The Haiku Foundation Forums

A couple of days ago, I had a chance to read my poetry in public for the first time.  I really engaged the (albeit small) audience of writers when I spoke about haiku and scifaiku.  But I found reading my haiku to be exceptionally challenging, both in the sense that it is an emotionally vulnerable experience and that I think you need to read haiku differently (slower?) than other forms of poetry to connect with the listener.  A friend of mine who came with me for moral support commented that, unlike in a longer speech or poem, where the listener can miss a word or two without losing context, every word counts in haiku.

So, is there a secret to reading haiku so that your listeners don't get lost?  Do you read more loudly, more slowly?  Do you provide the audience a written copy of what you are reading?     ???

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts & suggestions.   :)

I've been wondering whether it makes sense to enter haiku into standard poetry contests.  It seems like most journals have a bias toward short or long forms, so I would suspect that most contests do too, but many contests are worded as if they have no preference.

So, I was wondering what most of us here do - do you try to publish in other journals besides haiku journals or do you just stick to specialty journals?  Do you ever enter poetry contests with haiku that are not specified as haiku contests?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Julie B K

Roberta Beary.  And because I tend toward speculative haiku, I frequently bump into wonderful poems by LeRoy Gorman and Deborah Kolodji.

Julie B K

Thanks, everyone, for your thoughtful comments.  Here I am, nearly two years later, pondering the same questions, but the advice cuts a bit more deeply for me now.  Once again, I've been contemplating a chapbook, but when I laid my poems out - and culled the weak ones - I don't think I'm quite ready yet.  But I'm closer.  And I'm developing a voice.  It's kind of fun to look at the progression of my haiku writing - I can see growth.  But I think it's time to add a few individual poets' collections to my reading, to get a feel for what strong collections look like.

Thanks for the reminder, Don!   :)

Thanks, Alan, that answers a question of mine.  I recently picked up The Haiku Anthology (1986) at the library, and, while it's been an interesting read, I don't relate to most of the poems in the same way that I do to haiku published today.  It's almost like they aren't haiku, or more accurately, they aren't what I currently think of as haiku.  Is that the difference between modern and contemporary?  Did something happen in the 90's to shake everything up in the haiku community or was it a gradual evolution?

Sandra, I did not know that about poetry contests - I just assumed that a contest would want first rights or one-time rights.  I can see where these nuances can pose a challenge in translation!  Does anyone know about Kusamakura?  I can't find anything in the English-language section that says they own all rights to submitted poems, but it would be good to know.  Thanks in advance -

Julie K.

Thanks, everyone!  Alison, I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one facing this problem.  I, too, have found it very liberating - poetically speaking - to share without caring.  For now, I have a little recipe box with index cards in it and my own jumbled notations.  I have also found that I'm fine with letting go of a number of my early attempts and just storing the ones that have potential or speak to me.  It's a good start, but I also plan to store them digitally at a later time.  It's fun for me to see what everyone else is doing.

Hi Alan -- It's not exactly a continuation of my previous thread, although it is a related problem.  I probably shouldn't have used the word collection in the header for this topic.  What I'd like to do is get a handle on my complete haiku output so that I can organize it into a collection or various collections.  My previous question touched upon how to structure a collection in a literary sense.  Right now, I'm more interested in the mechanics of managing haiku output -- how do I find the haiku I want, how do I keep from losing them, etc.  I have haiku everywhere -- scribbled in the pages of Frogpond, typed into the notes function of my iPhone, tweeted on Twitter, posted on my blog, sitting lonely in Word files.  There's no cohesion or long-term organization in my current storage methods.

To touch on nobodhi's suggestions -- I think my haiku want to be grouped together somewhere, in some mass storage device (physical or otherwise), so that they can talk to each other and play together.

So Sandra, yes, that does help.  Thank you.  I used to organize my nonfiction publications in this way by title - pending in one file and published in another.  It didn't occur to me to store complete haiku that way too.  

Right now, I am leaning toward Alan's suggestion of writing out all of my haiku in longhand on index cards -- poem on one side and dates of creation and publication (if applicable) on the other -- and sticking them into a recipe box or similar.  I can't say exactly why that appeals to me, but I do like the idea of re-experiencing the poem through the pen, especially since I typed many of these into a computer or phone the first time. 

I'm curious as to what everyone else does with their haiku.  Please share! 

Thanks to everyone for their help.

I just realized that I have more than 300 haiku & short form poems out on Twitter.  What is the best way to organize them?  ???   I can't seem to wrap my mind around how to structure the collection.  I used to just log one poem per Word document in a Poetry folder on my computer when I wrote longer forms, but that seems excessive for short forms.  Maybe one haiku per index card & throw them all in a recipe box?

How do you organize your haiku?  Thanks in advance for sharing.   :)

Julie B. K.

Hi Aubrie:

Have you sent notices out on Twitter?  There's a wonderful community of short form poets on Twitter.  I tweeted the call for submissions to a friend of mine, but perhaps if a few more of us with Twitter accounts took the time to post about your anthology, we could encourage more poets to submit.

Julie B. K.
@MamaJoules on Twitter

Billie, is there still time to submit our haiku?  Thanks -- Julie B. K.

As recently as 2008, I would have told you that I hated haiku.  It was my least favorite poetic form.  Somewhere along the line, I became convinced that I could never write - nor understand - these short forms.  In my family-friendly science blog, I had this to say:

a difficult form
even with 5-7-5
this is not haiku

However, since I like both science and poetry, I bumped into science fiction poetry.  This led me to write Fibonacci Sequences and scifaiku.  For reasons that I can't explain, scifaiku got past my anti-haiku bias.  Once I started writing these little poems, I became obsessed.  I discovered Scifaikuest and submitted a few poems for publication.  In my cover letter, I mentioned that this was my first batch of scifaiku.  Editor teri santitoro was very encouraging and published some of my work.

So, for me, scifaiku provided an entry into haiku.  I doubt that I ever would have developed a passion for haiku if not for scifaiku.   

How did you meet haiku?

Julie B. K.

I'd appreciate some insight into the process of self-editing your haiku ...

Some haiku come to me fully formed, but that is the rare exception.  Usually I re-work them until I have an "aha!" moment and then I tweak the edits until I am reasonably happy.  But some poems -- argh!  I rework them and rewrite them until they turn into other poems and then they turn back to themselves and finally my whole page is a bunch of chicken scratches and nothing seems right.  For poems like this -- the ones that seem to almost work out but not quite -- what do you do with them?  Shelve them?  Finish them as best you can and move on?  Tear them up and start over?

seventeen syllables
hidden within this haiku
a year of words

Julie B. K.