I’ve heard people say, in person and online that they would like to write poetry, but they don’t know what to write about. I think if you don’t know what to write about, you should read more poetry. If you want to write poetry, you need to read it. I’ve come up with haiku by getting ideas from other people’s writing. I’m not talking about plagiarism; copying someone’s haiku and calling it your own but getting ideas about what to write about from what others write about. Basically, you can write about anything in a haiku. We’ve had a family of Bluebirds in one of our nest boxes recently and the young ones just fledged yesterday. This gave me an idea:

fledglings

trading home

for the wide world

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It’s a simple haiku with 2, 3 and 4 syllables. It’s short, to the point, and it tells a story. Again, I was outside listening to the birds and came up with this one:

grackles cowbirds wrens

all talking at once

in the trees

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This one sets a scene and tells a story. It’s not Earth shattering, it’s not world changing, and yet it’s a good haiku. This morning it was really foggy outside. That helped me to come up with these two:

a fine mist

settling on my skin

out of the fog

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the pale sun

a distant light

through the fog

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Both of these put you in the scene and if you’ve been in fog before, you know what its like. They seem familiar. Reading other’s work helps you to understand that anything can be written about in a haiku. Whenever I write I always try to use as few words as possible and only those words that most effectively tell the story. In the last one above, I could’ve written, “pale sun” instead of the pale sun but it seems to work better with a 3, 4, and 3 syllable count. I could also have written “distant light” instead of a distant light but kept it like it is for the same reason. You have to try different combinations of words, syllables and phrasing to see how they all sound. And more importantly than how they sound, but how they read. Most haiku are read rather than spoken.

Another idea is to take a finished haiku and re-write it. The second to the last one above could be re-written like this:

the fog

settling

on my skin

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This one is even shorter but it still gives you the same idea. Have you ever been in fog so heavy that you could feel it? That’s what this was like.

So I recommend spending time thinking about what you want to write about. Toss around some ideas from what you experience out in nature, or events, things people have said, whatever. And definitely read haiku! Read lots of it!