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Recently, I went to a poetry workshop held at a local Center for the Arts. The Center also had an art gallery, populated with noisy visitors, next to our class space. As part of the workshop, we were given instruction about how to write a Japanese Haiku poem. I had been privately wishing the gallery visitors would be quieter, so as not to disturb our class. This influenced my thoughts when writing my first Haiku. I wished the visitors would quietly look and “listen to” (meaning, “think about”) what the artist was saying through the art piece itself and its description. 

At the workshop, I wrote two verses. I later learned traditional Haiku poems are only one verse, containing three lines. I ditched a verse and reworked the one I kept. 

Haiku poems have a strict format of 5-7-5 in terms of the number of syllables allowed per line. Subtraction (of words and syllables) is more difficult than addition! I guess that’s the point in Haiku. The content of the 3 lines is supposed to be: 1. Setting / 2. Zoom-in / and 3. Discovery (or surprise, or challenge). It was a fun exercise. You should try it. I thought it was finished but later learned that Haiku rarely uses punctuation or capitalization. More rearranging and editing. Line breaks and word choice are everything.

Lastly, traditional Haiku poems typically don’t have a title. However, I broke ranks here so that the poem could be easily added to the Indexes.