by Dylan Tweney

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 …
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 on a bare branch

A crow alone is perching; a crow lands
Autumn evening now. autumn dusk
Basho, tr. Kenneth Yasuda 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
 Photo: GregHickman

Haiku helps you

see
The message that precedes all others -- in art as
well as life -- is simple: pay attention
Harlan Ellison
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
1. Read haiku every day
2. Write haiku every day
The haiku way
1. Read haiku every day
2. Write haiku every day
3. 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
 Photo: intherough

Think small
Mars landing --
a tendril of red dust
shifts from a footfall

Alan Summers
 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/comparis
on
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
 in one breath the whole autumn

Valeria Simonova-Cecon

“One breath
poetry”
10-12 syllables is usually enough
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…
 dylan@tweney.com

@tinywords
@dylan20

Happy haiku-ing
hum of the laptop
watching a lost world flicker to life

Dylan Tweney