Japanese Internment Camps

I researched more about the concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during WWII, and I found some alternative writing that came out of it. There is a poem called "That Damned Fence" and it is arranged in quatrains with the first two lines and last two lines rhyming with one another. It is a poem that describes the feeling of being trapped inside, with repetition of "That Damned Fence" throughout the poem.

After reading this poem, I found that in comparison to the haiku, which we read in class, the haiku is much more effective. The ideas in the haiku are not convoluted because the word choice is limited in this style of poetry. The alternative poem that I found on the internet is written by one author, where the haiku is by several authors; and while this would usually make the poem harder to follow because of different writing styles, I think it is good because it offers different perspectives in a chronologically manner. As far as expression of emotion, I think that the haiku does a better job. The emotion is not expressed as clearly to the reader in "That Damned Fence" and I think it is because of the freedom the author had to choose in words and stanzas that a haiku does not offer.

Though both poems were written in the Japanese concentration camps, I think that the haiku produced a better result, and those who did not experience the time can get a better idea of what went on inside.