Jean LeBlanc

The Haiku Aesthetic Jean LeBlanc

In October of 2011, I facilitated a writing workshop called The Haiku Aesthetic. We filled a classroom at Sussex County Community College on a gray Saturday morning as the first few flakes of an unusual autumn blizzard began to fall. I look back at that morning as one of the highlights of my poetry life. The room was a warm, laughter-filled island oblivious to the cold and threatening weather. This setting, in fact, seems to me in retrospect a perfect example of the paradox inherent in haiku, one of the elements of the haiku aesthetic I shared that day in the workshop.