Let's Anthropomorphize Nature Together

Return of the haiku prompt!

***For the first time in almost 2 years, I am doing some digital busking. What’s that? This is where I make custom haiku comics for anyone who asks. I send you printable digital files, and you are free to tip me whatever you like via PayPal, Venmo, or Strips. If you want one of these custom comics, all you need to do is DM me or send me an email and let me know! These make terrific gifts.***

Hello, Haikuists!

I used to send out thoughts and ideas for writing haiku with a haiku prompt every week. I stopped doing that two or three years ago. But I’m bringing the practice back!

I miss reading your poems, and I can’t stop myself from talking about haiku.

Below, you’ll find some thoughts about combining our imagination with observation to write haiku, a few examples, and a prompt. Please share your haiku in the comments!

Apophenia is the human tendency to see patterns or connections in random things. It’s one of our most beautiful and troublesome traits.

It’s one of the reasons we are so prone to conspiracy theories. The universe serves up a ream of data demonstrating a series of random, unconnected coincidences, and our brains immediately latch onto two unrelated points and concoct a story before we are consciously aware of what we are doing.

This most human condition is also one of the reasons eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. Apophenia means we automatically find patterns and create narratives to explain the presence or absence of non-existent patterns.

However, there is also something beautiful about apophenia. This is why we see shapes in the clouds and Jesus in a piece of toast. It’s also why we anthropomorphize nature in art, poetry, and our everyday conversations.

I don’t know if I’m any more or less sensitive to seeing patterns, but I do know I love to use these unreal patterns as seasoning for my haiku comics. I love to create characters from birds, frogs, and even the ocean.

One reason my poetry tends to lean heavily on apophenia and anthropomorphization is that I came to writing haiku as a way of practicing telling very short stories. I’ve written entire books with pirate haiku, horror haiku, and sci-fi haiku, all deviations from the officially “allowed” nature poems.

But there are plenty of stories to find in nature, too!

Once I started making poetry comics, I took my storytelling and layered it on top of what I was seeing and hearing in nature during my walks and hikes. Sometimes the poem doesn’t suggest a character from nature, but the comic does.

Haiku is fundamentally the poetry of observation. These short three-line poems are meant to record what the poet has seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and touched from the natural world. However, we are all biased, inaccurate observers, and that is where the poetry comes from. The best haiku, the best poems of any kind, perfectly blend observation with imagination so that the reader will never truly know how much of a line of poetry is a memoir and how much is a scrap of a novel. And the poet will also be just ignorant of the truth of their source material.

In much of the West, we falsely put poetry on a pedestal. However, as our proclivity towards apophenia demonstrates, inside, we are all poets.

Now it’s your turn. Write a haiku about some false pattern you’ve seen or some story you have created with an amphropromorphized character from nature. Your haiku can either be a traditional one, with three lines using the 5-7-5 syllable pattern, or you can write a free verse haiku.

Remember, there are no poetry police. This is a place for creative expression. So take some risks with your haiku. If you’re feeling brave, share your haiku in the comments!

Do you enjoy my work? There are lots of ways you can support me as an independent writer and artist. Just reading and sharing my work helps a lot! If you have the means to do so, here are a few other ways you can support me:

Thanks for reading! Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,