Haiku as Sketchbook

Make things simpler & two new 52 Haiku prompts

Hello, Poetry Weirdos!

On Wednesday, I wrote about living an audaciously mundane life. I've been thinking about the idea of finding wonder and beauty in our everyday lives for a long time.

Writing haiku and making haiku comics has become my primary way of documenting my life. I like to look back and rediscover all of the wonder and beauty that has been pushed out of my active memory by the pressures of living.

Recently, I wrote about how I realized the haiku comics collected in my book Wild Divinity were a kind of diary of my spiritual journey to find the divine. You can read the paywalled article for free with this link.

Another way to think of haiku is as a kind of sketchbook. Sketchbooks are how many visual artists notice what they notice. The writer Jack Kerouac also kept a small notebook that he sometimes called a sketchbook. Instead of drawings, he wrote small sketches of what he saw as he moved through the world—spontaneous prose and poetry.

Creating a regular haiku habit also allows you to have a sketchbook, even if you don’t like to draw. You can record your observations of the seasons or your mundane day-to-day happenings.

In the moment, a haiku may not seem like much. But over time, when you string several days and weeks of haiku together, you get a sketch of your life.

Instead of focusing on all of the “rules” of haiku, such as wabi-sabi, cutting lines, seasonal words, and syllables, I recommend you do your haiku sketches with a focus on just one or two principles and free yourself to sketch in haiku.

This makes the practice less onerous and allows you to sharpen certain skills. During the COVID lockdown, I began trying haiku sketching. My only requirements for the haiku I wrote during this period were that they fit the 5-7-5 syllable pattern and that they were “true”.

I called these sketches My Corona Diaries. Most of the poems have never been seen by anyone else before. Here is a selection of 13 of the poems I wrote in March and April of 2020.

My Corona Diaries (Excerpt March-April 2020)

lazy, rainy day 
dreamily flittered away
without touch of guilt
                                                     doom scrolling on phone
                                                     interrupted by child
                                                     looking for a hug
                                                                                                   frozen milk harder 
                                                                                                   to unthaw than expected
                                                                                                   please excuse the mess
                                                    driveway basketball
                                                    ritual over routine
                                                    these corona days
weekly shopping trip
brings creeping anxiety
store shelves more barren
                                                  our deep spring cleaning
                                                  alternates with family
                                                  game and movie time
                                                                                                    creating new games 
                                                                                                    like coronavirus tag and 
                                                                                                    Plague Olympics
                                                  days bleed together 
                                                  existing outside of time 
                                                  spring of stress coiling
quarantine birthdays 
presents arrive days later 
nobody complains
                                                    Animal Crossing 
                                                    a game where the parents show
                                                    the kids how it works
                                                                                                              being together 
                                                                                                  means our dog Loki hopes that 
                                                                                                             lockdown never ends
                                                     on Tuesdays, Dad makes 
                                                    pork chops, half with barbeque 
                                                    the other half plain
we only knew time 
was moving forward because 
the sun set each day

I will leave it to you to decide on the literary merit of these haiku sketches. For me, the quality of them is beside the point. I wrote them to document my experiences, and on rereading them five years later, I find they do the job.

It was during the lockdown that I made my first faltering attempts at haiku comics. Here are some of the earliest My Corona Diaries comics. These also serve as a good reminder to me that it’s important to be willing to suck at something if you want to get good at it—or the only way through is through.

52 Haiku Prompts 19 & 20

Each week, we get together to write and share haiku based on a prompt, with the goal of having 52 new haiku by the end of the year. Each haiku helps us pay attention to the changing seasons as we experience them.

You’re welcome to start at any time. If you missed a week or two, or if this is your first time seeing the prompts, start today!

This week we’re writing two haiku to make up for last week. You will find that I am not including new haiku comics for today’s exercise because I want to focus on the haiku sketching element of the prompt.

Let’s get started!

Write two haiku sketches about the proziac parts of your daily routine.

Here are mine:

silver ponysfoot 
flowers left on glass table 
art project remnants

the bathroom towels 
arranged like French Tricolour 
room smells of oui oui

Now, it’s your turn! Share your poems and any context or images you care to add below! (If you want to share an image, you will need to restack this post and then add a photo. Substack does not allow pictures in the comments.)

One last thing.

If you have read and enjoyed any of my books, it would be extremely helpful if you could leave an honest review with the retailer where you purchased them. Reviews help other readers find my books, and they help me when investing in paid advertising.

Thanks for being here!

Be the poetry you want to see in the world!

Cheers,