Creating Your Own Haiku Cards
Creating Your Own Haiku Cards
To the right is a random haiku card from my collection which is ready for you to use online — but you will learn so much more if you create your own haiku cards. You can write the haiku just on slips of paper if you are playing with them just once, but if you want to make a deck to play with again and again, it's best to use physical index cards. (More about index cards here.)
For my own physical index cards, I write the poem on one side, and then I write the author's name and source on the back, along with notes. That way I can focus 100% on the haiku, while also having the author information available just by flipping the card over.
And where can you find haiku to use for your own games at home? You can start with making haiku cards of your own poetry! And here are some useful online resources:
Living Haiku Anthology. I chose the poems I liked from the Creative-Commons-licensed poetry at this wonderful website. But you might choose poems differently, and you might also choose to make cards using the poems which are not CC-licensed.
Haiku Foundation Digital Library. You can find lots of resources available for download here, and it's also a great bibliography resource. If you see something here that is not available for download, just hop over to BookFinder.com (see below), and maybe you will be lucky enough to find a used copy available. Maybe even a cheap used copy!
Internet Archive. The Internet Archive has millions, literally millions, of books available for checkout. Just create a free account, and then you can start borrowing books online. I've made two Internet Archive "bookshelves" with haiku resources: Haiku, which is a general listing of over 100 haiku books, and also Haiku in Japanese, which is a subset of the general list, containing 30 books with haiku in both English and Japanese (often just the romaji, but that's a start!). I also have a Zen bookshelf.
Haiku of Kobayashi Issa. This is David Lanoue's monumental online Issa project, with literally thousands of haiku by Issa translated by Lanoue, with the Japanese text. There's even a random Issa haiku! (If you have played any of my games here, you know I love randomizers!)
If you are looking for haiku for games to play with children, I have an annotated list of children's haiku books (a work in progress!).
In addition to all these great resources online, you can also find lots of very affordable used haiku books at BookFinder.com, which combines book listings from ebay, ABE, ALibris, etc. Absolutely the best way to shop for used books online!
You can also subscribe to Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and other haiku journals which contain poetry and which also contain great essays that you can use for your own quote cards.