by Alison

tea, pan chocolate

kind women and Greek songs my

home away from home

by Kelly

Last night I got drunk

on 80 degrees, the grill,

wine and college tunes.

by Alison

digging digging holes

the big kids dig the little

one watches and learns

by Kelly

I am the proud owner of a gym membership. When I joined last fall, I had all sorts of ideas about how often I’d hit the gym, how aerobic, toned, flexible and dedicated I would be.

And I go. I go to the gym, but . . . But I’m not nearly as dedicated as I had hoped I would be.

Winter in Minnesota is dark and cold, and it’s much easier to stay indoors than it is to venture out.  This course of action — or rather inaction — has resulted in some extra padding, extra padding I’d love to shed now that spring appears to have sprung.

I was, therefore, able to relate with this tiny little book: The Sound of One Thigh Clapping: Haiku for a Thinner You.

The author, Meredith Clair, is a serial dieter, and in the midst of attending yet another weight-loss class, it hits her that the act of dieting is a lot like the act of writing haiku.

“To write a good haiku,” Clair says in her introduction, “one must pare down, economize, and make sacrafices.”

Dieting, of course, requires the same. And so it was that Clair found writing haiku to be a perfect side dish to her weight-loss plan.

I guffawed at many of her haiku, including this one:

So sweet. So creamy.

Yet so diabolical.

Dulce de Leche.

It immediately reminded me of Alison, my haiku’ing partner and a lover of dulce de leche. She picked up that love, of course, during our English-teaching days in Buenos Aires.

This one also jumped out at me:

This Filet-O-Fish

is neither fish nor filet.

And yet, I eat it.

As soon as I saw the words “filet-o-fish” that dang McDonald’s commercial started running through my head!

Filet-O-Fish aside, however, this little book inspired me to write my own diet-themed haiku:

Chocolate is breakfast.

Disagree if you want but

my mind is made up.

Now all I need is the inspiration to step away from the computer (I already know I won’t put down the chocolate) and hit the gym.

by Kelly

Shouldn’t be footage

on news of brother learning

his sister was killed.

by Alison

packed to the brim with

children climbing over books

this cold rainy day

by Kelly

corner house corner

window, pink shades always drawn . . .

what’s behind those blinds?

Single-handedly

redefining the meaning

of a friend: Facebook

Read more of Jen’s haiku.
Did you know Jen has an affection for all things Che? It’s true!
Check out her web site, Che Spotting.

by Kelly

I think it’s safe to say Alison and I are addicted to haiku. This doesn’t mean we’re haiku scholars. Far from it, in fact.

Our little poems break all sorts of traditional haiku rules — like the nature one. Our haiku often ignore nature completely.

Our shared penchant for breaking haiku rules is one of the reasons, perhaps, that we’re both so in love with Magnetic Haiku, as evidenced by our recent review of it.

Indeed, I was so taken with the concept of Magnetic Haiku that I actually went so far as to track down its inventor: Dave Kapell.

When I found out that Magnetic Haiku was invented right here in Minneapolis (my own hometown), I nearly fainted. Oh, the synchronicity!

So Dave, tell me how you came up with the idea for Magnetic Haiku.

Well, before we came up with Magnetic Haiku, we started with Magnetic Poetry. We put out our first Magnetic Poetry kit in 1993.

I’m an English major, but I’m definitely not a poet. I am a song writer, though. And I’ve got no trouble coming up with chords, but I have a whole lot of trouble coming up with lyrics.

I read somewhere that David Bowie used to photocopy pages of his journal and then cut up all the entries so he could move the words around and try to write a song.

I decided to do the same thing and it worked really well for me, it sparked a lot of ideas, but then . . . then there was the fateful sneeze of 1993. I sneezed and I scattered my song lyrics all over the floor and I lost my song.

So I got out a glue stick and glued all the words to magnets and then I stuck them to a cookie sheet. Eventually the words made their way to the kitchen fridge and eventually they became Magnetic Poetry.

So you started Magnetic Poetry in 1993. Have you been selling Magnetic Haiku since then, too?

No. We started selling Magnetic Haiku in about 2000.

When I first started the company, Magnetic Haiku was on my list of ideas. I’d been thinking about it for a long time. It just seemed like an obvious idea.

But the company was new and I was trying to grow it and haiku just didn’t seem like a big enough demographic to go after, certainly not as large as, say, dog and cat lovers. Cat lovers will buy anything that says “cat” on it. But haiku? Haiku lovers aren’t exactly rabid for haiku.

But actually, the haiku set has done quite well. I guess there are haiku lovers out there after all.

Matsuo Basho is considered a haiku master. Depending on the translation, his seminal work, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is also called The Narrow Road to the Interior.

How is the Magnetic Haiku kit different from the Magnetic Poetry kit? Does it have more nature words, for example?

Magnetic Haiku has 220 pieces in it. About half of those are word fragments and articles. The other 100 are nouns, verbs and adjectives.

Coming up with those words is a fun process. I went out and bought a copy of Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and started pulling random words out of that.

Ah…so when you play with Magnetic Haiku, you’re playing with the words of the master . . .

I guess you could say that.

Why do you think people like Magnetic Haiku, or Magnetic Poetry, so much?

When you see all these words hanging up on a fridge, or wherever, I think they just kind of beg you to fiddle.

You see a word, you think, “Hey, I could add ‘ing’ and ‘ly’ and make it say something else.”

I think it appeals to our tinkering aspect, just like if you walk by a table with a half-done jig-saw puzzle on it, you always stop and try to fit in a piece. We all want to leave our own little mark.

So what’s your mark? Do you have a haiku masterpiece to share with us?

Masterpiece might not be the exact word, but here’s one:

by Alison

Her friend since birth but

suddenly she knows his name

and calls out - Issey!

April is National Poetry Month and we’re celebrating!

Each Monday this month, we’re throwing out a topic and inviting readers to share haiku on the subject.

This week’s topic: Friendship

Add your haiku as a comment. Let’s see how many we can collect! Oh, and there’s no time limit. Today, tomorrow, next week. We’ll take ‘em!