Welcome back to Haiku Week at Teachers Write! Today, mentor poet Loree Griffin Burns shares her own haiku experience and offers up a writing challenge with lots of bonus resources to explore! 

Finding Haikus

My haiku journey began in the summer, near a beach in Rhode Island. Not on the beach,
because it was raining there and had been for days. But in a library near the beach, where a used book sale was underway. I was coaxing three kids through another wet vacation day with a new- to-them book when a slim paperback about writing haiku—Seeds of a Birch Tree by Clark Strand—caught my eye. It was an impulse buy. Twenty-five cents. The kids and I carted our books back to our rented cottage and read for the rest of the day.

“As haiku poets, we begin simply,” Strand wrote in his book, “by carrying a notebook and walking in nature every day.” 

The next morning, I got up before everyone. I walked a notebook into the yard behind the
cottage and sat on a damp, wooden chair. I planted my bare feet in wet grass, considered the salty mist, tuned into the ocean nearby. I wrote my first haiku.

I’ve been writing them ever since.

Most of us know learn that these small poems have a precise three-line structure: five
syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second, five syllables in the third. Some of us
know they are small poems that somehow feel big. But did you know that in Japan, where haiku evolved from older forms, the poems always include a season word? Hot or hammock let a reader know a poem was written in summer and words like chilly or harvest moon say fall. Snow and New Year’s Eve are season words for winter, mud and dandelion for spring. This aspect of the traditional haiku form was completely new to me. And thrilling.

I started bringing a notebook everywhere, stopping to scribble when I saw something that
felt like the start of a haiku. I composed in the woods or the garden or the carpool line, tapping out syllables with my fingers. I filled a first haiku notebook. I started a second. And as I did, I remembered how to savor the world around me.

outside after dark—
even the songbirds struggle
to let this day go

taken in their prime
by a friendly guy and his
mower: cornflowers

endless autumn rains
flatten even the cardinal
and the titmouse

stopping a minute
to collect flakes on my tongue—
fiftieth winter

The season words in the poems above are songbirds (spring), cornflowers (summer),
autumn (fall), and flakes (winter). I’ve come to see season words as the most magical part of the form. These words connect me to deeper pasts, to the winters and summers recorded by other humans—my peers and my teachers, but also complete strangers and long-dead haiku poets writing in languages I don’t speak. I’ve always been part of this continuum, even before the rainy vacation and the twenty-five cents. I just didn’t realize it before I began paying attention. Before I started writing haiku.

Surely you’ve guessed where this is going? Your Teachers Write assignment for today is
simple: find a haiku. Start by getting outside. Bring a notebook or a camera if you like. Pay
attention to what catches you up, what pulls at your imagination. When you find your something, make a note or snap a picture. Later, when you have some quiet time to get creative, pull out your notes and your pictures. Look over this list of season words. Are there any that tie your recorded haiku moment to the season you are writing in? Let yourself play.

See if you can fit what you saw or heard or smelled or sensed in that resonate moment into the delicate seventeen- syllable container of a haiku.

Resources for the haiku curious:

Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey, by Clark Strand (25 th
Anniversary Edition, Monkfish Books, 2023)

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, edited by Robert Hass (HarperCollins, 1994)

The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate Haiku, by William J. Higginson and Penny Harter (Kodansha, 2013)

Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness & Open Your Heart, by Patricia Donegan (Shambala, 2008)

Haiku: This Other World, by Richard Wright (Anchor Books, 1998)

Tricycle monthly haiku challenge

Yuki Teikei Haiku Society

Loree Griffin Burns writes books that celebrate our natural world and the people who study it. While researching her award-winning science books for children, she has beachcombed on both coasts, cruised the Pacific in search of plastic, surveyed birds in Central Park, stung herself with a honeybee, visited the wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly (on horseback!) and lived for a week on an uninhabited volcanic island in Iceland. Recently she’s been studying the insects that live in her neighborhood, work which inspired the picture books You’re Invited to a Moth Ball and Honeybee Rescue.  Loree also teaches in the Writing for Children and Young Adults program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Learn more at www.loreeburns.com.

Note from Kate: Teachers Write has always been and will always be free, but it does take many hours of work from me and our guest authors. Please say thanks by buying our books! 

Two more quick notes…

1. Don’t forget that the amazing Jen Vincent hosts Teachers Write check-ins on her blog each Friday! Stop by tomorrow to share your progress and meet your fellow campers. 

2. Some of our Teachers Write campers are involved in a project that explores poetry and healing, and they’d love for you to fill out their survey if you have time. From Denise Krebs:

Teachers Write friends, We are a group of teachers who write poetry at EthicalELA.com, an open online writing community founded by Dr. Sarah Donovan of Oklahoma State University. Currently we’re in the process of creating a publication of stories of poetic healing along with prompts for teachers and students of middle grades through college students. If you are an educator who writes poetry and shares poetry with students, we are hoping to hear from you. Please help us make this the best collection it can be by taking our survey at: https://okstateches.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0kwyrahDjPxZdoW