Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Book Spine Haiku: Libraries and Poetry

In honor of National Library Week and National Poetry Month, here is a relevant book spine haiku:

Lost in a Good Book, Here Lies the Librarian, The Lifelong Reader

Lost in a good book,
here lies the librarian,
the lifelong reader.
-by Amanda Pape


Book spine poems are formed by arranging books so that the titles on their spines make a poem (and no, it doesn't have to rhyme). Sometimes they're composed of many books, but book spine haiku uses only three books.

A haiku is a traditional Japanese poem divided into seventeen phonic units, the equivalent of syllables. The English version of a haiku is an unrhymed poem with seventeen syllables, arranged in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, in that order.1

So the challenge for book spine haiku is to find three books with titles fitting those limits that work together to create a poem that makes some sense. The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teaching Haiku, in the Reference collection on the main floor of the Dick Smith Library, provides some tips on technique that might help if you are challenged to create a book spine haiku.

More examples of haiku in the library's collections are here:  https://zeus.tarleton.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&bquery=SU+haiku&cli0=FT1&clv0=Y&type=1&site=eds-live

1Rholetter, Wylene. "Haiku." Salem Press Encyclopedia of Literature, 2014. EBSCOhost, https://zeus.tarleton.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=87322448&site=eds-live.

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