Write Your Own Haiku

In this fun Japanese children's book, kids will learn to create haiku—elegant and simplistic Japanese poems.

Haiku is a uniquely Japanese form of poetry that uses vivid words and imagery to capture a feeling or a moment in just three lines. Short but powerful, haiku poems are easy and fun to write and share with your friends. Haiku has become increasingly popular in school curriculums around the world, particularly among teachers introducing students to the art of poetry as well as Asian history and heritage. The activities in this haiku-for-kids book will show you how to create haiku and will help you to think up meaningful words and images with which you can write beautiful poetry.

Write Your Own Haiku For Kids introduces four styles of haiku to readers with clear explanations and numerous examples. This book includes chapters on:

• Your first haiku—how to get started writing this classic form of poetry
• Haiku about Nature—a traditional element in haiku
• Haibun—Haiku with a short story
• Haiga—Haiku with a drawing
• Renga—Haiku that you write together with friends

The study and creation of haiku is a great way to have fun with both writing and reading poetry while exploring remarkable aspects of Japanese culture.

Patricia Donegan served on the faculty of East-West poetics at Naropa University under Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was a student of haiku master Seishi Yamaguchi, and a Fulbright scholar to Japan. She is a meditation teacher, previous poetry editor for Kyoto Journal, and a longtime member of the Haiku Society of America. Her haiku works include Love Haiku: Japanese Poems of Yearning, Passion & Remembrance (cotranslated with Yoshie Ishibashi), Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart, Haiku: Asian Arts for Creative Kids, and Chiyo-ni Woman Haiku Master (cotranslated with Yoshie Ishibashi). Her poetry collections include: Hot Haiku, Bone Poems, Without Warning, Heralding the Milk Light, and haiku selections in various anthologies.

She won first prize in the 1998 Mainichi International Haiku Contest and won a Merit Book Award for translation from the Haiku Society of America for her book on Chiyo-ni, also in 1998. Her books on haiku have combined scholarship and insight in reaching young and old to inspire and sustain a lifelong interesting in haiku poetry, in both Japanese and English.