While reading a wonderful book about teaching haiku – Lighting the Global Lantern by Terry Ann Carter – I made a connection that I had not made before: in its spareness, haiku has something in common with 6-word stories. I'll have more to say about Carter's excellent book in a separate post, but I wanted to write up some thoughts today about this connection between haiku and 6-word stories.

For people who are not familiar with 6-word stories, it's an exciting micro-writing project that has become popular in K-12 and other educational settings, and also beyond, as for example in Larry Smith's 6-Word Memoir project. That project has produced some great books, and my personal favorite is this collection: Six Words Fresh Off the Boat: Stories of Immigration, Identity, and Coming to America. To get a sense of what they are like, here's a YouTube:

For more, here's a presentation I did a few years ago: 6-Word Stories: Some Thoughts about Very Tiny Stories.

One of the things I do in that presentation is to inventory 6-word stories based on how they allocate those words, either as 6 words all in a continuous sentence – "The last humans rattled their cage." (by Zie Hoffman) – or 6 words that have a break somewhere in the flow, with the point of the story depending on that break. For example, here's one with a 4-2 break: "I met my soulmate. She didn't." (also by Zie Hoffman). That break is something that can be haiku-esque!

Obviously, I'm a big fan of 6-word stories, but I hadn't even made the connection with haiku – although it seems obvious now! – until I read this haiku in Carter's book; the poem is by Scott Splinter:

first date
her dog
likes me

As a haiku, it honestly does not work for me, but it's a brilliant 6-word story! As a 6-word story, it would follow conventional capitalization and punctuation like this: "First date. Her dog likes me."

So, I wanted to share this idea now, and it will be something I'll be keeping in mind as I look at the many definitions people have put forward for what is, and is not, a haiku.

With 6-word stories, definitions are easy. For the 6 words, you can argue about hyphenated words (I count a hyphenated word as one word), but the real question becomes: what a is a story? The trap people often fall into is that a 6-word story is not an aphorism or a thought; it really needs to be a story, and a 6-word story obviously requires a special effort on the part of the reader. That's what made 6-word stories so popular with my students: not only did they like the challenge of writing these tiny stories, they liked the challenge of reading them because the reader is really involved in the making of the story, using the very limited information provided, almost like clues in a mystery.

With haiku, the spareness can also lead to profound reader involvement. At the same time, the haiku tradition is something very different because that spareness of form emerged from a very specific aesthetic and world view. Over time, as the haiku form has been adopted by writers all over the world in modern times for their own purposes, it has not always brought that same aesthetic and world view with it. For example, the haiku about the first date and the dog does not strike me really as a haiku... but I think it's a great 6-word story.

As part of this project, I will be spending a lot of time thinking about the different definitions of haiku and what those different definitions mean for readers and writers and teachers. For now, I just wanted to jot down these thoughts about 6-word stories and haiku so that I can return to it again later. I'll also have some posts to share about Carter's book, which is a really excellent resource.