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Survey says . . . THF Mission Statement

Every September the Board of Directors and Associates of The Haiku Foundation are sent a survey. Their responses help to guide our growth and direction. We’d like to broaden our input, and so we’ll be asking you to respond to a series of questions, one per week, over the next half-year. Your replies will be weighed in our assessment of our performance.

Today’s question: Mission Statement

Our mission statement reads as follows:

The impetus behind The Haiku Foundation was the realization that English-language haiku had done a poor job of promoting itself in two important venues: in gathering, interpreting, honoring and making available its comprehensive history, and in reaching beyond a coterie audience to establish its importance as a literary vehicle in the present and future. As a result, THF has two primary missions:

1) to archive our first century of English-language haiku; and

2) to expand possibilities for our second.

All other haiku groups—from journals to societies to conferences—have been created to help the individual poet realize his or her creative dream, be it education, publication or social contact. The Haiku Foundation does not follow this model. THF instead is a series of projects organized not for poets per se, but for haiku itself. The realization of these projects will in due course help all haiku poets. Haiku has been very good to all the poets who have been fortunate to have found it. The Haiku Foundation is where poets go when they want to give back.

Please assess how well The Haiku Foundation is delivering on this topic. Indicate your assessment of our performance to date by choosing one of the options:

Excellent

Good

Fair

Poor

Abandon

Please feel free to add additional comments. Thank you in advance for your consideration, and for helping us make The Haiku Foundation a better resource.

This Post Has 4 Comments

  2. Excellent

    I’ve been aware of THF since its beginning, and have been visiting daily for over two years. I like reading the Per Diem poems when I check my email and blogs in the mornings; and I follow the blog posts here. THF is really a library now, and I look at the various programs and features at different times; depending upon time, interest, my research etc.

    It can’t always be easy to be a formal archive and informal site that invites so much good conversation and poems in the comments at the same time (blog and forum). From what I know so far, this is one of the things that makes THF unique.

    Thanks to all, Ellen

  3. Hi, Gabriel: Thanks for weighing in here. I must confess that I never have truly understood this argument. If a group wished to pursue the study of stag-horn beetles, why should it be criticized for not including crickets? Shouldn’t that be up to the group? In any case, I hope you will be pleased to know that The Haiku Foundation has initiated a new program over the past few months titled World of Haiku. We have nearly 100 poets around the world gathering haiku in the dozens of languages and cultures in which they appear, and we will share the results of this project once we have a sufficient number of them ready for viewing. And, since you already knew about this initiative, I suspect you made your comment simply so that I had the opportunity to tell people what’s coming, for which I thank you.

  4. Your emphasis on English-language haiku narrows the field too much and does not strike a welcoming note to those in the haiku community who live full and interesting lives outside of the Anglosphere.
    Gabriel

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