Writing Exercise

Write a Haiku Sequence for Your Valentine

How to write short, linked poems for a thoughtful gift

When it comes to love poetry, it’s easy to feel like the pressure’s on. We can Google an endless supply of famous love poems. What more can we possibly have to say about love?

And how can we write something “good enough” that can truly express how we feel about someone we love, especially on a special occasion like Valentine’s Day or for an anniversary or birthday?

I say, don’t psych yourself out. Writing a love poem can be as straightforward as writing a tiny note to tell someone how you feel: if you can jot “I love you” on a post-it or send it in a text message, you can write a love poem.

Focus on small moments

In The Zen of Creativity, author and Buddhist teacher John Daido Loori quotes 17th century haiku master Matsuo Basho as saying that haiku are “simply what is happening here in this particular place at this particular moment.”

Loori continues: “To write haiku, to become this intimate with the moment, the poet must completely disengage, if only for an instant, all of her interpretive faculties. The mind must become one with the world, a detail of the world — the splash, a peach blossom, a neon sign flashing along the highway, the sound of a mountain stream. The poet’s craft has to slip through the intellectual filters and instinctively record the image that has been perceived.”

The intimacy of the moment has a lot to do with love, I’d say. By writing a short series of poems inspired by haiku, you share presence and awareness within your relationship and remind your loved one of images and feelings that you’ve experienced together or that come to your mind when you think of that person.

Writing haiku in English

By experimenting with writing haiku and haiku-like poems, we’re reminded of how we’re always working within a tradition of poets encompassing many times and many cultures. On the technical side, the short, compressed structure of haiku is great practice for refining poetic skill.

On the practical side, most of us have some experience reading and even writing haiku, so it’s a familiar place to start, and the short length of the poems can make them feel less intimidating. You can sit down for an hour and draft a bunch of haiku, then select your favorites to share with your loved one.

In my personal opinion (there’s some debate about this), we can’t totally translate the true Japanese form of haiku into English. We can, however, create our own versions of the form.

For Jack Kerouac, “the American Haiku type” are “simple 3-line poems… free of all poetic trickery” which take up everyday objects and experiences and describe them in spare, simple language. Instead of counting syllables, Kerouac is intent on specific but often overlooked details.

Time to start writing

OK, get out your notebook and pen, or open a new document on your computer. It’s time to express your feelings for your beloved by composing a series of short poems inspired by haiku techniques.

Here are a few tips.

• You don’t have to count syllables or follow a particular pattern of line length; just follow the spirit of haiku as Loori describes it above.
• Describe what you see, hear, touch, taste, and/or feel when you’re near the person you love.
• Express a series of tiny yet deeply felt moments.
• A classic haiku exercise is to write a set of “four seasons” haiku. Think of your experiences with and feelings for your loved one at different times of year.
• You can also try a variation on the four seasons and focus on different units of time — for example, revisit your experiences from each year you’ve been with your partner, or describe your thoughts of him or her at different times of day.
• Another idea is to write a series of “occasional” haiku, such as a short poem to describe each of your last few anniversaries, or a series of little poems to mark other important days or events in your life together, such as the birth of your children, trips you’ve taken together, etc.

It can help to think of poetry as a means for you to speak directly into your loved one’s ear. To write a haiku sequence, you simply have to be willing to play with words, arranging them into lines as you see fit. It’s a precious gift, I think, to take the time to recall moments, images, and feelings and share them with someone in a creative way.

Your haiku sequence can be an opportunity to say things you’ve never managed to say, or it can restate feelings, experiences, and memories that you’ve shared many times before — or it can do a combination of both. See what comes out when you sit down to write.

Creative ways to share your work

My girlfriend had a birthday not long after we’d first started dating. It was too soon for me to buy her a gift, but I wanted to do something sweet. So instead of a birthday card, I gave her a handmade book folded out of a single sheet of paper, with haiku on each page.

I added some collage and colored pencil details, too. Here’s an example of one of the poems, plus a photo of that page in the little book.

First time you leaned close to kiss me, your eyes turned soft and gold. Falling leaves.

I hope you’re feeling inspired to write some short poems to share, and maybe to present them in a creative way, too, like writing them in a card or in a small notebook. Or what about putting a few poems in a picture frame? You could even cut and paste lines from magazines to create your poems.…

Let me know if you try writing a series of haiku for a gift, and I hope you’ll share in the comments if you have other stories of writing poems for loved ones.

P.S. If you’d like some ideas for writing about non-romantic love, please check out the following exercise.