Troutswirl - The Haiku Foundation Blog

Delve into the history of English-language haiku in the most direct way possible: by reading its poets. Each week a new digitized version of a book of haiku, recent or classic, is offered for your perusal, drawn from The Haiku Foundation Digital Library and other holdings. Host: our digital librarian, Dan Campbell.

EarthRise Rolling Haiku Collaboration

The EarthRise Rolling Haiku Collaboration is the world’s largest annual collaborative poem. It's part of International Haiku Poetry Day (April 17), and plays out like an extended renku — the literary drinking game of feudal Japan. We look forward to your participation! Host: Jim Kacian. View the EarthRise Archive.

Education Resources

There’s so much to learn about haiku — and not just for students. Visit The Haiku Foundation’s Education Wall, where you’ll find lesson plans and educational tools for teachers and students alike. All age groups and experience levels will find something of interest to sharpen their approach to this surprisingly complex genre.

Haiga Galleries

Each month The Haiku Foundation will add a new gallery of work devoted to haiga and related visual arts, and feature it on the THF site. You will find traditional approaches to haiga alongside more current trends like photo haiku. Host: Jim Kacian.

Haiku Bridges

Haiku Bridges is a periodic feature designed to encourage and communicate significant haiku outreach initiatives to new audiences. Host: Scott Mason.

Haiku Comics of Hamilton Bay

Every couple weeks we will share Haiku Comics of Hamilton Bay, created by Monica Plant, inspired by her favored Canadian landscape and terrain. Monica is a Hamilton (Ontario, Canada)-based artist, writer, and naturalist, a self-described contemplative who “moves at a slow enough pace to see and hear things.” Host: Monica Plant

Haiku Dialogue

Haiku Dialogue offers a biweekly prompt for practicing your haiku. Posts appear each Wednesday with a selection of poems from the previous week. Comments are encouraged — join in the discussion! Host: kjmunro.

Haiku of the Day

Haiku of the Day (formerly Per Diem) is one of our most popular offerings. Guest editors are invited to create thematic galleries of poems which are then prominently featured on the site and are gathered into the Haiku of the Day Archive. Host: Lynne Jambor.

Haiku Registry

The Haiku Registry offers brief curriculum vitae for haiku poets from around the world. Host: Marta Chocilowska.

HaikuLife

HaikuLife is The Haiku Foundation’s haiku film festival, the only event like it in the world — the Sundance of Haiku. Each year auteurs from around the world submit films, from brief video haiga to feature length treatments, all based on and around haiku. Host: Jim Kacian.

Juxtapositions

Juxtapositions, The Haiku Foundation’s journal of haiku research and scholarship, is the only vehicle of its kind dedicated to academic, peer-reviewed haiku research and criticism. MLA Standard. Indexed. Senior Editor: Ce Rosenow.

Librarian’s Cache

Librarian's Cache is an occasional series that features journals, videos, and other assets from The Haiku Foundation Digital Library and other holdings. Host: our digital librarian, Dan Campbell.

New to Haiku

A space specially designed for those of you just starting out on the journey of haiku. First things to read, study, look at and try yourselves, without judgment. We remember — we all start somewhere. Host: Julie Bloss Kelsey.

re:Virals

re:Virals is an interactive feature which offers commentary on selected haiku each week. The supplier of the best commentary each week gets to choose the next week’s poem. An updated version of Virals, an early interactive feature of THF. Host: Keith Evetts.

Renku Sessions

The Renku Sessions was created to offer a participatory activity that honors historical traditions while actively engaging contemporary practice. Poets participate in 12, 20 and 36-link renku, moderated by the leading Western sabaki of our day. Host: John Stevenson. See our Archive of Completed Renku.

Second Life

Second Life: Japanese Haiku in Translation presents, every couple weeks, an original Japanese poem in English translation, with literal and literary versions, along with field notes, for a complete immersion into the poem. Host: Dan Bornstein

THF Monthly Kukai

The THF Monthly Kukai invites poets from around the world to craft a poem to the month’s theme, and then to assess the roster of poems by others on that theme. Winners receive books of their choice from the THF Hard Copy Library extra copies catalog. Host: Tom Borkowski.

Touchstone Awards

In 2012 The Haiku Foundation created the Touchstone Awards — the highest awards in the field — to reward excellence and innovation in the genre. Award categories are best individual haiku/senryu, best individual haibun, and best haiku publications. Overview: THF Touchstone Awards | Host: Bruce Feingold.

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A Sense of Place

A Sense of Place was an early iteration of Haiku Dialogue, with the prompt based on a location familiar to the poet, a kind of Westernized version of utamakura. Host: Kathy Munro.

Bookstories

Every book tells its story, but what of the other story, the story behind the book? Bookstories offers an opportunity to tell that story. Our authors reveal how their books came to be conceived, labored over, published, and sometimes not. Host: Various.

Craft

There is so much to learn about haiku! Follow the occasional journey of a haiku newbie as he asks the questions you wish you had asked, and discover that the answers are rarely so simple as to be easily had. Host: Gene Myers.

Creative Blooms

There is a takeaway in the dance between world and poem. In this spirit Creative Blooms aims to offer novel enjoyments of insight brought to you by the poets considered. Host: Richard Gilbert.

Dunes

Dunes was a good idea that never got off the ground: an exploration of the traditions of haiku and how they played a role in the traditional, contemporary, and innovative haiku that followed. The intention was to see how these traditions had shifted (hence the title) over the course of time. Unfortunately we have yet to find out . . . Host: Adelaide B. Shaw.

Envoys

Envoys was and occasional feature devoted to the study of individual, non-English haiku from the 20th and 21st century in multiple translations, eliciting additional commentary and insights from its readership. Host: Scott Metz.

Essences

Essences began as a column in the North American Post in Seattle, WA, a bilingual (Japanese-English) newspaper, aiming to return to the roots of the “haiku movement” in North America: its major poets, individual styles of haiku, books, journals and conferences as they evolved from the sixties and seventies onwards. Host: Carmen Sterba.

Field Notes

Field Notes: Explorations in Haiku pretty much tells you exactly what this is. The entire project migrated eventually to the THF Forum, and is still available and active there, so if you wish to see how leading lights of Western haiku have examined leading topics in haiku, join us there. Host: Peter Yovu.

Fluences

Fluences was devoted to studying haiku and the haikuesque by 20th and 21st century Western poets. Each installment examined a poem, or a group of poems, by a poet who has either dabbled in haiku, been influenced by haiku, or whose work has had an influence, in some way or another, on 20th and 21st century English-language haiku. Host: Scott Metz.

Haiku in the Workplace

Haiku in the Workplace was an interactive weekly writing prompt series that originally appeared in The Financial Times of London. When it was adapted to be a THF Feature, hundreds more poems were added to an already brimming collection, now gathered in one place for your reading enjoyment. Host: Jim Kacian.

Haiku Maven

Haiku poets have etiquette questions too — what the right way to submit poems to a journal? what about a contest? how close is too close to another poet’s poem? The Haiku Maven answered these, and more, with brio and no little acerbity, and the column was more anxiously awaited than Dear Abby. Host: Roberta Beary.

Haiku Music Challenge

Haiku Music Challenge allows present-day composers from around the world to interpret haiku — from classical Japanese masters to contemporary poets of all levels — in their own idiosyncratic styles, often with surprising and beguiling results. Host: Naviar Records.

Haiku Puzzler

Haiku poets love a puzzle as much as anyone, and for more than a year they were treated to a weekly cryptic crossword, whose solution was the name of a famous poet or book, or a term commonly used in the genre. These are still challenging, and you might want to try them yourselves! Host: Anita Krumins.

Haiku Windows

Haiku Windows was one of the many variants that has appeared as part of Haiku Dialogue: poems are written to a visual prompt and shared, and commentary on others’ poems is encouraged. Host: Kathy Munro.

Headsets

Headsets addressed the psychological aspect of literary craft as it applies to haiku and senryu. Classic psychotherapy questions were in evidence: “What's happening here?” and “How do you (might one) feel about that?” Readers were invited to examine their responses, and poets to explore their purposes. Host: Paul Watsky.

In Search of Basho

We all know and love Basho — who wouldn’t? Well, you might not if he were the anti-hero imagined here. Basho, a mouse in the mode of Maus, appears as dark and feckless, and not at all the saintly creature whose image has been carefully crafted by generations of acolytes. Co-Creators: Ross Fittock and Mark Findlay.

Montage

Montage was the feature that put The Haiku Foundation on the internet map. It offered a selection of haiku chosen to a weekly theme by three different leading poets each week. It ran for 43 weeks. 9 additional weeks plus New Year's Day were later added to Montage: The Book, still the largest and most beautiful haiku anthology ever created (and available in The Gift Shoppe). Host: Alan Burns.

Old Pond Comics

Visit the world of Kaeru — the young frog who doesn't want to hang out in the pond, but wishes to learn haiku at the feet of a master instead — and his family and friends. And encounter dozens of classic Japanese haiku along the way. You won't forget these characters anytime soon — they seem as fresh as the day they first appeared. Creator: Jessica Tremblay.

Periplum

Periplum feature selections and interpretations of contemporary non-English haiku from around the world, aiming to explore haiku by poets from as many tongues and cultures as possible. After a lengthy run on the THF blog, Periplum migrated to the THF Forum. Host: David G. Lanoue.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver was a feature devoted to showcasing the questions, ideas, and evolution of a beginner to the art of haiku. Each installment featured new work as well as the ideas and thought-processes behind it. Readers were encouraged to react with ideas and advice on how to develop and improve. Host: Laura Sherman.

Sails

Sails was designed to ask questions, to want to know more, to challenge all-to-comfortable ideas and beliefs. Where, apart from its origins in Japan, does haiku come from? Is it poetry, and in what ways? As it has been compared so often to photography, is it a snapshot taken by a tourist in an exotic locale, or a carefully thought out and painstakingly printed photograph by someone like Ansel Adams? Can it be both, and variations in between? So many questions. Host: Peter Yovu.

Season by Season

Season by Season is an ambitious project intended to offer the 24 “mini-seasons” into which the Japanese calendar is broken. It features poems that celebrate subtle moments within the overall structure of the four seasons, often with touching commentary on the lives of people who would be affected by these small distinctions. Hosts: Alex and Kit. Guest commentary by Hiroaki Sato.

Teaching Stories

Teaching Stories were tales of teaching haiku by teachers for teachers. The many segments revealed how they made haiku come alive for their students, and created an environment where educators could discuss the many challenges they faced in bringing a fuller sense of haiku to a culture that knows little more than the stereotypes. Hosts: Brad Bennett and Jeannie Martin.

The Kindness of Strangers

Most haiku poets today, even as they navigate the challenges of contemporary situations, nevertheless have comfortable lives. Not always so, and not always so today. This six-part series examines the way haiku interacts with those of less fortunate circumstances. Host: Anna Maris.

young leaves

Young Leaves was a brief collaboration between The Haiku Foundation and the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society. Active members of Yuki Teikei offered a poem taken from recent issue sof the group’s journal GEPPO, with commentary meant to stimulate further discussion. Hosts: Jerry Ball and Patricia Machmiller.

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