Japanese Poetry Patterns

Mad Hatter Haiku

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Let's write some nonsense!

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.



angrily alice
hear what you see not
writing-desk hare


this morning
I heard an eggplant

clamor in my eye

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Created 060102
Updated 080927

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