Since so many poets are inspired by photos, drawings, paintings, or other images when they compose their poetry, I wanted to add the “Haiga,” a dramatic poetic form to my weekly syllabic poetry challenge starting the first week of February 2019. So, for the new challenge posted on 2/5/19, this will be another acceptable form for our syllabic challenge.

Haiga is sometimes called observational poetry because it contains an image with either a haiku or senryu written on it or near it.

This one form combines three artforms: imagery (photographs or original art), poetry, and calligraphy.

The site, ahapoetry.com shares this about the Haiga:

“Haiga is a Japanese concept for simple pictures combined with poetry, usually meaning haiku. In Basho’s time,haigameant a brushed ink drawing combined with one…