Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

After looking at some of my older work, I felt inspired to do some new collages with hay(na)ku, so this afternoon, I took out a little stack of 3x5 cards which I had started but not finished as collage pieces, and I added text to three of them. All of the text comes from a vintage issue of Hit Parader magazine I bought on eBay last year. Here's one of the images... And it turns out that I did more of those hay(na)ku collages back in 2010 than I remembered. I got to looking at my Flickr photostream and found quite a few. I added three new collages that I made today, tagged all the old ones, and put everything together into a hay(na)ku set on Flickr .

I happened to find a post today where someone linked to my blog as a place to find examples of poems in the hay(na)ku form. I decided to go back and label all the posts where I posted poems in that form--I did a series of collage pieces in 2010 which incorporated tiny poems using the hay(na)ku structure. Here's a link to the hay(na)ku poems I've posted. Looking at them makes me want to return to the form; it's fun, and it works well as a way to experiment with small bits of found text. If you want to write a hay(na)ku, the rules are simple: the first line has one word, the second line two words, and the third line three words. I also like to do sequences where I reverse the word count in some of the stanzas, alternating 1-2-3 and 3-2-1 patterns. The form was created by a contemporary poet named Eileen Tabios, who does a lot of cool projects, including editing Galatea Resurrects , a great collections of reviews of small press books.

Made this little hay(na)ku card the other night with images and text from a Better Homes & Gardens book on flower arranging.

Often Replaced Originally uploaded by Mandy L. Of the collage/poetry pieces I've done lately, I like this one the best. The image is from a magazine ad I painted over with some cream-colored paint. This is collaged onto a piece of a cereal box, around 4x4 inches in size.

More text from an old Family Circle and image from a book of photos of Washington. I like this image of the road so much that I really didn't want to alter it in any way, so it seemed like a good idea just to shape a tiny poem for it.

Two tiny stanzas of hay(na)ku, collaged onto a trading-card-sized piece of recycled paperboard. The text is from a 1941 issue of The Family Circle, and the images are from a book of pictures of Washington state and a magazine that I painted over.