The Haiku Foundation Forums

Please see our Copyright Policies page on the main site.

Hello everyone and welcome to the brand new Seashell game!

You are the judges, and it is entirely up to you which poem is declared the winner. There will be no interference from me or anyone else.

There will be two haiku presented at the start of each game. We want to hear the reasons behind your choices, so an explanantion of how a poem works or doesn't work for you is required with your votes.

There are no right or wrong answers, all that matters is your honesty and that you remember to adhere to The Haiku Foundation's code of conduct. It is my hope that by assessing and studying the work of others we can all expand our skills and understanding of haiku.

John McManus

Thanks for your reply and links, Gabi. You know far better  than I about the difficulties of translation from Japanese to English!

My point is different than that, though. I am suggesting  that there are advantages—for poets who write haiku in English—in focusing on those  aspects of haiku which are more readily translatable: such as seasonal  references, certain approaches to imagery,  etc. I’m suggesting that these translatable characteristics, rather than the  ones that are so Japanese as to defy translation, could be the basis of  haiku in other languages.

For example, I'm not so sure that the Japanese idea of kigo, as opposed to the simpler idea of a seasonal reference, is as meaningful in other languages as it is in Japanese. Here's hoping that the World Kigo Database, and such books as Haiku World (William J. Higginson, Kondansha America, New York, 1996), prove me wrong.

Also,  I’m sure you know that the Gendai haiku poets and others have  challenged kigo and every other haiku convention. If Japanese haiku poets can do that and still write poems that are accepted in haiku in many quarters, my hope is that we can do that, too.

To receive an email when a new topic is added to a board, open the board, then click the Notify button at lower right (or upper right).

To receive an email when a particular topic is updated, open the topic, then click the Notify button at lower right (or upper right).

Some of the boards in this forum enable you to start your own discussions. Boards that support this feature will have a New Topic link at upper right (or lower right).



For example, the In-Depth Haiku: Free Discussion Area has the New Topic link at upper right.

If you do not see the New Topic link, then you cannot start your own discussions in that board. You can only reply to topics that have been started by the board moderator.

To report a problem with a board or a topic, you can use the Report to Moderator link at lower right of each topic and reply:



Please do not use the boards on this site to report problems. Please use the Report to Moderator link for this purpose.

When you add a reply or a new topic, you can use the buttons in the editor to add links and other special formatting. These buttons insert Bulletin Board Codes (BBC), which you might know from other forums.

You can also use the following basic HTML tags to format your text, then paste then into a post:

<b>, <u>, <i>, <s>, <em>, <ins>, <del>
<a href="">
<img src="" alt="" />
<br />, <hr />
<pre>, <blockquote>

One approach is to use an HTML editor to create a topic with links and other HTML code, then paste the code into the forum topic. Be sure to copy all of the HTML code, like this:


Here is a link to <a href="http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/">The Haiku Foundation</a>.


Remember though: a forum topic supports a small subset of HTML tags only, namely the subset identified in the first code block above.

*

If you don't already know how to use BBC or HTML, don't worry. Just type in your comments without any of these codes. The content is what really matters!