Haiku & Micro-Poetry

This workbook turns the Haiku & Micro-Poetry course into hands-on writing and revision of your own short poems. Each section maps to a course module and pairs drafting exercises, fill-in worksheets, and checklists you can run against any poem in progress, plus editable templates for a personal season-word palette, a haiku draft-and-revision sheet, and a form-sorting log for haiku, senryu, and tanka. Work one section per module, keep a running draft file, and use the action plan to take one moment from observation to a finished, fully cut haiku.

Unlearn the 5-7-5 rule and ground yourself in image-first, one-breath writing modeled on the four masters.

Find five published haiku from a real journal such as Modern Haiku, Frogpond, or The Heron's Nest, or from a Basho, Buson, Issa, or Shiki collection. Write each one out and count its English syllables. Note how many hit a strict 5-7-5 and how many run shorter. Then write three haiku of your own aiming for roughly ten to fourteen syllables, short-long-short, ignoring the seventeen-syllable rule entirely.

Write down three flat statements that name an emotion directly, for example I felt lonely at the station or the morning was peaceful. For each, throw away the emotion word and write only the concrete scene that produced it, something you could photograph. Let the feeling arrive through the image alone.

Fill this in for one draft to test whether it is a true haiku or a short lyric in disguise.

Anchor every poem in a specific, lived season through one well-chosen concrete detail.

Go outside, or to a window, right now and spend ten minutes recording only what tells you the season: light, smell, sound, temperature, what people are wearing, what plants and animals are doing. Write at least eight concrete details. Resist borrowing classical imagery you have not seen; record only what is actually in front of you, in the spirit of Shiki's shasei, sketching from life.

Take one season detail from your inventory and build a haiku outward from it.

Write a haiku deliberately using a worn season word such as cherry blossom, autumn leaves, or falling snow. Then rewrite it twice, each time replacing the cliche with a fresher season detail from your own palette that carries a similar mood. Compare the three versions aloud.

Build each poem as two images across a clean cut, and choose pairings that make the reader re-see.

Using Jane Reichhold's method, write five fragments (single concrete images, often a season word) in one column and five phrases (a separate image or small action, two lines each) in another. Then pair them across the columns, trying non-obvious matches. Mark the cut between fragment and phrase with a dash, colon, or ellipsis. Keep the best three pairings.

Pick one strong first image. Write three second images to pair with it: one that is too close (means nearly the same thing), one that is too far (no possible relation), and one in the resonant middle (unlike on the surface but secretly related). Keep only the resonant pairing and finish it as a haiku.

Fill this in to control where the pause and the cut fall in one poem.

Sort your short poems into the right form and revise each down to only its necessary words.

Write four short three-line poems from everyday life: two centered on nature and the season, two centered on human behavior, relationships, or social comedy. Then label each as haiku or senryu based on its center of gravity, using the focus test: nature and season point to haiku, human psychology and comedy point to senryu. Let the senryu be funny or wry.

Take one finished haiku and add two more lines, roughly 7-7, that turn from the outer image toward inner feeling, memory, or reflection. Reshape the third line so it works as a pivot: it should finish the image above and open the reflection below. Allow stated emotion and the word I, which haiku usually forbids.

Run one wordy draft through deletion until nothing more can be removed.