Haiku: A Japanese form of poetry

17 syllables in 3 linesFirst line: 5 syllablesSecond line: 7 syllablesThird line: 5 syllables

Implies season & locationMakes associative leapsEvokes deep emotions.

Haiku Experiment

This exercise incorporates several of the creativity enhancement tactics:– Apply Analogies– Borrow, Adapt or Steal– Shift Perspective

By modifying the intended creative process, culture and aesthetics, it could be applied to many interdisciplinary approaches.

Translating prose to poetry1. Describe your favorite natural setting on MSU’s

campus. Use past or present tense (no future tense).

2. Revise your prose passage by eliminating articles (the, an, or a) and any other unnecessary words, avoiding personal pronouns.

3. Choose your most interesting words and images. Rearrange words in 5-7-5 syllable lines. Juxtapose surprising combinations.

Poetry Mash-up: A Haiku Exercise

Step One: Write a prose description of one of your favorite natural places on campus during a specific season.

Step One Example:I remember a day in early October. I was standing on a bridge over the Red Cedar River. The sky was cloudy but bright. The clouds were white with faint reflections of sunlight. Some of the trees had begun to change color. But as I looked downstream, the yellow and orange leaves became less and less distinct. In the far distance the trees seem completely green. There was some disturbance in the water. I could barely see the little rapids where the river breaks against the stones.

Step Two: Revise your prose description according to simplified Japanese grammar and aesthetics.

Grammar: Use only past or present tense. Do not use

articles (the, an, or a). Eliminate unnecessary words. Prefer passive voice.

Aesthetics: Use words that suggest time , place and mood without clearly stating them.Avoid personal pronouns, such as “I” and “you.”Prefer understatement and ambiguity.

Leave things unsaid—up to the imagination.

Clouds catch eastern light.Rippling water reflects open sky. Leaves change—spattering yellow, soft gold, tipped orange.Distant trees hold summer green.Water breaks on stones.

Example of description with “Japanese” constraints and American-style free verse

Rewrite your description in three short lines that are not necessarily sentences.

Rearrange the syntax and emphasis to make the poem fit the traditional Haiku form:

First line: 5 syllablesSecond line: 7 syllablesThird Line: 5 Syllables

Clouds catch eastern light.Rippling water breaks on stone.Soft gold, summer green.

“Poetry is about the clarities that you find when you don’t simplify.

Poetry is about complexity, nuance, subtlety. Poems also create larger fields of possibility.

The imagination is limitless, so even when a person is confronted with an unchangeable outer circumstance, one thing poems give you is the sense that there’s always, still, a changeability, a malleability, of inner circumstance. That’s the beginning of freedom.”

American Poet, Jane Hirschfield