The primary purpose of these workshops was to introduce students to a visual thinking approach to writing, based on images and associations from their own memories.

Haiku is a poetry of perceptions, so it has a powerful impact on the reader's memory. The natural result of reading haiku is to remember similar situations and feelings (and, of course, to write those memories down as new haiku or to create a painting in response).

The workshop began with students closing their eyes and imagining the moment and related feelings of various haiku by famous American and Japanese haiku writers. For example, what do you imagine when you close your eyes to "see" this well-known haiku by Colorado sheep farmer, James Tipton:

the sun coming up . . .
five eggs
in the iron skillet

Images appeal to the senses. What colors do you see in this haiku? How did you know the skillet was black? What can you hear? Can you taste the eggs cooking in the skillet? Is it cold at dawn, and why do you feel the warmth of the stove or fire? Where do you imagine you are when you see this sunrise and hear those eggs cooking? What kind of day is this going to be?

By imagining and discussing several haiku, the students begin to understand that if you use images in your writing, you don't have to explain as much to the reader. The images contain rich details such as colors, touch, smells and sounds.

The second major realization from reading haiku is that each haiku is about a single instant in time, and that each haiku is written about a specific place. This is important because each haiku must establish a mood or atmosphere, a feeling that we associate with being in a certain place at a particular time of the year. To write haiku, the students were asked to imagine being at a specific location, then we gathered up possible images that might be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or felt at that location. We wrote haiku from these collected images.

As students began writing haiku, they wanted to know about the form. What about the seventeen syllables? I ask them how many syllables are in haiku, and one of them invariably gets it right—there are two syllables in the word haiku. I stress that haiku are usually made up of two fragments, two images that are placed next to each other.

Haiku are not sentences. They may not have a verb at all. They are simply two images unified through a single instant in time and a particular place. Sentences are too complete and leave nothing for the imagination of the reader. Haiku are imagination "jump starts" inviting you to complete the scene that the writer begins. They only bring up a couple of things and don't tell the whole story, never explain the feelings involved, and leave it up to the reader to finish according to the reader's own imagination.

The essential parameters of a haiku include: (1) the importance of haiku as a means of stimulating memories and associations in response to the images of the haiku (how to read a haiku is the essential thing) followed by (2) an understanding of how haiku are literary art made from images (images are words that appeal to the senses) in a (3) form of two parts . . . one image establishing the seasonal context or scene . . . pause . . . then our reader's imagination gets a second image . . . which invites the reader try to put the two together into a new unified imagined whole. That's the joy of haiku.

The natural response to a haiku is to write another haiku. After reading and writing several haiku in collaboration as a class and individually based on various imagined scenarios, students were invited to complete two paintings.

Millikin honors student, Jennifer Griebel, shared her haiku painting "River Fog" with the students. She discussed the goals and techniques of Japanese sumi-e paintings. Like haiku, sumi-e paintings only provide a minimal number of images leaving things deliberately incomplete so the viewer completes the scene in their own mind. She showed the students how Japanese kanji are ideogrammatic, suggesting images of things in words. She showed them the derivation of mountain and river and gate in Japanese kanji, then she encouraged the students to try a painting using only black paint.

If you use evocative images, the viewer will fill in the colors themselves. She also encouraged the students to resist the urge to fill the paper with paint, but to include only two or three things in the painting. After completing a black ink painting, the students were encouraged to use colors with the same technique of including only two or three things and not necessarily painting the entire objects.

When you effectively combine sumi-e and haiku, the goal is not merely to illustrate the haiku, nor for the haiku to merely provide commentary on the painting.

The goal is for the two works of art to leap by associations and to resonate with compatible feelings. Neither finishes or completes the other. Both continue to ask the reader or the viewer to continue to feel, to imagine, to live beyond the moment being presented.

The reader and viewer get to make the connections between the two works of art.

The workshops concluded with reading the haiku aloud and viewing paintings by the students. And hopefully, of course, their journey with poetry and painting continues on . . . a never-ending life of moments worth painting or writing as haiku.

Still dreaming up haiku,                     

—Dr. Randy Brooks                     
Millikin University