Zuihitsu is a Japanese poetry form that translates roughly to “running brush.” The idea behind a zuihitsu is to follow your “brush,” or pen, and see where it takes you. Zuihitsu can include short or long lines (think Walt Whitman). They may include snippets of dialog or stories. They rely on juxtaposition, fragments, and even contradictions. As Kimiko Hahn, a practitioner of zuihitsu, says, they rely on disorder.

This video might help you understand more:

Before writing zuihitsu, I like to share two examples with students. The first is Kimiko Hahn’s poem “The Orient.”  This poem is also published in Hahn’s collection, The Narrow Road to the Interior. It’s well worth your time!

To start the lesson, I ask students to identify all the associations they have with the word “orient.” Kimiko Hahn will be using all of them in her poem, so it’s useful to get them thinking about the meanings of the word. We read Hahn’s poem and discuss our observations.

Next, I introduce zuihitsu as a “running brush” and share Jenny Xie’s “Zuihitsu.”

Only after we have seen these two zuihitsu do I define zuihitsu for students:

• A genre of Japanese literature consisting of loosely connected personal essays and fragmented ideas that typically respond to the author’s surroundings.
• Zuihitsu are neither prose poems nor essays, but they may resemble both in some ways.
• The creation of order in zuihitsu depends on disorder. Zuihitsu demands, as its starting point, juxtapositions, fragments, contradictions, random materials, and pieces of varying lengths.

After this brief introduction, students write zuihitsu. I start by giving students about 10 minutes to freewrite about something they’ve been thinking about for a while.

Next, they spend about the same amount of time, more or less, writing about something that is related to that first topic.

After freewriting, it’s time to locate a few fragments to include. I encourage students to look up definitions, skim Wikipedia, find ads, and peruse song lyrics—whatever kind of fragments come to mind.

After these three steps, I ask students to move the three parts into a poem using Hahn’s and Xie’s poems as a model.

I taught this lesson most recently on our school’s annual Wellness Day because it can be quite a relaxing or cathartic exercise.

I asked one of the students who attended my session as she was leaving how she felt. She said, “I feel…. light.”

We can all use a bit of that right now.

A slide deck for this lesson is embedded below.