Practical Haiku: How Reading and Writing an Ancient Poetic Form Can Change Your Life – Presentation Transcript

1. 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
2. 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
3. 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

4. But it’s a lot more fun!
   • sudden downpour –
   • no one wins
   • the wet-t-shirt contest
   • David Giacalone
5. How haiku helps you live better
   • Haiku helps you write more precisely

   home addition– the carpenter’s math penciled on drywall Barry George

6. Haiku helps you see
   • The message that precedes all others — in art as well as life — is simple:  pay attention               Harlan Ellison

   Photo: GregHickman

7. 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.
8. 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

9. 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

10. The haiku way
    • Read haiku every day
    • Write haiku every day
11. 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

12. Haiku Basics: Immediacy
    • Right here, right now. Lookit this!

    Photo: Funkandjazz

13. Think small
    • Mars landing —
    • a tendril of red dust
    • shifts from a footfall
    • Alan Summers

    Photo: intherough

14. 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
15. Contrast/comparison
    • 2 parts: short – long or long – short

    the whoosh of steam from the espresso machine – frosty evening Charles Trumbull

16. Use natural language If you can’t say it with a straight face, try again
17. “ One breath poetry” 10-12 syllables is usually enough in one breath the whole autumn Valeria Simonova-Cecon
18. 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

19. 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…
20. Happy haiku-ing hum of the laptop watching a lost world flicker to life Dylan Tweney