on poetry

words
are a waste of time…
poppies

Kobayashi Issa
(June 15, 1763 – January 5, 1828)

. . . . .
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text

send some peace

February, which is National Haiku Writing Month (NaHaiWriMo) is also Peace Poetry Postcard Month. Sign up, write a peace poem each day and mail one a day to a name on your pre-assigned list. Prompts will be posted on Facebook if you need a jump start.

To sign up

• Send an email to worldpeacepoets [at] gmail.com
• Use the subject line Peace Postcards
• In the body of the e-mail include your name, mailing address, city, state, country and Zip or postal code

Write poems. EASY.

call for haiku

The online journal Right Hand Pointing, which publishes about 12 issues a year of short poetry, very short fiction, art, and other things, invites submissions for the Winter Haiku Issue, to be published in February. The deadline is January 20, 2017, and the complete guidelines are here.

haiku haiku

If haiku is on your radar, here are two bits of information from Haiku Northwest (via Michael Dylan Welch) that might interest you:

• The thirteenth annual Porad Haiku Award is accepting haiku submissions for just one more week. The deadline is Thursday, September 15, 2016. The 2016 judge is Charles Trumbull, former president of the Haiku Society of America and editor emeritus of Modern Haiku magazine.
• The Seabeck Haiku Getaway 2016 doesn’t take place until October 27–30, but you can save money by registering now. Early registration ends on Friday, September 23.

Follow the links for additional details on each of these haiku opportunities.

Haikus*

2016 Merit Award
By Corinne Foster (9th grade)

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
Pancake on a stick

. . . . .
*Copyright 2016 by Corinne Foster. Broadside illustrated by Megan Carroll.

pixelated

Herewith, a random selection of things that have flashed across the screen:

• An article in the Portland Press Herald (the other Portland) about a poetry contest in Skowhegan, Maine. In it you’ll find the term “haiku bombing.”
• A review in The Guardian of English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection Of Shorter Poems From Skelton To Jonson by John Williams (published 1963, reissued 2012) that describes the book in terms — “punchy and sinuous” — that may cause you to rush out and purchase the 398-page tome.
• An announcement from the Library of Congress that Juan Felipe Herrera has been appointed to serve a second term as the 21st Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.
• An announcement in The Seattle Review of Books (and a link to the Facebook event) regarding poetry goings-on in Redmond, Washington, this Sunday, April 17, 2016.
• A link to the fine literary journal Clover: A Literary Rag with a reminder that submissions for Volume 11 are open until April 30.

public poetry

Talk about crowd-sourcing! At the new Google facility under construction at King’s Cross, London, Poetrics is an interactive installation that translates voices into poetry. Three motion-activated microphones pick up voices and use Google’s speech recognition software to interpret the words, which are then displayed on a series of 17 LED panels. (The panels are arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 words — not syllables — although the designers say that they were inspired by haiku.*) See more pictures and see the report on ITV news.
*For the down and dirty on 5-7-5, see this explanation.