Thank goodness for Twitter! Because this is where I first became acquainted with the haiku of Barb Heath. And after just a few tweets I was already hooked on her poems. So I asked Barb if she would be interested in being a guest at our site and I’m glad she said yes. Her haiku will appear over the next five days.

Barb is a professional writer who has found a different kind of sanctuary in haiku. Let’s give a big welcome to Barb as she tells us a bit about her life, work and approach to haiku:

I’m Barb Heath, a full-time freelance writer/editor. I’ve been writing as long as I can remember, but I didn’t discover haiku until my sophomore year of college. For the first 20 years of my life, I learned to “expand on my thoughts.” “Add supporting details.” Organize paragraphs. Write ten page papers. Fifteen page papers. Twenty page papers. Cite ten sources or more.

And then came haiku. I stumbled into a “poetry in translation” class that was originally supposed to be “advanced creative writing.” Haiku: it was mystifying, aggravating to me at outset. I loved what we read in class, but I couldn’t reproduce it. I had never learned to love such little things as syllables before. I was about to throw my haiku homework in the garbage when I realized, “I don’t have to be good at writing haiku, but I do have to learn something from it.”

Haiku actually taught me (what I think is) the most important thing for all my writing: focus. Haiku forces me to focus events, emotions, settings, etc. until they’re in their purest, most impactful forms. For me, writing haiku is like squeezing the juice out of a 750 page orange. Sometimes it takes me days to choke the nectar out of a single sentiment. Stray segments of haiku hang around my apartment on sticky notes, ripening. Professionally, I write essays, articles, standardized testing stories, web copy, and advertising materials. Recreationally, I even do some comics. Haiku fits in there somewhere.