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:

So here’s something fun: Magnetic Haiku.

You’ve seen those boxes of magnetic poetry, right? All those little white magnets of random words that stick to a fridge or file cabinet . . .

They even show up stuck to the back of espresso machines in coffee shops. People play with them while waiting for their lattes to steam.

Well, believe it or not, there is a magnetic poetry kit made especially for composing haiku, and here at Haiku By Two, we’re completely smitten.

What I like most about the Magnetic Haiku is that it’s not intimidating. So many people, I think, are intimidated by poetry — even short poetry like haiku!

But with the magnets, you’re restricted to the words you’re given, so right away, some of the pressure is off to be uber creative and insightful.

Given the absurd imagery and language before you, all you have to do is make a modicum of sense.

Suddenly, composing a haiku becomes this whimsical thing you can easily do while you’re waiting for the pasta water to boil. Like here’s one I came up with the other night:

Deep, man. Very deep.

Actually, this reminds me of a song from Cats . . . Macavity The Mystery Cat.

I, too, am totally digging my Magnetic Haiku. Mine’s not set up in my kitchen, though, so I can’t mindlessly do it while boiling water.

I’ve got mine stuck to a white board in my office. Whenever I’m in a writing funk, I go stand in front of it and just start moving words around. I think it helps my writer’s block.

This is something I came up with the other day: