I mentioned in my last post that I'd talk about haikuishness later. So here's my haiku news:
http://wistaria.blogspot.com/2009/05/pinewood-haiku-contest-winners.html



I took 2nd place in the 2009 Pinewood Haiku Contest with my junco haiku. It's the first haiku contest I've ever placed in, so I'm quite pleased. The haiku itself came about last winter when I was sitting here at my desk, probably working on my novel and watching the juncos eat seed outside my window. Simple as that.

The following link will take you to the Roadrunner Haiku website, where 3 of my "seven moons" poems are published after 5 of Michael Dylan Welch's "seven suns" poems. (Five of his "neon buddha" poems are also published in this issue of Roadrunner.) http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/pages92/haiku92_revealed.htm If you don't know the story behind the surreal "seven suns" and "seven moons" poems, it's this: Michael wrote the "seven suns" poems all in a go, and emailed them to me to see what I thought. They struck such a chord inside me that I had to respond to them, not by just circling my favorites, but by trying my own hand at something similar. So I sat down and wrote "seven moons" all in one go. They just came to me, just as they came to him, quickly and with very little conscious thinking. They were a lot of fun, and we followed them up with two rengay and a kasen renku, though none of the linked forms seemed to carry quite the energy of the originals. Ultimately, it would be wonderful to publish all of the "seven suns" and "seven moons" poems.

Simply Haiku also has two of my senryu in their summer 2009 issue: http://simplyhaiku.com/SHv7n2/senryu/senryu.html I'm tickled to find my humble senryu right next to poems by Cor van den Heuvel and Christopher Herold.

And to top it off, the summer issue of Modern Haiku arrived in the mail today, right when I was wanting a fresh dose of haiku! Here's a link to the site, which includes Deborah Kolodji's great haiku, among others: http://www.modernhaiku.org/issue40-2/haiku40-2.html

OK, that's all the haiku news for now. I'd better get some submitted so I might have further haiku news in the future!