Where does Haiku come from?

Rohini Gupta

A question often asked is, where do you get your ideas? Where does a haiku come from? How do you manage to keep writing?

Those who are new to haiku may wonder what to write about. Those who write a lot can reach a dead-end where it seems to all dry up and they wonder how to get started again. Sometimes poets get stuck in a rut and keep writing the same thing over and over again, in slightly different words and don’t know how to get unstuck.

Haiku may seem easy to write because it is so short. Bad haiku is very easy. Anyone can produce three lines of the kind you see splashed on social media many of which do not resemble haiku at all. Like any field of art, writing a good haiku takes years of work and enormous amounts…