At seventeen syllables, haiku is the shortest poem in world literature. It is now also the most popular form of poetry in the world, written in nearly every language. And yet, as haiku has spread internationally, one of the most important aspects of the tradition has largely been lost—the community of poets.
In Europe and the United States, haiku is often regarded as the domain of literary elites, but this is not the case in Japan, where haiku is deeply rooted in communal activity. Millions of amateur Japanese poets belong to haiku groups (clubs, really), which are sponsored by different “schools” of haiku, each with its own magazine. Most daily and weekly newspapers carry a haiku column featuring poems submitted by their subscribers, sometimes on the front page.
To help bring back this social dimension, we are inviting our readers to participate in the monthly Tricycle Haiku Challenge. Each month, moderator Clark Strand will select three poems to be published online, one of which will appear with a brief commentary. Each quarter, one of these poems also will appear in the print magazine alongside an extended commentary. In this way, we can begin to follow the seasons together—spring, summer, fall, and winter—and share the joy of haiku together as a community.
Requirements:
Anyone can submit haiku to the monthly challenge using the form below. To be considered for publication, your haiku must:
- Be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables:
Getting the syllables of a haiku to sit naturally inside of its seventeen-syllable form is the primary challenge. Each haiku is a word problem in search of a satisfying seventeen-syllable solution. - Contain the “season word” assigned for that month:
A haiku isn’t only a word problem. To the seventeen syllables the poet must add a turn of thought that results in more than seventeen syllables of meaning—along with a word that refers to one of the four seasons. How the poet uses “season words” like autumn sun or dew will typically determine the effectiveness of the poem.
Part of the reason haiku appeals to so many people is that its rules are simple and easy to follow, yet it can take a lifetime to master them. Ten million people currently write haiku in Japanese. There is no reason why millions can’t write haiku in English, too, provided they agree on the basics. The turn of thought you add to that simple formula of 5-7-5 syllables with a season word is entirely up to you.
Submissions close on the last day of the month at 11:59 pm ET, and the results will be posted the week after. Monthly submissions are anonymized and the winning poems are selected in a blind process.
To learn more about the history and principles of haiku, check out Clark Strand’s online course with Tricycle, “Learn to Write Haiku: Mastering the Ancient Art of Serious Play.”
This Month’s Season Word:
Submit as many haiku as you please using the submission form below. Just be sure to include this month’s season word.
Fall season word: “October”
october sunlight
briefly with no one watching
the bardo is here
Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the season word “October.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.
Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.
*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the word “October.”
Haiku Tip: Write Poetry for One Month!
Practices like mediation or writing haiku poetry usually come with the directive to do them every day. That’s good advice, provided you can follow it. For the person who can’t, it’s a recipe for failure.
You start with the best of intentions, but after a few days, maybe a week, you miss a day. Then you are likely to think, “I’ve failed in my resolution, so what’s the point?” You’d be better off practicing occasionally, as the mood strikes you, rather than setting yourself up for failure.
In the history of haiku poetry, the most famous example of this involves Yosa Buson (1716-1784), one of the greatest haiku poets of all time.
Following the wedding of his daughter Kuno in 1777, Buson was in an expansive mood. He wrote a book, Midnight Melodies, that has since become the standard text for studying his approach to haiku. Then, as summer approached, he committed to an ambitious personal project: to compose ten haiku a day for one hundred days, with the aim of producing 1,000 poems.
The project was modeled on a Zen training period of 100 days, but Buson wasn’t the first person to attempt such a thing. Basho’s disciple Kikaku (1661-1707) had written one haiku each day for one hundred days to commemorate the fourth anniversary of this mother’s death. Buson may have intended his collection to honor the fifth anniversary of his own mother’s death, but there is no way to know for certain.
Buson prepared carefully for the project. He marked the dates in advance in his notebook, leaving space for ten haiku every day. The first poem, written for the annual flower festival, reads:
flower festival
a mother’s womb is only
temporary lodging
There are many masterpieces in Buson’s collection, including this one, but in the end he regarded the project as a failure. The average entry contains eight (not ten) haiku, and Buson abandoned the effort after writing only 137 poems. In a note dated May 29, he finally confessed: “Due to fatigue, I became sluggish in doing everything from this day on. I spent many days idly, without being able to think up a single haiku.”
And so, the net result was a loss of creativity rather than the disciplined, daily outpouring of haiku that Buson had anticipated.
The better approach is the one that Japanese poets follow to this day, which is to write as many good poems as they can over a given month to share at their local kukai (“monthly haiku meeting”). That is the tradition we honor in our Monthly Tricycle Challenges.
Unlike a Japanese kukai, where members contribute 3 to 5 haiku, in our online version, you may submit as many poems as you wish. You could write one haiku a day if that feels doable (as long as you hold that goal lightly), or you could write them at intervals throughout the month as inspiration strikes.
A recent winner submitted only one poem for the challenge that month, but it was clearly one that he had given considerable thought to. So there is no single right way to do this. And the only way to fail is to set too strict a goal and end up feeling disappointed in yourself. Write as many or as few poems as you like.
This must be what Buson discovered, because after reclaiming his creativity he never attempted anything like the “New Flower Diary” again.
Some thoughts on October: As the name of a month, October belongs to the “season” category for fall, which includes the temperature, the shortness of the day, the equinox, and the names of the months. The name October originates from the earliest Roman calendar, in which it referred to the eighth month. Its placement shifted to the tenth position with the addition of January and February to the Julian and Gregorian calendars.
In the northern hemisphere October is associated with the cooler, crisper weather of autumn and the clearer, more transparent sunlight that accompanies it. Night falls earlier over the course of the month, and some say that the veil between worlds grows thinner as we near All Hallows Eve. Because October is a harvest month, its colors are red, yellow, and orange. In most regions autumn will be well advanced by mid-October. Typically, the leaves will reach their peak color at this time.
As a season word, “October” pairs naturally with other words. “October sunrise,” for instance:
light under the door
from the october sunrise
stretches for one foot
But try not to add another season word to the mix. If you are writing a haiku about the “yellow leaves of October,” you will want to use an expression like “October’s gold,” which suggests yellow leaves without mention them directly, thus following the standard haiku convention of using only one season word per poem.
August’s Winning Poem:
Summer season word: “Snail”
deep inside her shell
the snail becomes a mountain
and lets the sun go
— Stevie Rosenfeld
You can find the honorable mentions, additional commentary, and August’s haiku tips here.
Previous Winners
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2022 |
2023 |
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2024 |
2025 |
2026 |
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December |
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