How to Write Haiku Poems

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Laura, and today I'm going to talk with you about how to write Haiku poems. A haiku poem is a short poem which is no more than three phrases sort of reflecting on a moment in time or an image in nature. A good place for you to go first of all when you're starting to write haikus is haiku.com which is actually a big online community of lots and lots of different haikus. The examples that I'm using today is an anonymous haiku submitted to that website. So basically, you can write your haiku about anything but generally haikus are written about nature and a feeling in time. So what you want to do is you want to start by putting yourself into a calm mood in order to start writing your haiku and contemplate something beautiful that you've seen recently. Like for example, the haiku that I'm reading today was prompted by a picture of a drop of water standing on a piece of grass. And so people responded with their haikus to this visual image and the haiku today is called, you don't event have to title your haiku, but this one has a title and the title is Loneliness. Tiny drops of rain slowly falling from the sky; They're tears from my eyes. And when we look at this haiku we see that there are indeed three lines. The first line is tiny drops of rain. Tiny drops of rain which has five syllables. The second line is slowly falling from the sky. Slowly falling from the sky--seven syllables. And the last is they're tears from my eyes. They're tears from my eyes. So you have your five, seven, five rhyming progression in a haiku. And that is really all there is to it when you're writing a haiku. You need to just let the calmness sort of infect you and just let yourself go."