Welcome!

This website offers teachers and students an introduction to writing haiku poems, a chance to study the history and nature of haiku poetry and an introduction to the fundamental principles of creative writing. It is free and non-profit making. If you are a teacher, you may download the lesson plans and photocopiable poem sheets and use them with your classes.

Show Don't Tell is the most fundamental poetry lesson ever, demonstrating the principles of creative writing. These principles apply to screenwriting and the novel as much as to haiku, but because haiku are so short they offer the best way to learn them.

Waning Moon Press shows you haiku poetry books available in beautiful hand-made bindings and also offers some dead-cheap poetry booklets (written by research physicists and a prisoner serving a life sentance for murder!)

Bibliography

This page provides a short annotated reading list and links to other sites devoted to haiku.

Acknowledgements and Permissions

Please note that you are free to use poems published on this site with pupils in an educational institution, and for that purpose you may photocopy poems, but the copyright in the poems rests with the authors, translators, or their publishers. You can not re-publish any of these poems without seeking permission from the copyright-holders.

Waning Moon Press would like to thank the following for giving permission to re-publish copyright material:

David Cobb, Michael Gunton, Cicely Hill, Japan Airlines Foundation (for poems from "Childrens Haiku"), James Norton, Lucien Stryk, Brian Tasker, Weatherhill Incorporated (for the translations of Santoka Taneda by John Stevens), Maggie West, Bill Wyatt, Caroline Gourlay and Jackie Hardy.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, in some cases without success. If we have not contacted you, please contact us by e-mail

The Author

The teaching lessons on this website have been piloted in schools and colleges many times. They are written by George Marsh, who is the author of Teaching Through Poetry: Writing and the Drafting Process, published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1988. George has taught in schools, and in the teacher training departments and in the literature departments of the University of Portsmouth and University College Chichester. He has also run a poetry development programme in secondary schools for the South Downs College, Hampshire, and was Writer-in-Residence at Kingston Prison and Writer-in-Residence to the centenary of Portsmouth Football Club.