Practical HaikuHow 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 easy7 But sometimes they don’t make sense5 Refrigerator

Rolf Nelson, threadless.com

Actually, it’s not so simpleThere’s a lot more to haiku than counting syllables.

On a withered boughA crow alone is perching;Autumn evening now.         Basho, tr. Kenneth Yasuda

on a bare brancha crow landsautumn 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 betterHaiku helps you write more precisely

home addition– the carpenter's math penciled on drywall

Barry George

Haiku helps you seeThe 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 lifeLike 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 happen1. Read haiku every day

Daily Issa http://cat.xula.edu/issa/Mann Library, Cornell http://haiku.mannlib.cornell.edu/@dailykutinywords.com

The haiku way1. Read haiku every day2. Write haiku every day

The haiku way1. Read haiku every day2. Write haiku every day3. 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 smallMars landing --a tendril of red dust shifts from a footfall

Alan Summers

Photo: intherough

Show, don’t tell

in the old stablewe made hot, passionate lovelike wild horses do

anonymous horrible poet

stolen kisses barn swallows twitter in the eaves

Mike Farley

Contrast/comparison2 parts: short - long or long - short

the whoosh of steam from the espresso machine – frosty evening

Charles Trumbull

Use natural languageIf 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?” puzzlemannequin faces a cosmetic counter woman offers a spritz

Jeffrey Winke Photo: Lisa Brewster

Share your haiku with othersReadWritePoem.orgWorldHaikuReview.orgHaiku 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

dylan@tweney.com

@tinywords@dylan20