Haiku on Haikai Home

Edited by William J. Higginson

Our Haiku Offerings

As we gradually gear up, we presently have three offerings for our haiku visitors, plus one in the works. Below, there are also links to some prize-winning haiku I recently judged, and my comments on them:

Review of the Haiku Canada Conference 2007. I spent much of my time at the recent Haiku Canada Weekend taking photographs and notes on the program and other features of the event. The several web pages of this review give a comprehensive overview of the most "user friendly" haiku conference on the continent, as well as putting faces with some of the names of Canadian haiku poets, translators, and others.

Haiku by the Numbers, Seriously. This essay takes up haiku form and gives an overview of more than 100 years of haiku translations in English. The page also offers a look at where our design ideas are going, at least in so far as serious essays/academic articles are concerned. This page contains special formatting that makes it easy to print out, without wasting ink and paper on web-page navigation, among other features. Give it a test-drive, and let me know what you think! Contact William J. Higginson at wordfield-at-att-dot-net.

A Taste of Butterfly Dreams. New translations of classic and modern Japanese haiku by yours truly, paired with stunning nature photographs by Michael Lustbader. This is actually a small web site, the current main offering on our sister web site, From Here Press. From Here Press is our bookselling venue, which will eventually have a full-scale web presence of its own. In the meantime, enjoy this preview of the electronic book Butterfly Dreams: The Seasons through Haiku and Photographs, which includes some 25 image-and-haiku pairs, and offers some of the comments on translations and photographs found in the book. Note that the order form on that site also lists other books available from us.

The I-N-G Thing. This is a coming attraction, I'm afraid, as I have to piece the essay together from my previous writings on the subject, add some new material, and give it some order. All of this takes time, and right now we're entering the busiest season for teaching poets like me. (To get an idea of what's going on in Penny's and my professional lives, visit our Events site at http://events.2hweb.net//index.html.) This i-n-g thing essay is in progress, and if you'd like an e-mail when it's done, drop me a line with the subject line "The I-N-G Thing" or something like that.

Haiku and Commentary. Looking beyond this web site, there are the Winners of the 2007 Francine Porad Haiku Contest of the Washington Poets Association and my "Judge's Comments" for them, on the Association's web site at http://www.washingtonpoets.org/owas/view.php?a=1044.

And Other Recent Winners and Commentary. Not too long ago, I was invited to select the winner of the Scorpion Prize for the best-of-issue haiku in the online Roadrunner Haiku Journal issue 6:3. Here are the poems I particularly liked and my comments on them as they appear in issue 6:4: http://poetrylives.com/roadrunner/pages64/scorpion64.htm.

Meanwhile, you may wish to visit the Web site of the Haiku Society of America at http://www.hsa-haiku.org, or the extensive list of online haiku resources which I edit for the Open Directory, here: http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Poetry/Forms/Haiku_and_Related_Forms.