One crisp autumn day, on a whim, I started sending haiku to a few friends via email and text message. I had a new phone and was interested in its SMS capabilities. The only things I found that I could get via SMS were sports scores and stock updates. Boring! I thought: 160 characters — that’s probably enough for a tiny poem. If I could subscribe and get a daily haiku on my phone, that would be pretty cool!

Of course, nothing like that existed yet. I soon learned about email to SMS gateways that would let me email text messages to phones, if I just formatted the To: address properly, and that sparked an idea: To start a haiku by SMS service.

One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had a little mailing list going. At first I borrowed haiku from library books. I added a few of my own early efforts. In time, I started accepting submissions.

Before long, tinywords had become a daily magazine of haiku and micro poetry. That was over 25 years ago, and tinywords now has over 3,000 subscribers, making it one of the biggest haiku/micropoetry publications in the world. We’ve published over 4,400 haiku by almost 1,000 different poets, including some big names in the haiku world, some big names in the larger poetry world, and some people who are just regular lovers of poetry without particularly big names at all, like me. I’m not even the editor anymore. For more than a decade, Kathe Palka and Peter Newton have been making all the editorial decisions. I am, happily, the publisher, technical support guy, and customer service rep.

In September, we celebrated tinywords.com’s 25th anniversary by sponsoring a reception at Haiku North America 2025, the big biannual haiku conference. It was a joy to meet and celebrate with almost 200 haiku poets, many of whom have appeared on our site over the years.

Along the way I learned that haiku are about more than just syllable counts: Haiku are a tool for mindfulness, a vehicle to bring us into presence and awareness of the world, a literary form that sharpens our powers of observation and description, and a writing practice that helps us cut away the fluff.

As one of the most concise literary genres, haiku have helped me to be a sharper, more direct writer. They’ve helped make my headlines and email subject lines more concrete and pithier. (My email bodies are still too long, though — my excuse is that they’re prose!)

It’s no exaggeration to say that haiku have made me a better writer and editor, and they have certainly helped my career.

But it’s the haiku philosophy of awareness, close observation, mindfulness, and concision that has made the biggest difference in my life. Haiku are steeped in Zen, and over time, practicing haiku-like awareness, day after day, has helped me to show up better for my own life.

In the past year, haiku have taken on an additional dimension for me as a tool for deep listening. Over the summer, I became a Certified Listener Poet through a two-month class and practicum run by The Good Listening Project, a nonprofit at the intersection of listening and poetry.

TGLP does amazing work in hospitals and health care organizations by sitting down with people, listening to them tell their stories, and then writing original poems just for them. The goal is to help people feel seen, heard, and valued.

This work has inspired me to integrate listening and poetry in new ways, and haiku seems perfectly suited for experimenting along those lines. It’s the perfect “starter” form: Easily approachable, not intimidating, easy to read and to write. And there are probably hundreds of different ways to write haiku, most of which don’t even require counting syllables!

So what happens when you use haiku as a tool for discovery and connection with other human beings? Let’s find out!

On December 7th in San Francisco, I’ll be co-leading a three-hour mindful writing workshop focusing on haiku, with co-presenter Marion Pernoux, a gifted somatic arts therapist and Reiki master.

It’ll be fun. It’ll be inspiring. And it will be an illuminating way for you to reflect on the past year, share with others, and go forward with some new tools for writing and being present. Join us!

Sign up for the workshop –> here

Part of the workshop fees (after renting the space it’s in) will go to support TGLP, so they can bring listening and poetry into more places where patients and health care providers need to be heard. So you’ll not only be learning about haiku and listening, you’ll be supporting good listening in the broader world too. Win-win!

If you can’t make it but still want to support good listening and poetry, please consider making a donation to TGLP. It’s a 501(c)3 nonprofit, so your donations are tax-deductible. I’ve given them $500 and I’m asking my friends to join me by matching some or all of that amount.

Donate to listening poetry -> here

Field notes

Fast food for the mind: “Put simply: if you don’t care about the details, AI could be great. That’s the tradeoff. Your level of care is directly proportional to how much the details matter.” Adam Singer

Why I run: “Running connects me to my father, reminds me of my father, and gives me a way to avoid becoming my father. My father led a deeply complicated and broken life. But he gave me many things, including the gift of running—a gift that opens the world to anyone who accepts it.” Nicholas Thompson in the Atlantic

Head banging: “In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, ‘This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.’” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird