Relevant Posts:

Short story about my afternoon w/ SP
Sarah Palin Haikus
Palintology
Censorship?

Apologies to those of you who get this already.  I am not posting it to talk down to anyone or anything.  It’s just that several people have emailed me saying they love the idea of haiku but are not sure exactly how to write haiku or have to think about it for a while since they haven’t done this since high school or whatever.  Might well be the reason so many people have written me that they’re not sure how to go about it is that it’s something so fresh and utterly in the moment that don’t realize how simple it is so long as the basic premise is followed.  And if you get this already, you can go ahead and skip to the next blog post, I guess.  At any rate, Eastern Haiku is  a seventeen syllable poem.  Divided into syllabic lines of 5-7-5 and are mindful of the topic, the haiku will write itself. Matsuo Basho is the Eastern haiku master—he created the brief simple 17 syllable form. Kerouac is the one who innovated the contemporary Western Haiku, created a haiku that does not adhere to such tight syllabic structure but rather, takes the relevant and re-appropriates.  I find it liberating to embrace the opportunity to embrace the restrictions, thereby grounding the 17 syllable for against the formlessness of multiple combos times multiplex which is why I stick w/ the 5-7-5.  While I don’t consider any of my haikus my best writing, I do like the process of constructing it.  Light, accessible yet clean and elegant brain candy.  Okay, enough from me, tho.  Real reason I’m going on and on about this is to provide a link to this article about haiku that I found on The Huffington Post.  Check it out, if you have (a) the inclination (b) the time (c) in inability to control the distraction (d) the impulse to invite distraction in (e) none of the above.  There are some haiku blogs and essays out there that are kinda lame.  Others are not particularly lame, per se.  Just really obvious color by number-ish.  This essay, I like, tho.  Found it on Arianna Huffington’s Blog.  So I link.  Here tis—

Haiku: Do You Haiku by, John Lundberg