Per Diem News

We Want YOU!

We Want YOU! to be an editor of Per Diem in 2012.

The Per Diem feature is our daily poem, and we’ve had a great run with the database that Jack Galmitz and Paul Pfleuger created in 2009, but it’s time for some new material. What we have in mind is a series of monthly collections, each with a theme. To provide an example, we’ve created “A Haiku Bestiary” to run in January. All the poems chosen incorporate an animal—no birds, no insects, in this case—and had the further goal of revealing something about the animal itself, and not just some anthropomorphized view of it. Traditionally a bestiary will follow the alphabet, with one animal for each letter. Some can prove quite challenging, and we admit we cheated: the “X” animal, for instance, is “oXen”. Also, there are 31 days in January and only 26 letters in English, so some “popular” letters make more than one appearance. We hope the result will not only entertain you and reveal some excellent poems that you may or may not be aware of, but also stimulate discussion and consideration of animal being, and our relationship to it.

Not all themes need to carry in this way, of course, and in fact what we really hope for is variety. We’ll be considering themes from anyone who wishes to participate. What you need to do is:

1) choose a theme (haiku bestiary, in our example)

2) provide some idea of how the theme would work (showing animals as themselves, not anthropomorphized)

We’ll help you choose a month that’s not spoken for, and can help you get raw materials for your selections through generous accessibility to the Haiku Database created by Charlie Trumbull. We can also discuss your theme in more detail as you are developing it for airing on the Per Diem site. And we’ll work toward a deadline so your work is received in a timely fashion.

We hope you’re excited by the possibilities of sharing some favorite poems and a theme that is important to you with other haiku poets and readers during 2012.

If you’d like to become an editor for Per Diem, use the Contact page send your theme and explication, and even a sample poem or two. We look forward to your ideas for our daily poems!

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Hi Abigail and Robert:

    Thanks for your interest, which is shared, apparently, by many—we’ve had a heartening response to the call for editors, and monthly slots for the next couple years are filling up fast.

    To become an editor, you’ll need to decide on a particular theme, and then choose poems that illuminate that theme. For instance, we have upcoming collections on the relationship between weather and mood, astronomical events, the senses five, and much more, all as seen through the prism of haiku. If you can identify a theme that you’d like to explore, I can help you generate a database of pertinent poems that will help you arrive at the numbers you need. And don’t worry, Abigail, the problem is much more how to limit one’s self to a mere 30 or 31 poems when there are hundreds that one would like to include. And of course you don’t post each day—you submit the entire roster to us and we feed it through the per diem software which selects one per day from the database you’ve generated.

    I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Happy hunting!

    Jim Kacian
    THF

    P.S. Thanks, too, Robert, for the good thoughts.

  2. I am interested, too. Although a new posting a day, for 30/31 days, sounds a bit overwhelming.

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