New to Haiku: Jump into Haiku with Michael Dylan Welch

This week at New to Haiku, Michael Dylan Welch shares his practical guide for getting started with haiku. This piece was first published on the Vancouver Cherry Blossom festival website in April 2020, and also appears here on Michael’s Graceguts website. 

Michael is a well-known leader in today’s English-language haiku community. He serves as the longtime vice president of the Haiku Society of America, cofounded the Haiku North America conference in 1991, and cofounded the American Haiku Archives in 1996. Michael is also the founder and director of the annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway. 

 Michael writes: “As Laura Lee Bond has put it, ‘Haiku is deceptively simple. It’s three lines and it’s jump, dive, emerge. Haiku is something that everybody can do.'”

“Those who don’t jump will never fly.” ―Leena Ahmad Almashat, Harmony Letters

You’ve heard of haiku. You know it’s a short form of poetry from Japan. You might have friends who write haiku, at least occasionally, and you remember learning about it in school. You may remember that the teacher said something about counting syllables, but perhaps you’ve also heard that you don’t have to, and instead need to focus on capturing a moment of personal experience in three lines, often with a reference to the season, such as cherry blossoms for spring. But how do you get started? How do you jump into haiku?

A good way to get going is to start noticing things. Pay attention to your five senses and be more conscious of the sensory input you absorb every day. What did you smell or touch on your afternoon walk? These are external seeds for haiku. How were you feeling when you scanned the news over breakfast or while you commuted to work or school? These are internal seeds for haiku. Haiku grows out of thinking about what causes your emotions—all the things you experience through your five senses. But don’t write about your feelings. Instead, be aware of them and focus on what may have caused them. Then write about those causes so that a feeling might be implied.

But again, how do you start? Put a notebook in your pocket or start a file on your smartphone where you can jot notes. Focus on moments, on little observations. Take the things you see and hear and smell and touch and transform them into words. Pine boughs swaying in a gentle breeze. The sound of an ambulance as it speeds down the street. Seeds for haiku. Then put such observations together with another image to give the poem two parts. Maybe like this:

pine tops swaying
in a gentle breeze . . .
a sparrow’s rising trill

nodding geraniums—
an ambulance wails
down the boulevard

Do you see how these poems use specific references such as pine tops, a sparrow, geraniums, and boulevard? Make the most of your language in all its rich textures, but be careful not to add metaphors or similes that are detours to the objects you experience rather than the objects themselves. No titles or rhyme needed either. Do you see yourself there in the woods or on the street? Do you feel a sense of tranquility or peacefulness in the first poem, or maybe tension and concern in the second poem? The reader adds these feelings, so you don’t need to say them in the poem. You want the poem to summon feeling, not impose it. Just show images interacting and, with practice, the feelings will arise in each poem. Putting two things together is vital to making haiku work, creating an energizing or reverberating space, a space for you—and your readers—to jump into haiku.

So, how can you write a haiku today? Try these steps:

• Go for a walk in a nearby park or around your neighbourhood. Take a notebook!
• Write down two or three details you notice through each of your five senses. These could be single words or short phrases that name or describe what you notice. Try to be factual rather than judgmental (such as saying a sunset has “red and yellow clouds” rather than saying it’s a “beautiful” sunset).
• On your walk or later, try turning each word or note into a longer phrase that presents the experience, and pair two descriptions together to create a haiku. It takes practice to pair the best elements together, but keep trying.
• Revise each poem to make it feel right, with no excess words (you don’t need to worry about counting syllables), and maybe share it with friends to get their feedback—not just whether they like it, but what they like about it, or what might puzzle them.
• Make this a weekly habit and start filling your notebook with haiku seeds.

For variety, try these tips in different seasons of the year, at different times of day, and in the rain, snow, or in sunshine. The exact same walk will produce different experiences at these different times, giving you fresh seeds for haiku. And remember the words of poet Mary Oliver, who said, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Jump in!

For the novice haiku poet, Michael recommends starting with these pages from his website, Graceguts:

• “Becoming a Haiku Poet“
• “Further Reading“
• “Haiku Checklist“

Michael Dylan Welch has been investigating haiku since 1976. This has included amassing a library of 6,000+ haiku books and journals, publishing 4,500+ individual haiku and senryu, and much engagement with the worldwide and domestic haiku community. Michael teaches haiku and writes frequently about haiku strategies through hundreds of essays. He runs Graceguts.com, NaHaiWriMo.com, Rengay.com, and other websites, and is also web manager for Haiku Northwest, the Tanka Society of America, the American Haiku Archives, Haiku North America, and the Western Washington Poets Network, among other organizations. Michael is president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword, curator (since 2006) of SoulFood Poetry Night, director of the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, and perpetrator of National Haiku Writing Month. He lives with his wife and two children in Sammamish, Washington, and invites you to join him in his fulfilling haiku addiction.

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