Wherein I Discover the True Art of Haiku

 I have been reading Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.  I think my friend Kim from writing class mentioned it.  Or maybe it was in the writing prompts for that week.  The title alone would have made me devour it.  It's a book about how to write or how one woman encourages herself and others to write.  Sometimes those kinda books snore me.  But this one has chapters that are short and easily digested while one is sitting on the can.  (TMI?  Really?  I don't trust anyone who doesn't do this.  I mean what ARE you doing in there if not grabbing some down time to read while you go about your business?)

Anyway, this morning the chapter is entitled 'A Sensation of Space' in which she talks about the need to study the FORM of the kind of writing you are interested in doing.  Makes sense.  I wouldn't let someone drive my car without an understanding of how.  I wouldn't attempt to recreate some Julia Child masterpiece without knowing what I need and what steps I'm going to have to dance.  The exercise for this is to write short poems - 3 lines about whatever you see around you.  In 3 minutes.  Easy peasy - this is the kinda stuff the girl loves....

Pink shavings 

                                                            Removed into a bowl
                                                       Veiled the image for a time

OK.....diggin it.  She then goes on to discuss how what we are taught and know as the haiku form with its familiar 5-7-5 syllabic distribution is not really what the form is meant to be.  How that structure misses the mark.  And I think well then anything can be a haiku.........

And there is that little bit of breathing room.  It all can be a haiku.  It is all a haiku if we just look for it.  In fact, the River of Small Stones blog challenge was simply about writing haiku in their proper form.