Haiku
News
A new haiku/tanka
journal has been started by Dick Whyte and Laurence
Stacey. The purpose of this journal is to explore current
events and news items through the poetic forms of haiku,
senryu, tanka and kyoka. There have been many attempts to
marry the news with haiku poetry on the internet, but as
Liam Wilkinson wrote, "often using the 5-7-5 model... It’s
the kind of thing to which serious writers, readers and
students of haiku and related forms would have a strong
aversion." (read the rest of Liam's article here:
http://prunejuice.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/haiku-news/)
In contrast to this, Haiku News is
attempting to marry the art of modern English language
haiku with the news. We have no interest in the 5-7-5
form. We are interested in good contemporary haiku poetry,
which is inspired by world events (from the intimate to
the intimidating, from the minuscule to the monumental).
What we are hoping is that through the poetic we will be
able to inject the political with the personal. As Joseph
Stalin wrote, "One death is sad, one million deaths is a
statistic." At Haiku News we are trying to
remind people that a million deaths is really nothing more
than one death a million times over. It is not that a
million deaths is more sad than one, but that each of the
million deaths is equivalent to one. Too often the news
assumes a pretense of objectivity, and reports events as
if they were simply a curiosity, rather than something to
feel and think critically about.
We have been on-line for about a month now and plan to
update once a day with news from around the world in
poetic form. Because this is a huge task Haiku News
is taking submissions. All you need to do is write a
haiku, senryu, tanka or kyoka about a news article and
send it to us with a link to the news item which inspired
it. To read more about the submission process see here:
http://www.wayfarergallery.net/haikunews/?page_id=48
Happy writing!!
