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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our understanding is limited. For example, at the periphery of what you are saying, other creatures perceive the world with different focus than humans and have senses that outclass our range of perception. Haiku from the perspective of a cat? Or a bat? That is a thought to mull over. I include different creatures that live in a virtual realm that we use marginally, but only partially understand.
lost in the margins of sunset.
beautiful.
I love your haiku!
I agree that we must be careful not to allow our view of haiku to retract to being merely a vehicle for nature observations. Haiku have long been used to make perceptive social and psychological observations.
Ah, Cli-fi (climate fiction)! I feel there is no fiction, everything strange is real, and hopefully a better understanding of liminal realism (which I feel is the actual reality and not our filtered/perceived one) will become clearer, and of course haiku has a role to play, as always, tackling the hard-edge of today into tomorrow’s world.
Hi, Alan, I can relate to that. I am writing a speculative fiction novel about a climate changed future earth where humans seem to have vanished and sophisticated biobots have taken their place, so certainly at the margins of reality! There is much music, so no doubt haiku are written.
Hi Lynette,
Back in early 1990s that Churchill district golf club was a sweet walk at dusk. I actually never had a drink in the club with its pokies.
It was a fascinating experience for my brain to tell me there was a bird there, as I didn’t realise until a few steps on, and I just looked back in wonder and pleasure. I think it was my first ever glimpse of a frogmouth, I others after that, mostly in the daytime.
I guess it is so many things, it’s what liminal realism is all about, isn’t it? It’s part of the new empathy.
“liminal realism” is storytelling at the edges of scientific, mythical, and poetic worlds. It works as a kind of interspecies magic, situating the reader in-between human and other-than-human worlds.
Bénédicte Meillon, (August 2021)
warm regards,
Alan
Dear Alan,
Thanks for your reply. And yes, I like your comment about the ‘now-present’ being best caught in the future a split second away!
Regards,
Lakshman Bulusu
Hi Alan. I love Janice’s comments on your haiku. The haiku does lead the reader’s thoughts well beyond the words written in the haiku. My aim is usually to lead the reader’s empathy beyond the exact words. If the reader has experienced a personal fluff of feathers, or a feeling of joy at watching the bird or a sensation of pleasure that spring showers must be celebrated in a dry countryside then I feel I have succeeded.
What I feel about your haiku is the wonder at the sight of this bird, so silent and still at the verge of night. I am waiting for it to move. Waiting…waiting. It’s yellow eyes may follow me. And there is also a shocked surprise in our encounter. Not for the frogmouth, who is rarely surprised. As for the golfers, well they have gone and the bird can briefly occupy the part of his world that they have changed, much as birds use the telephone wires and chimneys, roof peaks etc.
Dear Lakshman,
I like the idea of “a haiku captures a moment in time, in the past, present, or future“
When everything is in the past the moment we experience something, our ‘now-present’ is best caught in the future a split second away!
Alan
As some of you might know, most of my reactions to haiku poetry prompts is to immediately pen a single line haiku! Though I still write a lot of 3-line haiku too.
The seasons, and not the natural seasons, but anything celebratory or otherwise during a season or part of a season (soccer, tennis, politics, war, music festivals such as Glastonbury or local Summer ones etc…) are to be explore and often ramp up a haiku.
I wrote an article about ginkō writing, for instance:
local pride festival
glints of perfect nail colour
in the pint of lager
Alan Summers
Ginko: All Fingers and Thumbs with Alan Summers
Blithe Spirit 33.3 (August 2023)
Summer kigo
Of course beer (and lager) are Summer kigo in Japan, and Pride Festivals are also often Summer events, mostly as we can believe the weather will be calm, dry, and warm!