Spring Equinox 2025 – Haiku Musings Event

To mark the Southern Hemisphere Spring Equinox in 2025, we offer a new interactive opportunity – a chance to contribute a Haiku Musing and to respond to other poets’ musings. The prompt question for you to muse on is:

What do you find most helpful when writing haiku?

Writing a haiku can involve many considerations, such as where you find inspiration, the kinds of experiences you like to write about, your aims and approach, the haiku craft and techniques you employ, and how you go about editing your compositions. You are invited to share your thoughts on aspects important to your haiku compositional process. 

Please keep your Musing to no more than 250 words.

You may also respond to other poets’ musings with succinct comments.

This Haiku Musing event opens on Saturday, 20th September 2025, Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST), and closes on Sunday, 28th September. 

We look forward to contributions from haiku poets worldwide.

Please enter your musing in the comments section below, and reply to a poet’s musing by using the ‘reply’ option below the comment.

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52 thoughts on “Spring Equinox 2025 – Haiku Musings Event”

  1. A Story of Two Haiku Journals    posted for Rose     

    Rose van Son

    Walking the forest trails is one of my favourite pastimes. So much to see on the forest floor, so much to discover high in the trees. Walking is a journey of discovery: the river, the beach, even to the end of the street, there is so much to unearth, to haiku.

    For this I keep two journals – one, a notebook to jot any images I come across, a draft moment of what I see / hear – for sound is important to me, the crunch of dried leaves, the sound of words on the page. I take my camera for photographing fungi or wildflowers on the forest floor. Spring is prime WA wildflower season, tiny spider and donkey orchids, greenhoods, hide amongst the forest undergrowth.   A time for intense observation!   

    I note their changes from past years: were the orchids early or late? Have they reappeared at all? Nature’s loss is often overlooked. I juxtapose the past with the present; make edits, over weeks.    

    When I am happy with the haiku, I transfer it into my ‘Finished Haiku journal’.  But, I hear you say, is a haiku ever finished? Sometimes I add the date but not always: the finished haiku has already told me so much of its life’s journey. I sit with this journal, reflect and enjoy a meditative moment with a cup of tea; the haiku completed and ready for submission should a deadline arise.   

    Liked by 2 people

    1. This sounds like an excellent practice, Rose. I too, find that I need to keep haiku for a while to work on them. They often seem wonderful at first — the rosy glow of the composer suffuses the poem.

      I think it takes a while before the impact of the observation fades, so we can examine the haiku as a reader. Then we can see if it communicates effectively when removed from our first perspective of observing something, or perhaps ruminating on some observation or idea. Only the words are left. If the words alone convey something vivid, that seems like success.

      Often it takes a reader’s view to show me areas where the words are plain as daylight to me, but obscure from another’s point of view. I think of that as the difference between a private haiku, which conveys information to the one person, and a public haiku. A haiku that has meaning only to the writer is also valuable.

      Liked by 1 person

  2. As it’s gone quiet and writers have expressed so much about the writing process so well already…

    I wonder how people tackle their currently? Not just what topics, be it natural history, which I carried out extensively in The Blo͞o Outlier Journal Summer Issue 2022 The Natural History Haiku (Issue #3), but with the tiny methods and techniques from enjambment/line break choices, to no or some personal pronouns, purely direct observation only, or part direct experience part internal thought, and if so how much internal thought.

    And what do you all think about Show Don’t Tell which I never really understand for years and years, and now do not fully agree with it! <grin>

    And anything else that you can think about.

    I’ve written a lot of Australian haiku and haibun as I lived in Queensland, mostly farmland, for five years, travelled in the Northern Territory and found out a few years that my biological mother lived just on the outskirts of Perth WA.

    warm regards,

    Alan

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Hi Alan. I feel there were various misunderstandings when haiku spread into languages other than Japanese, one being the avoidance of using ‘I’.

      From my understanding from a Japanese language teacher, when I took classes, the Japanese avoid using ‘I’ as part of the structure of the language. Various usages have come about because of politeness. This is not the case in the English language, so there is no particular reason to avoid using ‘I’ in English language haiku.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I can’t quote a source though years ago I came across that so much is implied in Japanese that they don’t need to state personal pronouns.

        I do believe that multiple personal pronouns in any kind of writing, sentences, paragraphs, is a little too much, especially in a haiku in English.

        Of course in a tanka, at least an English-language tanka, two or three personal pronouns seem okay:

        origami trick

        I fold in on myself

        for the night

        singing

        the last bird out

        Alan Summers
        Poetry Corner: Birdsong ed. Kathabela Wilson (May 2016)

        asthma attack–

        pulling her outside

        away from friends

        her breathing steadies

        while my own trembles

        Alan Summers

        The Strand Book Of International Poets 2010

        Author: Edited by Imran Hanif and Jane Lee ISBN: 9781907340062 

        the undertaker’s 

        awkwardness

        butterflies are dying 

        as I help wrap her 

        in a winding sheet 

        Alan Summers

        The Right Touch of Sun

        2017 Tanka Society of America Members’ Anthology

        ed. Margaret Dornaus and David Terelinck

        Liked by 1 person

  3. On thinking about how I write haiku, I would say my writing falls into writing after slow reflection or “fast reflection” or just for fun.

    Slow reflection happens after either Buddhist meditation or quaker silence (worship) , this is about getting into a deep silence and then just letting an image form.  The image can then be formed into a haiku later

    Fast reflection – in practice this is not so fast. the image or idea may be weeks of months old. It may already have been expanded into a longer poem. Yet after a period of musing the actual writing with be very quick.

    Just for fun are challenges I like to set myself – can I write about this topic or that topic. In truth it is probably very similar to the fast reflection as I have been thinking about an idea for a while

    What I love about Haiku is getting to the absolute essence of an idea or an image and then juxtaposing this with a different or an insight that makes the original image deeper. Although I have been writing Haiku all my life I have only just found the Australian Haiku Society, and it is already enriching my writing. It is wonderful to read all the great Haiku and where possible share, but I am discovering the form is a lot freer than the 5-7-5 form. Although I must admit I am attracted to the old form but being able to move away from it provides flexibility and creativity  

    Liked by 2 people

  4. In my early days of composing haiku I found two guides particularly helpful.

    –

    My serious interest in haiku started towards the end of a period of living in Japan. On my return to Australia I found John Bird’s approach to seasonality and the use of ‘keywords’ helped me to situate my own poems within the Australian context. I benefitted greatly from John’s considerations of seasonality and homogenous haiku.

    Seasonality: https://users.mullum.com.au/jbird/dreaming/ozku-about-kigo.html

    Homogenous haiku: https://users.mullum.com.au/jbird/dreaming/ozku-about-homogenous.html

    –

    American poet Jane Reichhold set me on the haiku path through two of her books. The first one was her Basho: The Complete Haiku (Kodansha International, Tokyo, 2008), which came out just a few months before I returned to Australia. The second was her very practical Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide (Kodansha International, Tokyo, 2002), which I found in a bookshop at Narita airport on a subsequent trip to Japan. Some of Jane’s materials can be accessed at The Haiku Foundation Digital Library.

    Techniques: https://thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/items/show/625

    Fragment and Phrase Theory: https://thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/items/show/781

    –

    Leanne Mumford

    Sydney, Australia

    Liked by 3 people

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