Haiku Without a Mind’s Eye: Aphantasia, Perception, and the Art of Attention

What if the world’s most image-driven poetic form could be mastered without a mind’s eye?

For millions of people living with aphantasia—the inability to create mental images—poetry, and haiku in particular, can feel like a closed door. Traditional advice often assumes you can picture a scene, imagine a moment, or visualize a detail.

But what if you can’t?

Haiku Without a Mind’s Eye is the first book to explore haiku through the lived experience of multi-modal aphantasia — no pictures, no recreated sounds, no sensory memory — and to show how the art of haiku not only survives without imagery, but in many ways thrives.

Drawing on Japanese aesthetics, close readings, and the author’s own practice as The Aphantasic Haikuist, this book reveals how haiku works at its deepest level:
not through mental pictures, but through attention, relationship, pattern, and the subtle emotional shift known as the kire.

Inside the book, you’ll discover:

• How haiku communicates meaning beyond visualization
• How to read and write haiku without relying on mental imagery
• Why kigo (season words) and atmosphere resonate even when you can’t “see” them
• How to use prompts—words, phrases, or images—without needing to picture them
• Why haiku is fundamentally a poetry of perception, not imagination
• What changes (and what doesn’t) when the mind’s eye is silent
• How aphantasia can actually sharpen your haiku, not limit it

Throughout the book, you’ll also find original haiku written entirely without visualization—showing how the form opens itself to readers regardless of how their minds work.

This book is for you if you are:

• an aphant looking for a way into haiku
• a haiku poet curious about how others experience poems differently
• a writer exploring perception, cognition, and creativity
• or a reader drawn to quiet attention and the art of noticing

Haiku does not require images.

It requires presence.

And that skill—attending, noticing, feeling the shift between two parts of a poem—is available to everyone, with or without a mind’s eye.

If this way of approaching haiku resonates, you’re warmly invited to begin.