Dylan Tweney is an editor at Wired and has been publishing tinywords, a daily magazine of haiku and micropoetry, since 2000. In this presentation, he talks about how haiku can change your life.

1. by Dylan Tweney
Practical Haiku
How a tiny, ancient form of poetry can make your life
better by making you more creative, a better writer,
happier, nicer to be around, more productive, sexier …

2. Everybody knows how to
write haiku, right?
5 Haiku are easy
7 But sometimes they don’t make sense
5 Refrigerator
Rolf Nelson, threadless.com

3. Actually, it’s not
so simple
There’s a lot more to haiku than counting
syllables.
On a withered bough on a bare branch
A crow alone is perching; a crow lands
Autumn evening now. autumn dusk
Basho, tr. Kenneth Yasuda Basho, tr. Jane Reichhold

4. But it’s a lot more
fun!
sudden downpour –
no one wins
the wet-t-shirt contest
David Giacalone

5. How haiku helps you live
better
Haiku helps you write more precisely
home addition–
the carpenter's math
penciled on drywall
Barry George

6. Photo: GregHickman
Haiku helps you
see
The message that precedes all others -- in art as
well as life -- is simple: pay attention
Harlan Ellison

7. Haiku teaches patience…
Because you can’t always go out and make a haiku, you often have
to wait for one to come to you.

8. Haiku helps you appreciate the
small, wonderful things in life
Like cherry petals, ants, spoons, blades of grass, peeling paint, nuts
and bolts, dew, earlobes, discarded coins, scraps of paper, oil
rainbows in puddles, snowflakes, stray wisps of hair …
Photo: Lily

9. The haiku way: How
you can make it
happen
1. Read haiku every day
Daily Issa http://cat.xula.edu/issa/
Mann Library, Cornell http://haiku.mannlib.cornell.edu/
@dailyku
tinywords.com

10. The haiku way
1. Read haiku every day
2. Write haiku every day

11. The haiku way
1. Read haiku every day
2. Write haiku every day
3. Be alert to haiku moments
morning news
with the paper, I bring in
a cherry petal
Dylan Tweney

12. Haiku Basics: Immediacy
Right here, right now. Lookit this!
Photo: Funkandjazz

13. Photo: intherough
Think small
Mars landing --
a tendril of red dust
shifts from a footfall
Alan Summers

14. Show, don’t tell
in the old stable
we made hot, passionate love
like wild horses do
anonymous horrible poet
stolen kisses
barn swallows
twitter in the eaves
Mike Farley

15. Contrast/
comparison
2 parts: short - long or long - short
the whoosh of steam
from the espresso machine –
frosty evening
Charles Trumbull

16. Use natural
language
If you can’t say it with a straight face, try again

17. in one breath the whole autumn
Valeria Simonova-Cecon
“One breath
poetry”
10-12 syllables is usually enough

18. Look at the world as a “what's
wrong with this picture?” puzzle
mannequin faces
a cosmetic counter woman
offers a spritz
Jeffrey Winke
Photo: Lisa Brewster

19. Share your haiku with
others
ReadWritePoem.org
WorldHaikuReview.org
Haiku Poets of Northern California – hpnc.org
Or, just write haiku and send them to your friends, leave them
tucked in library books, on Muni, scrawled on the bathroom wall…

20. dylan@tweney.com
@tinywords
@dylan20
Happy haiku-ing
hum of the laptop
watching a lost world flicker to life
Dylan Tweney