It’s an interesting thing to think about and explore, sort of the old form vs content debate.
I actually think the two line format might capture the Japanese haiku the best, but using three lines and two line breaks for English haiku gives the writer a lot to play with.
I would even consider breaking your example poem into these lines,
evening snow
coming down
my son snoring
because I like the mischievous way that coming down can refer to the snow or an altered state, or maybe evening just an elevated emotion, etc.
I guess the important part is what works best with the poem, and what kind of meanings the writer wants the readers to access easily.
Another thing worth mentioning when you say that English is not Japanese is that following the 5-7-5 syllable format can really limit your choice of words and topics.
Say I want to write a poem about chrysanthemums. That’s four syllables right there, whereas in Japanese it would only be two (Kiku). Not to mention the need for particles in English, etc. etc.
I didn't even consider the double meaning of "coming down". Very good! We could play with formatting more.
evening snow
coming
down
my son snoring
So many possibilities!
It goes the other way too, right? Many Japanese words are 5 mora or more. Katatsumuri, for instance. Only one or two syllables in English, depending on the accent you are picturing as you write it ("snal" or "snA-ul"), but five morae, taking up the entire first or last clause.
In Japanese I kind of like the limit of 5-7-5. It makes it something of a puzzle and helps guide me in my word choice. If I were more fluent I may feel otherwise. But in English I find it far too constraining.
I hadn’t thought about words like katatsumori. 🤣
I haven’t ever tried to write haiku in Japanese, so I hadn’t really considered how the language might constrain the writer as it sometimes does in English.
Since reading this comment two days and being taken aback by the reformatting that you did of the poem about your son’s snoring, I’ve been looking at a lot of English haiku and finding all kinds of different formatting examples.
One that I particularly liked was a single line haiku that used a double or triple space between words to make a line break. I thought that was pretty clever.
dry leaves scattered across a road is there a pattern