Hi Noticers!
What have you seen out in the world today?
petal pirouettes
riding the wind from tree branch
to sidewalk below
The Story of a Moment
The most beautiful thing about a haiku is that it is a distillation of a moment. At its core, a haiku is an observation—of something you’ve seen, something you’ve imagined, or a combination of both.
Haiku are also the perfect vehicles for very short stories.
How do you tell the story of a moment?
First, you have to jettison the hero’s journey framework. The hero’s journey may work perfectly for a Pixar film or a novel, but you cannot cram all of that into seventeen syllables.
One classic example of a great small story is the famous frog haiku by Bashō:
old pond
a frog jumps into
the sound of water1
What happens in this story? when you read these words, you get a picture in your mind of what you think happened. Your picture and my picture are not the same. That is one of the brilliant things about using haiku to tell stories. It requires the active participation of your audience. It’s collaborative storytelling.
This poem is brilliant because it evokes sight and sound.
The full story plays out in the imagination of the reader. The writer is relying on the knowledge of the reader to make the story work. As a writer, you have to strike a balance between relying on reader inferences and writing explicit details. If you give too many details, the poem becomes obvious and less interesting. If you fail to give enough details or your audience misses your allusions, your poem becomes inscrutable.
One exercise I use to practice this balance is to write haiku related to well-known fairy tales. Here’s an example:
woman weds captor,
claims it's not Stockholm syndrome
town says he's a beast.
This entire poem hinges on the reader being able to make the inference to the right fairy tale from the context clues of woman weds captor and town says he’s a beast. The Stockholm syndrome line gives the poem a little flair and serves as an additional hint.
Do you recognize the fairy tale?2
This poem may not work as well with younger readers as the idea of Stockholm syndrome is no longer common knowledge since it has been discredited. But, if you are of a certain vintage, you have a clear understanding of that phrase.
Another special thing about haiku storytelling is that nothing needs to happen. You can tell a compelling seventeen-syllable story about something just being. Haiku tell stories of small actions and no actions at all.
Here is my attempt at a static haiku that still tells a story:
time stopped for a moment
floating in the turquoise sea
not staring at clouds
What do you see when you read these lines? Does it tell a story for you?
I’ve found that the better I get at using storytelling in haiku, the better my prose sentences become. Thinking of a haiku as a story also focuses your attention even more on the small dramas happening around you.
The bee is no longer just buzzing around, it is desperately trying to fulfill its genetic imperative to find nectar for the hive. And it’s not just high stakes for the bee. The flower cannot fulfill its duty without a pollinator. The story of the bee and the flower is not a fable, it’s an existential drama (or tragedy should something go wrong).
When writing haiku, your observations of the world can be a great source of inspiration, but you will often need to use your imagination to take your poem to the next level. Look again at the haiku comic I started with:
petal pirouettes
riding the wind from tree branch
to sidewalk below
I did not literally see a petal spin and gracefully fall to the ground when writing this poem. I saw an ornamental apple tree in bloom and a pile of petals underneath it. I made a note in my notebook about it. In my life, I’ve often seen petals floating in the wind. I've also seen many beautiful ballets. To write this haiku, I took what I saw and combined it with what I imagined happening to one of the petals on the ground.
The greatest haiku writers can pack a wallop in just three lines. The poems that move us most deeply are the ones that speak a story to our souls. However, the only way to ever write a great haiku, to tell a moving story in a three-line poem, is to write a lot of not-great haiku.
Practice your story skills today. Tell the story of a moment, and write a few haiku!
Artist Note
My dream is that one day, writing haiku will be seen to be as effective a mindfulness practice as meditation currently is. There is so much power in noticing things. Poetry writing of all kinds focuses your mind, engages your imagination, builds your empathy reflexes, and teaches you about your place in the world. Writing haiku is simple, but it is not easy.
Be the poetry you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
This translation of the poem is by Jane Reichhold. It is my favorite translation. Reichhold also notes that in Japanese, you cannot tell the difference if it is one frog or many frogs. The correct translation could very well be frogs jump into. My second favorite translation of this poem is by Alan Watts:
The old pond,
A frog jumps in:
Plop!
Allen Ginsberg’s translation is also fun and captures well the humorous aspect that classical haiku often embodied:
The old pond
A frog jumped in,
Kerplunk!
It’s Beauty and the Beast
My first haiku written when I was an undergraduate in a creative writing class in 1988!
Indian boys/
sinewy & doe-eyed/
frozen in headlights
You're a great teacher, Jason. Anything that slows us down is a win. I think you're luring us to haiku!