Happy National Haiku Poetry Day (April 17th)! After attending a workshop with the amazing Maryfrances Wagner, Missouri's poet laureate, at the Sigma Tau Delta conference, I was inspired to keep researching and writing haiku.
A lot of us (me included) wrote haiku in elementary school, being taught what Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines as a haiku: "an unrhymed verse form of Japanese origin having in English three lines containing usually five, seven, and five syllables respectively."
Modern poets are changing the game and exploring the "usually" of that definition.
Here is what I've learned so far:
5-7-5 is OUT: Stop paying so much attention to the syllables and focus on the strength of your words! Some contests might require the old 5-7-5 format, but generally haiku can be whatever syllable pattern you want. Just remember to keep it short and strong.
Go for the element of surprise: One of the most impactful things you can do with your haiku is surprise the reader! In our haiku workshop, we practiced this by writing the third line of an already published haiku. Maryfrances Wagner gave us a handout that had the first two lines. I'll put one below that I found in frogpond vol. 42:1 so you can try your hand and link the full poem at the bottom of this post so you can see the "zing!" By Mark Dailey: google earth i zoom in on
Comparing nature to human things: Nature is extremely important to haiku culture. Don't center the man-made object, center the nature in your poem. A lot of haiku teachers, including Maryfrances Wagner, illustrate this by telling the story of the master, Bashō, and his disciple, Kikaku, of the morning that Kikaku came back from the fields and said, “I have written a haiku.”: Bashō invited him; they sat, and he read the haiku. “Take a pair of wings / from a dragonfly, you would / make a pepper pod”. Bashō said, “This is not a haiku. You killed the dragonfly. The haiku is: Add a pair of wings / to a pepper pod, you would / make a dragon fly.”
Check your use of articles, adverbs, and adjectives: The Japanese language doesn't have articles like "the" so they aren't needed in English haiku either. Adverbs and adjectives do too much telling, and that also hurts the power of your haiku.
Don't tell your readers how to feel: I'm so guilty of this! I love using metaphor, simile, and personification in my "usual" poetry, so my brain wanted to slip into using it in haiku too. The whole point of haiku is for your reader to make their own inferences, and for the nature to speak for itself. Don't tell us that the "flowers are blooming" or "hearts blooming like a flower," show us the "blooming flower" or "blooming hearts." Create an image and let it speak.
Here's an example of a haiku I wrote at the workshop! Is it good? I don't know and I don't care, and that's pretty beautiful. Here we go:
girl smiles
less and less
never stops
Here is Mark Dailey's haiku from point two (and there's a bunch more here to read!):
Want more info and prompts? Visit The Haiku Foundation! Here is a blog post I found especially interesting about the difference between Western poetry and haiku:
Happy writing everyone! Comment below what you write, or send them to me at hannahgbartlett23@gmail.com. Want to polish yours for publication? Book a free consultation with me today and we can discuss how to go about that.
Happy writing!
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