A Full Year Of Cheryl's Everyday Haiku in 2013

PART 1

One year ago on January 1st 2013, I challenged myself to write daily haiku and post them on-line. I did my best to write at least one per day. The response has gone well beyond what I expected. Thank you all very much. I am writing this to share with you excerpts from my adventures.

On some days, my circumstances, or temporarily low levels of inspiration and creativity, kept me from writing on a given day, I would write more than one on the next day(s). Sometimes, I was so inspired, I would write more than one per day. 

My creative process was fueled by other poems I found on-line. I would leaf through haiku anthologies I collected. It was easy to find inspiration among those pages. I would flip a page or two, find a rare treasure and suddenly, I was ready to write.

Haiku is very much alive in numerous on-line forums. One of the first I found was Twitter. The hashtag #haiku is tweeted every minute of every hour of everyday. Dozens of people around the world read my haiku and clicked "favorite" and/or "retweet". 

When I had trouble starting a poem, I would search through other haiku tweets and deconstruct a poem I liked, then I would write a new one adding my own spin to the concept. I made a lot of new Twitter friends by doing this. Twitter has, by far, the most vibrant community of haiku writers. 

Sometimes other poets would reply to my haiku tweets with new poems of their own. If something was happening in current events, a few of us might start a chain of haiku. For instance, the "Product Poet" would post something about a popular sports figure who happened to be in the news. Another poet would see the haiku and use the last line to start another new haiku. A third poet, maybe me, would take the last line from the 2nd poem and write a third. This was lots of fun and would happen quickly. Poets could be from anywhere, and there was no limit to how many people could participate.

In April, after I began posting on Blogger and tweeting links to these posts containing my haiku, I began to see my name included in tweets for paper.li's. "Haiku Today" and "The Poetry and Me Daily Part 3" started picking up my poems and featuring them in these on-line niche papers that gave all included more exposure. At first, I would see one or two per month. By the end of 2013, it was happening almost daily.

I knew about the dynamic haiku community on Twitter before I started Cheryl's Everyday Haiku. On Facebook I discovered #NaHaiWriMo (National Haiku Writing Month). During each day of February, the shortest month, participants write one haiku, the shortest poetic form, and post online. Since I had been writing one per day since the beginning of January, I decided I would write two haiku per day in order to participate in this project.

My activity on Facebook connected me with some very accomplished and opinionated haiku poets. I learned that there is a minimalist school of thought that suggests haiku is less than 17 syllables. Proponents of this approach are adamant that syllables are inaccurately correlated to their Japanese counterparts. And because this causes western, English, haiku to contain much more information, they insist that the 5-7-5, or 17 syllable guideline be abandoned.

I disagree with these people. I believe that 17 syllables is here to stay. It is the American, or western method of writing haiku that should continue to be practiced and celebrated, along with the shorter mini-micro approaches. During the last year, I attempted to write both ways. I don't believe anyone has to choose one way to write haiku. Neither should anyone argue with others to get them to write a certain way or stop writing the way they like to write.

This is poetry. Taking sides in this battle will not cure cancer or decrease the prison population. Choosing to write one way or the other, or both, will not crack the earth into halves. While I started the year staunchly adhering to 17 syllables and loosely grasping 5-7-5, I changed my mind and decided to embrace all approaches to writing haiku, as long as I didn't exceed 17 syllables.

Google+ has one of the warmest and most interactive haiku forums. I started posting there in April as well as on my blogger page. I continued until the end of the year posting on five social media pages: Twitter, Blogspot (Blogger), Facebook, WordPress and Google+. A handful of people joined my personal sites (WordPress & Blogger).while 70+ people liked my haiku page on Facebook. And I gained hundreds of  followers on Twitter and Google+.

So, what's next for me and my haiku? I followed in the footsteps of another poet I saw on Facebook and Twitter when I started. As I watched her begin her second year, when I began my first, she started adding images to her poems. I added photos periodically, so I really want to make my own original changes..

Video haiku might work. Tout and Vine are apps for creating short videos, I think most spoken haiku will fit into a 15 second Tout video, and shorter haiku will fit on a 6 second Vine. Of course, YouTube has poetry of all sizes. People will enjoy seeing the faces of fellow haiku poets in motion. Maybe the hashtag could be #VidKu. What if just one quarter of the poets who are posting haiku on-line started doing so on video? I think I want to find out!