I think of haiku as verbal snapshots. I am struck by the perfection of a moment (an “aha” moment that haiku poets describe as a “haiku moment”) and I put down the words that best paint the picture, or capture the scene.

The beauty, for the poet, of practicing the writing of haiku on a regular, if not daily basis, is that it means putting oneself in a perpetual state of readiness, as if holding a camera up to one’s eye at all times, prepared to capture the moment. It is a special kind of awareness, awake-ness, a special way of willingness to be struck by wonder. It is a way of living with one’s third eye always open.

The principal tenets of haiku — having to do with nature, containing two images, referencing the season, being composed of three lines of 5, 7, 5 syllables — are all to be found in my haiku, but not always all of them in all poems.

In the haiku moment, the image almost always comes before the words. While I am putting the words together, I sometimes find myself recreating the image with a drawing, a sketch, a small watercolor. At other times, I am struck by a scene in life or in nature and I capture it with a photograph.

Some haiku feel complete with just the words; others feel complete when image and words work together to form a whole. I imagine there will be times when the image, or images, work perfectly with no words at all…

In my experimentation with images and words, I started making these time-lapse videos, at first to share the process of writing the haiku, with the image being an illustration of the moment I was first moved to write the poem — and then came to realize that the video itself was integral to the composition as a whole, a new form of haiku made of words and pictures in motion.

Of course, it is all artifice. The haiku is written before the video is made, the illustration goes through several iterations, and the process of composing the poem is impossible to share without living my life on camera.

I think of these time-lapse videos as a way of sharing the haiku moment every time they are viewed.

Matsuo Basho, a 17th century Japanese poet, was considered the first master of the haibun, a form of writing that combines paragraphs of lyrical prose and haiku. I love Basho and read both his haiku and his haibun frequently.

Haibun were used most often in the composition of travel diaries. Basho’s most famous is The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which chronicles a 1,200 mile-long journey the poet made on foot. He described the landscape, the people he encountered, small animals, his relationship with his apprentice, his meditations on the various shrines and temples they visited— all with these delightfully observed mixed pieces of prose and haiku.

What I love most about Basho is his lightness of tone, his sense of humor. He did not consider spiritual depth and gaiety to be mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite.

The playful tension between prose and verse in his haibun is something I wish to emulate. A sense of humor, in this life, is everything. Let us giggle, and take our time on our way to the graveyard.

All poems that include images, sounds, or videos and are not haiku.

I enjoy experimenting with poetry that is performative in nature, be it by using audio, video or images of various kinds. Some poems ask for more dimensions, while others are happy with their textual representation (which is also an image, of course). I allow the poems to guide me.

Why have categories at all?

In addition to being fascinated by the interplay between words and pictures and sounds and moving images, I also enjoy playing with form. While working on an idea, one of the questions I ask myself is, “would this best be expressed as a sonnet? Or a villanelle? Or maybe a ghazal?”

For now, all these formal experiments will be put in this “bucket.” The different categories help me see themes emerge, patterns, interests. Having all these groupings helps me bring into focus what I care about most, or at least at the moment.

I always marvel, when poets publish a collection of work, at how they decide to order the poems in each particular chapbook or collection. I think these categories might help me, one day, understand how to order a potential collection of my work.