Writing Haiku for International Haiku Poetry Day

© 2020 by Kristen Lindquist. Originally created for the Camden Public Library.

April 17 is International Haiku Poetry Day. While we’re all cooped up to keep our distance from each other, and since April is also National Poetry Month, it seems like a great time to learn how to write a haiku poem! Originating in Japan over 500 years ago, the haiku is now the world’s most popular poetic form, written in many languages and shared internationally in journals, books, and online forums. (You can read more about IHPD here.)

But what is it? Put simply, the haiku is a short, unrhymed poem that uses images to evoke the essence of a moment in time, often in nature. That’s it. You can do this.

Here are a few basics about the form to get you started

1. Haiku are short: three lines! But forget the 5-7-5 syllabic formula you learned in grade school. Unless you’re writing in Japanese, haiku are not 17 syllables long; the Japanese “syllable” is not equivalent to an English syllable. So contemporary English language haiku are more like 10 – 15 syllables long, often (but not always) with the middle line a little longer than the first and last. (And even many Japanese poets no longer stick to 5-7-5.) [NB: the word “haiku” is both singular and plural.]

2. Much more important that the haiku’s syllable count are its images. The basic structure of the haiku presents a moment in time by juxtaposing two images: one image in one line; the other in two lines. The two images are associated in some way. Can you see what’s going on between the two images in the examples below? How are the two images related/connected, and how do they play off one another?

Example A                                 

(Image 1): dandelions                          

(Image 2): a moment stretches

in the sun

—Aron Rothstein

Example B                  

(Image 1):   a pink pile

                                    of baby pigs

(Image 2):                 April sunrise

                                   —Kari Davidson

 (Examples taken from THE HERON’S NEST 2019, Vol. 21)

3. Haiku originated as a type of nature poem that usually included a seasonal reference word. This doesn’t always hold true anymore, but each of the examples above clearly refers to a specific time of year. Here in Maine I like to think we’re more in tune than in some other places with how the seasons affect the landscape around us, and it can be fun to get that into your poem. Why not a haiku with fiddleheads, smelts, spring peepers, or sap buckets?

4. Don’t worry about punctuation or capital letters. As you might have noticed in the examples above, you don’t even need to write in complete sentences! And especially don’t worry about trying to sound “poetic.” Haiku use ordinary, straightforward language to simply present two images, with no use of rhyme, simile, or metaphor. You’re just telling it like it is, letting the moment captured in the images themselves convey the mood or feeling to the reader without having to directly say anything like (with Example B, above), “It made me so happy to come upon a pile of piglets on a spring morning.”

Ready to write your own?

Try this process to get your creative juices flowing…

1. Come up with your first image. My favorite way to do this is to look out the window: one crow on a branch, a cardinal singing nearby, some patches of dirty snow, a budding maple tree, forsythia buds… What am I experiencing that generates a particular feeling for me?

2. Now hold that first image in your head and brainstorm what might go with it. Run through all five senses. I’ve picked “maple buds” because they’re making me feel hopeful right now, a reminder that spring goes on regardless of a global pandemic. Leaves will bud and unfurl on all our trees, birds and their songs will return, flowers will bloom, and soon we’ll all be interacting as a healthy community again. So what associates with maple buds? The color red, the return of spring’s birds, sap running, maple syrup, flowers budding…and so on.

3. Start putting things together to see how they sound/feel. Do they convey the mood or feeling you want to share?

maple buds

fresh syrup

for my pancakes                              

Fun, but doesn’t convey the hopefulness I want.

maple buds

the trees begin

to flower                                           

Closer, but I want more complexity, want the reader to say “ahhh” at the end…

maple buds

the red bloom

of sunrise

This gets closer to what I want: the shared red color of the buds and sunrise, the hopefulness

of sunrise, and the use of “bloom” to describe both the sunrise and hint at the flowers

soon to come. And the maple buds also indicate that this is a spring moment.

4. That’s all there is to it, and yet there’s SO much more to it! From these most basic

beginning steps, writing haiku can become a lifelong creative habit, a form of creative

 meditation, and an engrossing topic of study. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Here are some books I recommend to help you learn more about the crafting and

complexities of haiku

·      Donegan, Patricia. WRITE YOUR OWN HAIKU FOR KIDS. Tuttle, 2005. Great for adult beginners too!

·      Gurga, Lee. HAIKU: A POET'S GUIDE. Modern Haiku Press, 2003 & 2013.

·      Mason, Scott. THE WONDER CODE: Discover the Way of Haiku and see the world with new eyes. Girasole Press, 2017.

·      Reichhold, Jane. WRITING AND ENJOYING HAIKU: A HANDS-ON GUIDE. Kodansha USA, 2013.

A few more contemporary examples to inspire you

Notice the use of wordplay, the senses, and the way each of these captures an “ah” moment.

relationship advice                                      full moon

from a firefly                                                 all our sounds

on again                                                         are vowels

—Peter Newton                                           —Chad Lee Robinson

pausing                                                         distant thunder

halfway up the stair—                               the dog’s toenails click

white chrysanthemums                            against the linoleum

—Elizabeth Searle Lamb                             —Gary Hotham

These were written by students in my Five Towns Adult Ed class this past winter:

pinyon smoke                                               the birch sheds

drifting from the chimney                         blank pages

grandfather’s pipe                                       I have no pen

—Joseph Cote                                               —Jason Freeman

fire in the hearth                                          an ocean of sweetgrass

watching the light                                        blows

tell an old story                                            mother’s braided hair

—Gail Ribeck                                                —Nancy Kerwin