of multitudinous size, limited in what it can say only by the extent to which its composers are willing to dispense with grammatical encumbrances.

For example, taking the above statements, an example of rich and varied—if rather rotund—prose, and watch their translation into haiku form:

Haiku, the short poem
Of multitudinous thought
Abbreviated.

Notice the exponential increase in profundity that comes with the decrease of syllabic expenditure. This is a wonderful device for poetic thought and should be liberally employed when ideas need a poetic flourish to send them along on the eastern wind.

Indeed, the notion of the “eastern-ness” in haiku should not be quickly forgotten because to be eastern implies the strange and distant, an “other” that persists today even in our more rapidly circulating globe. The very foreign-ness of the haiku is directly imbedded in its name, which means nipple blossom, and for its oral peculiarity marks any composer as a cosmopolitan with appropriate taste. Indeed, to say “I have composed you a haiku” has an air of education far brisker than “I wrote you a poem” because one: you have demonstrated the knowledge of a specific genre of poem, and two: you have shown that your artistic reach can grope the distant shores of inspiration.

But, one may stop and say that the foreign is ugly and frightening. Ah, true enough and true forever, but the foreign of the east has the special property of being a particularly distant foreign, not the imposing monster that gnaws bones in your bedroom closet, but rather the smoke-nostriled dragon that slumbers worlds away, licking coals and gouging screams that evaporate after the tip of a tongue gives such fantasies air. The eastern foreign is a spectacle of the sublime that we can handle safely because the core of its power is insulated by the rolling pacific, rolling and rolling and rendering our fears to soft and pleasant rock and sway, that takes us away to wonderful and far dreams,
As such, haikus are
Distant, sublime, and juicy
Nipple blossoms.*

* here, we count the period as a “full stop,” functioning in the meter as a syllabic beat that can fill in for the missing syllable and allow the most succinct re-emergence of the profoundly appropriate, four-syllable, definition of haiku.