What Haiku Practice Can Teach
About practice, and showing up, and sticking with something
For the past couple months, I’ve been writing haiku daily (usually three, sometimes more, occasionally less). This experiment grew out of three distinct inputs/inspirations:
Mom’s primary care doctor retired last October, and in his thank-you card to us for his farewell gift, he penned two haiku about Mom and me.
One of my recent favorite video games, Ghost of Tsushima, included a series of side quests where you locate meditation spots around the island, and compose haiku from the inputs you see in the natural surroundings.
I have recently been enjoying the book Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison. While not strictly haiku, many of these short poems feel very much like haiku… but often with a twist. Here’s my favorite:
Straining on the toilet
we learn how
the lightning bug feels
So when I was feeling this need to do SOMETHING in creative writing, but at the same time feeling stalled on my fiction, those three inspirations converged. And “three haiku per day” became my new daily writing practice.
Assessing my haiku practice
Once I had 30+ days of practice under my belt, and 100+ haiku to show for that practice, I took a pause a few weeks ago — to gather that work into one place, see what I had, and assess the practice.
I asked myself some questions:
Have I enjoyed the practice? Yes.
Did it feel fruitful? Yes.
Did I want to keep going? Yes. (And I have.)
Was there any point where it felt like a chore? a “have to”? Yes. Caveat: those days were rare, and usually once I started I was happy to continue.
Did I like the results? Yes. Generally, anyway. Some of the individual haiku are crap, but some are pretty good.
Did that creative practice prime any other creative work? Yes. Not as much as I’d like, but it feels like my creative work, particularly the output of that work, is always like that: never enough.
Did I learn anything from the practice — about the practice itself, about myself, about creativity, art, the world? Yes, indeed.
The answer to that last question led to this essay, and this 👇 list.
What Haiku Practice Can Teach Us
These are my learnings from the first phase of this ongoing experiment. I expect I’ll uncover other lessons as I go, but these ones have been particularly helpful for me in this first leg of the journey. And hopefully will be for you, also:
1. Constraints are good
The limitations of the haiku form are helpful. Not only do the constraints sometimes help boost creativity (see learning #5), but having such a small set of win criteria for the practice (produce three haiku each day, three lines each, following the 5-7-5 formula) helped me stick to it.
2. Sometimes it’s good to break the rules
Just as those constraints above can be helpful, sometimes it’s good to deviate from them, and not be a slave to the formula. For me, that was often writing outside the common themes of haiku (the natural world, death, transience, etc.), and simply using the 5-7-5 structure as my guardrails.
When I told my friend Maghan about my practice, one of her early attempts was to alter the form of one of her pieces to 5-5-7, which I thought was cool.
Think of the constraints as guardrails on a steep mountain road, or those ones they put up for the kids just learning to bowl, instead of handcuffs or a prison cell.
3. Sometimes we hate what we wrote that day, and that’s okay
Some of my days were, “There. Three. Done. Sheesh.” I’d reread the three haiku on the page, shake my head, say, “Well, the saying does go, ‘Done is better than good.’”
Other days were, “Hmmm. That one didn’t really work. It was close, but that last word just doesn’t cut it. But right this minute I don’t have a better one, so it’s good enough for today.”
Sometimes there’s learning to be had from the practice. Other times it’s just about showing up and doing the thing. Practicing.
4. Sometimes practice leads to something else
My haiku practice sometimes led to other pieces of non-haiku poetry when the haiku form didn’t work. Or to other prose efforts (like this essay).
5. Sometimes expressing in few words an idea gives us ideas for what else we might want to say about it.
This somewhat relates to #4, but it’s a little different. Where that one was more about structure and form, this one is more about the ideas — is there more to this idea that I want to express beyond the constraints of the form? Not that a particular haiku didn’t work, but more that it DID, and I found I had something more to say about that idea.
Sometimes haiku was an “obstacle is the way” sort of trick to express something I was struggling with in a different medium (the essence of a character for a story in progress, or a poetic “log line”, for example).
6. Sometimes it’s just fun, figuring out the word puzzle that fits 5-7-5
Here’s where my puzzler-/gamer-geek brain goes to town. Verbal Tetris, anyone? Fit the pieces together to make the new thing. Turn the words around until the rhythm is right and the meaning is clear.
I also happen to LOVE Roget’s Thesaurus (I still have my copy of the 4th Edition, which has seen a lot of use in the past 40+ years), so the opportunity to search that tome for the perfect word to fit that idea and the two syllables I have to work with… the best.
7. Haiku are like “dad jokes”/puns: it takes 100 bad ones to get a really good one
This lesson comes from my friend John, who is the punster of our friend group. Most of his efforts are groan-worthy, but every once in a while, he gets one that’s perfect… the perfect blend of humor and wordplay that has us all laughing. Is it one in a hundred? Probably so.
Interestingly, when I looked back at my first 100+ haiku, there was one I particularly liked, of all the ones I’d written (it’s #110, for the record):
Some days my mind feels
like a vast, ancient archive
whose archivist quit
I leave to you to decide if that particular haiku is “good” — I don’t know that I consider it art, but it did a good job of capturing a moment, a feeling, with an image I could… well… get lost in.
So John wasn’t far off the mark with his “Rule of 100” — and I wasn’t too far off that mark, either.
The Haiku Continue
I’ve kept writing haiku, pretty much every day since I started. Some days it goes well. Other days I struggle with one of them — hell, sometimes with all of them. But I leave that practice feeling a little lighter, satisfied, relieved. Like scratching a persistent itch.
One day recently one haiku led to another, and another, and I found I had, in five haiku, a larger poem that speaks to the essence of this practice — and perhaps other practices, too.
Some Days the Words Come
Some days the words come
like a stampede of hooves
trampling as they goSome days the words come
like an icicle melting
pooling drip by dripSome days the words come
only by force of will applied
with torture deviceSome days the words come
like a gift from God or muse
blessed soft whispersAlways the words come
when at last our minds quiet
and our hearts open