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!!