A surprising number of named forms fit in three lines. Two came to English from Japanese and carry centuries of practice with them. One was invented in America within living memory. And one, the tercet, is simply what English poetry has always called a unit of three lines. This page defines the four you are most likely to meet: haiku, senryu, tercet, and lune. Where we can, the example is a poem we published ourselves.
Three Line Poetry accepts all of these forms and everything in between. The only rule of the journal is the one in its name. If you would rather start with finished poems than definitions, our three-line poem examples page gathers sixteen of them from the archive.
Japanese · traditionally 5–7–5 sound units · a season, an image, a cut
The haiku is the most famous short form in the world, and the most misunderstood. In Japanese it is a poem of seventeen sound units called on, arranged 5–7–5. An on is shorter than an English syllable, which is why a strict 5–7–5 haiku in English usually comes out baggier than its Japanese ancestors, and why most serious English-language haiku poets write shorter than seventeen syllables. The count is the least of it anyway. A classical haiku carries a season word (the kigo), stays close to observed nature, and turns on a cut (the kireji): a pause that sets two images against each other and lets the spark jump between them.
The touchstone is Bashō's poem about the frog, written in 1686: an old pond, a frog jumping in, the sound of the water. That is the entire poem. Nothing is compared to anything, nobody's feelings are reported, and readers have been arguing about it for three centuries.
Here is a haiku-shaped poem from our own pages. Season, weather, one sharp image, and a cut between the second and third lines:
Japanese · same shape as haiku · subject: human beings
The senryu has the same silhouette as the haiku but a different target. Where haiku watches the natural world, senryu watches people, usually with a raised eyebrow. No season word is required and the tone runs from wry to barbed. The form takes its name from Karai Senryū, an eighteenth-century Japanese editor whose collections of these poems made the style famous.
A working test: if the poem is about the moon, it is probably a haiku. If it is about the person looking at the moon, and it is at their expense, it is probably a senryu. This one from our archive qualifies on every count:
European · any three-line stanza or poem · rhymed or unrhymed
So what is a tercet? Simply three lines of verse that belong together, either as a whole poem or as a stanza of a longer one. It is the broadest term on this page. A haiku printed in three lines is, technically, a tercet. When all three lines rhyme (AAA), the tercet is often called a triplet. Tennyson's "The Eagle" is built from two of them, and the first is probably the most quoted triplet in English:
Tercets also chain into larger structures. Terza rima, the scheme Dante invented for the Divine Comedy, interlocks its tercets ABA BCB CDC, so the middle line of each stanza hands its rhyme to the next; Shelley borrowed the scheme for "Ode to the West Wind." The villanelle, the form of Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," is five tercets followed by a quatrain. A poet who can manage three lines can be led into nineteen before noticing.
American · 5–3–5 syllables, or 3–5–3 words · no other rules
The lune is the youngest form here, invented by the American poet Robert Kelly in the 1960s as an English answer to the haiku. Kelly kept three lines but reset the count to thirteen syllables, arranged 5–3–5, and dropped the classical requirements: no season word, no cut, any subject. The name is French for moon; the short middle line bites a crescent out of the poem's right edge.
A second version came from the poet Jack Collom, who taught poetry in schools and noticed that children count words far more reliably than syllables. His variant counts three words, then five, then three. Both versions are in active use, so "lune poem" can mean either. If you want to try one, take a sentence you actually mean, then carve until the counts force choices. The lune's charm is that its little arithmetic is strict enough to push back but small enough to finish before lunch.
The list does not stop at four. The Korean sijo is usually printed in three long lines of fourteen to sixteen syllables, each with a pause in its middle and a twist reserved for the third. The katauta, older than the haiku, runs 5–7–7 in Japanese. And free-verse poets write in unrhymed tercets constantly, from Wallace Stevens to the present, for the plainest reason available: three lines make a room that is small enough to control.
Three Line Poetry is not a haiku journal, though we publish work that would sit comfortably in one. We take any poem in exactly three lines: haiku, senryu, tercets, lunes, and poems that answer to no form at all. Since 2011 we have published sixty issues this way, and every one is free to read online. Start with the current issue, or with Issue 1 to see where it began.
If you write in three lines, read our writing advice on line length and meter, look at what has succeeded on the examples page, and then submit. Submissions are read year round and publication is free.