Writing Spaces

This post contains a participation component! Read to the end to jump in.

Previously, on this blog, I spent a year or so writing what I thought was a form of haiku. How wrong I was!

In November, 2024, Claudia Radmore, past president of Haiku Canada, led a workshop on haiku that showed us participants the surprising freedom, and the restrictions, of the haiku form.

The first freedom is doing away with the idea that we must stick to the 5-7-5, or 17-syllable, structure. As I understand it, Japanese syllables work differently than English syllables, and the 17-syllable rule can’t apply in the same way in English.

Instead of haiku being syllabic, think of it as

• a one-breath, two-part poem
• with a phrase, and a fragment, in three lines
• include a season, using an indicator, such as swarm season, rather than the name of a month or season (not June; not Summer)
• focus on senses, not feelings
• don’t use similes or metaphors
• be peaceful, non-violent, non-political
• use only necessary capitals
• use no punctuation
• don’t title your haiku

There’s more, of course there’s more, and I’m still a haiku novice even though I now have a sense of the form.

Here are two haiku I wrote at the workshop.

For the first exercise, we were asked to include the line, “on the lake”:

geese beat wings
reflections fracture
on the lake

The prompt for the second was simply to write any scene, and to follow the guidelines of haiku:

fresh snow
rabbit’s print
fox has followed

In each of those examples, the middle line works as a pivot line: the first line could stand alone, with the next two lines being the phrase; or the first two lines could be read together, with the last line as the fragment.

Now I want to rework two of my early haiku from this blog. For the first one, I only need a few adjustments. For the second, though, it seems I’ll need a deep edit.

#1, the original, from September 15, 2020

Pillars of rain bash
mile-high against the shore: here
ancient trees endure

I want to keep the storm’s energy and the driving force of the rain coming from the water. I might use “battering rams of rain” but A), it’s obvious, and B), haiku avoids “ing” words. They’re not forbidden, but one per haiku is the limit.

Here’s what I’m going with:

grey rams of rain
bash the wooded shore
ancient trees endure

A more usual word than “rams” would be “pillars,” as in the original, or “columns,” but I like the single-syllable forcefulness of “rams” and the alliteration with “rain”. I also like the half rhyme of “shore” and “endure”.

#2, the original, from February 26, 2018

Ice cracks across sloughs
on low-bottomed fields–
Sing, chickadees.

To make the middle line a pivot line, this could become:

ice cracks over sloughs
across low-bottomed fields
chickadees sing

Possibly. Here, in the first two lines, I changed “across” to “over” and “on” to “across” so I wouldn’t create an image of the chickadees sitting on the actual low-bottomed fields. These birds would be flitting in the trees and brush around the fields. A related point: be careful not to include numerous images in a haiku. Fewer images is better.

But in the revision above, the powerful command of Sing, chickadees. is missing. How can I replicate that power without the capital “S” and without the punctuation?

ice cracks over sloughs
across low-bottomed fields
now chickadees sing/chickadees will sing/while chickadees sing

Nunh-unh. This piece feels like a Rubik’s Cube. I’ve turned it every which way without getting a result I like, and I’m stuck in a limited perspective.

I’D LOVE YOUR HELP! WHAT CAN YOU COME UP WITH FOR THIS HAIKU, USING ANY PARTS OF IT YOU CHOOSE? MAKE IT YOURS!

Post your contributions in the comments!

Workshop leader Claudia Radmore is the past president of Haiku Canada

This workshop was part of the Art of Writing series presented by Almonte Readers & Writers

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