I do beseech
    You (gracious Madam) to vnthinke your speaking,
    And to say so no more.

 William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, II. iv. 104 (1613)

Stop thinking.       Start unthinking.       Unthink.

When the verb unthink is delivered as a command, it carries with it a quietly unexpected, mildly jarring effect. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first attestation of this verb was in 1600. It has occurred fairly steadily since then.

Issuing this word as an opening instruction in a haiku-writing workshop is the key that throws open perceptual doors and mental windows.

The effect of the un- prefix in the verb unthink conforms more or less to the pattern of its occurrence in similar verbs, like unfasten, unwrap, undo, unmake, unlace, etc. Unthinking comes to mean not merely not-thinking or the absence-of-thinking (being thoughtless), but the opening, loosening, and even dissolving of thinking: hence, a discarding and abandonment of thinking, a liberation and deliverance from the preformulated strictures and preset structures imposed by whatever was previously understood to have been meant by thinking.

Into and through the apertures of unthinking, flies the haiku.

As a poet, one of the ways I make an income is by running poetry workshops in schools, both in the UK and internationally. In this context, I have introduced the writing of haiku, with particularly fascinating and rewarding results.

I work with groups of between 30 and 200 students. An effective session lasts around 75 to 90 minutes. What I am looking for at all times from pupils’ writing in a haiku workshop is not cleverness, elegance or beauty, and certainly not charm, prettiness or descriptiveness, but, rather, the precise registration of particulars, when clarity and simplicity of definition open unexpectedly into insight, surprise, resonance, challenge, delight.

The approaches outlined here are just as valid for workshops with university students and, indeed, mature adults, as with children.

I begin with a short warm-up: talking about my own approach to writing and saying a bit about my own poems. During this time, participants can sit back, get used to my voice, find out a bit about me, receive a flavour of what’s going to happen, and so (I hope) feel more comfortable, assured and expansive in the face of novelty.

The next stage is to set up the haiku’s structural game-rules. I explain these quickly and suggest the 3-line model, the traditional 5-7-5 syllable count and the natural and/or seasonal theme. I add that, in the modern haiku-game, these rules don’t matter much and should be taken as little more than starting points and guidelines. Sometimes pupils can come up with brilliant 2-line haikus. I emphasise that it’s important never to pack lines out, so that the number of syllables expands to fit some artificial prescription. It’s crucial that not a single syllable is redundant, not a single word wasted. A good haiku is all the stronger and more supple for being lean, streamlined. This instruction needs to be repeated, many times, in response to individual students, especially to those who want the safety of rules. Students who can’t manage without security and authority aren’t likely to write good haikus. Haikus are for lovers of exploration and adventure.

Seedlings can be ruined by frost and destroyed by drought: nascent poems can be miscarried by rule and aborted by reason. So, from the outset, theory and ratiocination are kept to a minimum. In a haiku workshop, learning and writing occur via each other: by doing and making, trial and error, practice and experiment. First attempts are followed by swift, direct, individual comment from me, including both praise and criticism. Praise is sudden, full-frontal and enthusiastic: it often momentarily stuns the recipient with its speed and sharpness. Faces beam; eyes light up. Criticism, on the other hand, is always delivered gently and encouragingly, though never less directly or openly. It leads to the simplification of images and the clarification of word-outlines into sharper focus, especially though the removal of redundant adverbs, adjectives and articles. Dense over-description throttles the haiku.

Neither praise nor criticism is dwelt on. The touch of the workshop is light, the pace fast, the mood expansive and playful. Nor do I attempt to ‘explain’ the ‘inner’ mental and spiritual structure of the haiku, which itself both is and contains the body, or bodies, of the haiku’s multiple meanings. The kids have to ‘get it’ themselves, at their own pace, in their own time. What is exciting and sometimes wonderful about a haiku workshop with young people is the multiplicity of ways this inner structure can rise and break, first on one child, then ripple and flow in waves to another, then another, then another and another. A haiku workshop is to do with barely noticeable mental glimmerings and sky-wide dawnings, with slenderest verbal and perceptual openings and mind-blowing heuristic leaps. It involves broaching narrow tentative gaps in intellectual half-light and revealing vast and staggeringly amazing new horizons. It’s a journey across waves into and through multiple layerings of awareness.

The nearest I offer at the outset to any explanation of inner structure is the simple guideline: that in the first two lines, word-images or word-pictures that aren’t necessarily or obviously connected may suddenly find themselves living together as unexpected neighbours. I add that, in the third line, this juxtapositioning can lead, of its own accord, to further astonishing and extraordinary possibilities.

What is going on in my mind here, although I don’t say so, is something like this: that these possibilities might include a clue or a link, a clue to a link or link to a clue, a casual comment or surreptitious aside on a connection that may open onto miracle, an extension of an apparently solved equation into wonder, via another image, an answer, a riddle, a puzzle, a doubt, a new question or set of questions.

And even if I never actually say as much as this, but prefer in practice to keep my statements simple, some of these subliminal patterns of preoccupation and underlying instresses of inspiration are at least likely to support and inform whatever I do say and do during the workshop itself.

Then the active process of writing begins by my making a new haiku of my own on the spot. I compose it on the OHP transparency and talk through and around it as I’m doing it. Here is an example, reconstructed from the first haiku workshop, in the library of a rural secondary school in Norfolk, with a group of around thirty 13 to 14 year-olds, in July 2004.

I tell these teenagers that I’m going to write a haiku. At this point I’m waiting for images to strike. Outside the library window, a bird whizzes past, so fast I can’t quite make out what species it is. I pick up my pen and scribble onto the OHP transparency:

A bird flies past outside
Inside, a poet writes a haiku
Where is the poem?

My hand moves quickly and the poem flies straight onto the screen as it writes itself out of me. Of course, at this stage it doesn’t matter whether what I produce is any ‘good’. The point is to write several poems like this, in the presence of the children, and to write them as fast, simply and effortlessly as breathing. In this way, the children get drawn fully into the process. Standing back from this handiwork, as if from a first sketch for a painting, I see that I can improve it, and say so. And I begin to cross out redundant words on the transparency,:

A bird flies past outside
inside, a poet writes a haiku
where is the poem?

The boys and girls follow this critical cutting. While this poem is being made, they are attentive. They engage in the act and process of what’s happening. They want to have a go themselves. It’s infectious.

Then I tell them to start writing, quickly. and to write as many haikus as possible. They can move around the room, anywhere they like. I challenge them, playfully, to write at least five haikus in the next fifteen minutes. What I am after is lightness, spontaneity, speed; expansiveness and exploration; dynamic interplay between perception and language; interiorisation, certainly, but not heavy, or broody introspection. I ask them to look at things, to listen to whatever is going on, and to start off with any image that catches their attention. Their aim, I say, is to catch whatever image catches them. They are to follow the first image they see, the first thing that sees them. Then they are to see where the image takes them, trust the image they follow, submit to it, and let that image open out and take them wherever it wants to go. Half-intentionally, I partially contradict myself by telling them to write silently and only to talk if they need to and, then, when they are ready, to show their friends what they have written. And to show me. A little non-essential contradiction is no bad thing, partly because it jars each child into decision-making. I tell them not to stop. To stop stopping. To work fast. And add:

Stop thinking.       Start unthinking.       Unthink.

I receive a few odd glances but most of the kids seem to have at least some inkling of what I’m getting at. After all, it’s not usual, not typical, not normal, to find a teacher in full-time education who tells you to unthink.

Suddenly everyone is walking around, looking at things. Phrases and fragmentary lines are getting down on paper. Of course everybody needs to talk and nobody takes any notice of the injunction for silence. Centuries of moments pass. I ask if anyone wants to try their work out on me. I carry a mini tape-recorder-cum-dictaphone. Kids offer to recite their haikus into the dictaphone, and I ask them to do so, twice. I rewind the tape in a couple of seconds and they listen to their own voices as they are played back. Grins and smiles abound. The playback loops into positive feedback. Children copy one another’s ideas. Friends gather around and want to have a go too. Me, me, sir. Please, sir, me. There is commentary, tightening, criticism, suggestion, improvement, cutting. Conventional expectations are attacked, including such clichés and misconceptions as:

Some children still just don’t get it. They want to follow formulas and they want approval from me because I am ‘the teacher’. They're gridlocked into thinking, and into thinking that they're thinking and, worst of all, into thinking that the way they think is ‘natural’.

Yet, sometimes, with little or no need for suggestion or intervention from me, mini-miracles of unthinking do occur. Here are several examples by students aged 13 to 14, who attended the first workshop at a secondary school in Norfolk in July 2004:

The wooden tables
Magnificent rainforests
Human injustice.

Hol Dear

The lord of the flies
walks slowly to his grail
back to his dark lair.

Sam Webb

A blind man listens
Bright colours and rainbows
Can you describe them?

Hannah Chapman

Rachel Weir

What’s going on in these poems? I think it’s something like this. Students everywhere are taught to think: to think more, think more effectively, think more constructively, think more positively; think more creatively and imaginatively; think more considerately and delicately. Indeed, we all know a very great deal about thinking: good thinking, more thinking, deeper thinking, clearer thinking, linear thinking, lateral thinking, analytic thinking, synthetic thinking, and so on and on. Thinking has huge amounts of investment purposefully piled into it: for thinking is useful, utilitarian, moral, productive, profitable.

But there’s a but, and a glut: it is that there’s so much thinking going on, that thinking interferes with all other processes. Thinking has got so dense and insistent it’s almost impossible to hear or see anything else that’s actually happening.

That’s why what I’m after is learning to unthink. When thinking has become a pollutant, the haiku blows in clean fresh air.

This article was first presented as a paper at the conference
of the International Haiku Association in Sofia, Bulgaria, 2005.
It was published in Writing in Education, N^o. 39, Summer 2006.
It is linked to the schools page on The Poetry Kit website.

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