Practical Haiku: How Reading and Writing an Ancient Form of Poetry Can Change Your Life

Practical Haiku How a tiny, ancient form of poetry can make your life better by making you more creative, a better writer, happier, nicer to be around, more productive, sexier … by Dylan Tweney

Everybody knows how to write haiku, right?
5 Haiku are easy
7 But sometimes they don’t make sense
5 Refrigerator
Rolf Nelson, threadless.com

Actually, it’s not so simple
There’s a lot more to haiku than counting syllables.
On a withered bough A crow alone is perching; Autumn evening now. Basho, tr. Kenneth Yasuda on a bare branch a crow lands autumn dusk Basho, tr. Jane Reichhold

But it’s a lot more fun!
sudden downpour –
no one wins
the wet-t-shirt contest
David Giacalone

How haiku helps you live better
Haiku helps you write more precisely
home addition– the carpenter's math penciled on drywall Barry George

Haiku helps you see
The message that precedes all others -- in art as well as life -- is simple: pay attention Harlan Ellison
Photo: GregHickman

Haiku teaches patience…
Because you can’t always go out and make a haiku, you often have to wait for one to come to you.

Haiku helps you appreciate the small, wonderful things in life
Like cherry petals, ants, spoons, blades of grass, peeling paint, nuts and bolts, dew, earlobes, discarded coins, scraps of paper, oil rainbows in puddles, snowflakes, stray wisps of hair …
Photo: Lily

The haiku way: How you can make it happen
1. Read haiku every day
Daily Issa http://cat.xula.edu/issa/ Mann Library, Cornell http://haiku.mannlib.cornell.edu/ @dailyku tinywords.com

The haiku way
Read haiku every day
Write haiku every day

The haiku way
Read haiku every day
Write haiku every day
Be alert to haiku moments
morning news with the paper, I bring in a cherry petal Dylan Tweney

Haiku Basics: Immediacy
Right here, right now. Lookit this!
Photo: Funkandjazz

Think small
Mars landing --
a tendril of red dust
shifts from a footfall
Alan Summers
Photo: intherough

Show, don’t tell
in the old stable we made hot, passionate love like wild horses do
anonymous horrible poet
stolen kisses barn swallows twitter in the eaves Mike Farley

Contrast/comparison
2 parts: short - long or long - short
the whoosh of steam from the espresso machine – frosty evening Charles Trumbull

Use natural language If you can’t say it with a straight face, try again

“ One breath poetry” 10-12 syllables is usually enough in one breath the whole autumn Valeria Simonova-Cecon

Look at the world as a “what's wrong with this picture?” puzzle
mannequin faces
a cosmetic counter woman
offers a spritz
Jeffrey Winke
Photo: Lisa Brewster

Share your haiku with others
ReadWritePoem.org
WorldHaikuReview.org
Haiku Poets of Northern California – hpnc.org
Or, just write haiku and send them to your friends, leave them tucked in library books, on Muni, scrawled on the bathroom wall…

Happy haiku-ing hum of the laptop watching a lost world flicker to life Dylan Tweney [email_address] @tinywords @dylan20

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Practical Haiku: How Reading and Writing an Ancient Form of Poetry Can Change Your Life

by Dylan Tweney on Mar 03, 2010

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