My interest in the short, constrained verse was sparked when I got a mobile phone.
Back in the day the limited number of characters that could be sent by SMS suggested the format would be good to send poems to my friends.
The title of this blog came from one of those haiku.
The following year I began writing one each day, a practice I've largely maintained -- although there was a slip last year.
The little I know about haiku comes from following Naviar Records' haiku challenges and the poem shared today came with this insight from Masaoka Shiki:
He advocated realistic observation by “sketching” (shasei) poems and going out into nature with notebooks, thus abandoning the traditional subjects of haiku of the time. His advice for an aspiring poet was, “Use both imaginary pictures and real ones, but prefer the real ones.”
It's an approach that makes sense to me, as I've been writing haiku in response to nature photographs more and more since late 2017.
That was when I collaborated with Naviar Records to develop the Crossing Streams exhibition.
For that Dr Greg Pritchard to run a writing workshop, as he had contributed to the Slow Book Haiku exhibition that I'd invited to fill the other room at the Narrandera Arts Centre.
In his workshop Greg introduced the term 'ekphrasis,' which is a creative response to an artwork.
