Mad Hatter Haiku is patterned after a warm-up exercise I used to hold for my creative writing students. It is meant to relax
the writing process and to stimulate creativity. The name, of course, comes from the famous Mad Tea-Party in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
In our natural effort to make sense of everything, we sometimes stumble over startling imagery or a fresh idea in something
that is—at heart—nonsense. That can start us on the way to creating something original and worthwhile or allow
us to see something old in a new light.
The idea is simple: It is merely to write something that looks like a haiku and possesses some vague sort of syntactic logic
without making
satisfactory literal sense. If we discover something useful along the way, Great! If not, we simply sit back and enjoy.
