Introduction
This week at The Great Margin and The Daily Haiku we have been asked to set the Weekly Challenge (#TheWeeklyChallenge) for the marvellous and inspiring 64 Million Artists. No surprise it is to create a haiku with or without images around the theme of LOVE, one of our top ten all time favourites!
Here are some ideas for creating Love Haiku.
Word Association
Set a timer, say 5 minutes, the time it takes to boil a soft to hard egg! Write down anything and everything that LOVE brings to mind, don’t over-think, just get it down. At the end, highlight your favourites, maybe choose 5. Then choose your absolute favourite and there is a starting point for your haiku.
Object Association
Set a timer, say 10 minutes this time, enough time to take a shower! Collect physical objects around you that you LOVE and put them onto a table. Arrange them. Photograph them. Choose your favourite 5. Then your favourite one. This can inspire your haiku with or without image. You may also choose to draw or paint your object.
Nature
Go on a walk outside your front door. Collect some natural objects, eg, leaves, flowers, stones, shells. Again photograph them. Also video any of your favourite scenes on the walk. This is your starting point for a haiku. Describe what you see in the video and photograph. Focus on the senses.
Photographs
Choose a favourite photograph in your home, on your screens and describe what or who you love about it and why.
Food
What do you love to eat. Share a recipe, a meal, a picnic. Describe the tastes, the occasion, who if anyone you were with and this is the starting point for your haiku. Pancake Day coming up fast on the heels of Valentines Day so that might be a start.
Places
Where would you go if you could go anywhere? Think about a fantasy place you have never been and write a haiku about it then write about a favourite place (with or without images) this maybe inside a chair by the fire or a bench by the sea…
Childhood
What did you love as a child? Is it still what you love now or has it changed? These reflections can form the basis of a haiku with or without images.
Land Art
Find a place outside, garden, park, beach, moor, street – where you can recreate a haiku with stones, writing in sand, a combination of natural objects, found objects, chalk on a pavement. Maybe a message about kindness, sharing love, something inspiration that others will happen upon in these difficult times.
Postcard
Send a postcard about your life to yourself in a haiku listing all the things you love about your life.
What is love?
Use the questions from the WHAT IS HAIKU TO YOU workshop but swap in the word love and see what comes out.
Link: https://thegreatmargin.org/conversations/haiku-who-are-you-a-creative-exploration/
Send a Love Haiku in a text
If you were sending a text to someone you love in a haiku form what would you say? 3 lines, 5/7/5 syllables a guide not a rule.
Opposites Attract
Think about what you DON’T LOVE this can often be how we find out what we do LOVE.
HAVE FUN – ANYTHING GOES
Links:
Share your haiku with hashtag #TheWeeklyChallenge #LoveHaiku #TheDailyHaiku:
https://www.facebook.com/64millionartists/
On Twitter @64M_Artists
On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/64millionartists/?hl=en
7 Comments on “Conversation 39: 64 Million Artists Weekly Challenge LOVE Haiku Bite-Sized Workshops”
Love
no need to go further
my only home
is you
Places
children’s puzzle
every corner of Australia
in mind
Your haiku on Love is absolutely wonderful and its space within the page is beautiful the way it reduces down to the beautiful and tender last line ‘is you’. The children’s puzzle is more of a puzzle itself, oblique, it takes me to finding corners for a jigsaw but then suggests something abstract in the final line, I would love to see a photograph with this of the puzzle and see it as a haiga. Children is also a little generic for me I want to picture someone a boy, a girl, a name, a baby…
I love these little bite-sized ideas. When I am stuck I often revert to the good old spider diagram.
Take a piece of blank paper, in the middle draw an oval shape big enough to contain the word/subject you want to start with, then you draw lines to represent the spider’s legs and add words or phrases the word/subject makes you think of. This spider can have as many legs as you like. Choose five of the best and then one of the five and go with it!
One to do when you can’t walk in the fresh air. ❤👩🦰🧡
I love Leonard Cohen and was writing these haikus for him based on the weekly theme of Birds. I referenced birds that Leonard Cohen referenced and designed this stream of haikus (using The Daily Haiku’s themes from Monday to Friday) to describe imagined incidents in an ongoing relationship. The stream had not reached its end by Friday’s mist so i added the three remaining birds.
Weekly theme = Birds or flight. Daily themes = Happiness, yarn or home, red, roads, mist
Birds Leonard referenced, Dove, Eagle, Vulture, Peacock, Sparrow, Robin, Hummingbird in song. Nice to have choices.
There is also a Jim Morrison reference for those who know their American Prayer but should it have been a Bob Dylan reference. Should this link have been Dyonesian or associative, sex or roads? Edit or not edit. The choices we have to make.
Haikus for Leonard
Like birds on a wire
Minims, crotchets on a stave
My heart string singing
For the house sparrow
Tidying its egg filled nest
A sweet song of love
Sung on hotel beds
Where we have collapsed entwined
Fallen red plummage
Vultures eat their fill
Of the road kill that remains
Leaves blood on the sheets
The fanning peacock
His pride displayed in conquest
Unseen in the mist
Unseen in the mist
She snuggles up close to him
Thinks her loves a dove
No soaring eagle
Gliding through ecstatic cloud
Crying for himself
Beating himself up
As visible as the wings
Of lost hummingbirds
If Love were a season what would it be?
Love is like springtime
If you touched Love what would it feel like?
A pussy willow catkin
What does Love taste like if anything?
Thirsting for water
Where does Love live?
Love lives in the woods
Does Love have a colour?
A youth first green then lusting
What are Love’s best features?
Dammed, ready to burst
What isn’t Love?
Love wasn’t winter
What does Love do?
Freezing over then thawing
What doesn’t Love do?
Wasting snow sculptures
What does Love see?
Love sees the sunrise
Who are Love’s friends?
Listens to the blackbirds song
Where does Love want to go?
Travels with music
What does Love say if anything?
Love speaks quietly
If Love were an animal what would it be?
Like well fed new born chicks sleep
If Love were a smell what is it?
Unfazed by day time
If Love wanted to try something new what would it be?
Love would grow feathers
How does Love move (if at all)?
And fledge and flap and then fly
What does Love look like?
Love is the mother hen
How does Love feel?
Proud of this newly hatched clutch
Love life in springtime
This is amazing Richard I love your creative responses to love
I love that you ave created this opportunity for me to play