Author: Lynette Arden

Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival – 2015 Haiku Invitational

Australian poets who received Honorable Mentions in the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival – 2015 Haiku Invitational include:

snow-heavy blossoms
their hands
share a pocket

Nathalie Buckland (Nimbin, NSW)

late afternoon . . .
touching the blossom
with the tip of her cane

Jo McInerney (Boolarra, VIC)

sharing the bench
the old busker
and cherry petals

Mark Miller (Shoalhaven Heads, NSW)

sharing an umbrella
with a stranger
cherry blossom rain

Vanessa Proctor (Sydney, NSW)

blossom moon
the pregnancy line
turning to pink

Cynthia Rowe (Sydney, NSW)

The Red Dragonflies’ Christmas Meeting and Ginko, 2015

On the 5th December Red Dragonflies, Vanessa Proctor, Cynthia Rowe, Barbara Fisher and Dawn Bruce, met for a ginko of the Great Masters Exhibition at the NSW Art Gallery. Members Beverley George and Lesley Walter were unable to attend and were sorely missed.

After the ginko, lunch was enjoyed on the café patio and haiku writing exercises read and workshopped. Small Christmas gifts and good wishes for the 2016 writing year were exchanged over coffee.

Dawn Bruce

A Hundred Gourds 5.1 released

The 17th issue of ‘A Hundred Gourds’, a quarterly journal of haiku, haibun, haiga, tanka and renku poetry, is now online for your reading pleasure.

http://www.ahundredgourds.com/

Renku News – Guest Editor for AHG 5.2, Kala Ramesh

Due to unforeseen circumstances, William Sorlien is not available to receive renku submissions for AHG 5.2, the March 2016 issue. Kala Ramesh has kindly agreed to be our Guest Renku Editor for the forthcoming March issue. Please read the AHG news page for further details and send your renku submissions to this address: haikugourds@gmail.com with ‘Renku Submission’ in the title bar.

Haiga News – New Haiga Editor, Sandi Pray

With this issue we farewell Aubrie Cox and welcome Sandi Pray as our new Haiga Editor. Please read our news page for further details.

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8th Kokako Haiku and Senryu Competition

A full set of results for the 8th Kokako Haiku and Senryu Competition will be published – in New Zealand – in the next edition of “Kokako”, accompanied by comments from the judge Catherine Mair.

In the meantime, the following entry by Australian haiku poet Barbara A Taylor was included among the poems rated as Commended:

in wild Kakadu
tourists take selfies
with a crocodile

Report on HNA 2015 – Marietta McGregor

The Haiku North America (HNA) 2015 Conference was held from 14-18 October at Union College, a liberal arts college founded in 1795 with a classically-inspired campus near the foothills of the Adirondacks in upper New York State. Appropriately for the setting, this year’s conference, Autumn Term was themed around the teaching and learning of haiku. After a welcome by HNA’s principal organisers Michael Dylan Welch, John Stevenson and Hilary Tann (other hard-working committee members were Yu Chang and Tom Clausen), 130 poet delegates each recited one of their own haiku/senryu.

The two Australians, Jennifer Sutherland and Marietta McGregor, along with poets who travelled from Japan and India, received a special welcome, a round of applause in appreciation of their long journeys. Jim Kacian launched proceedings with Realism is Dead, posing the question that, if haiku was no longer rooted in the real world, what might then ground it? The keynote address by Dr Randy Brooks examined some of the issues with teaching haiku in the American education system.

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Cynthia Rowe: winner – Grand Prize: 1st Place in 2015 World Haiku Contest

Australian haiku poet Cynthia Rowe has won the Grand Prize: 1st Place in the 2015 World Haiku Contest, with the following haiku:

bare branch
the wild persimmon
snow-flecked

Another entry by Cynthia was one of five haiku to gain an Honorable Mention in the same competition:

old railway track
a tumbleweed skips
through wild grass

Comments about Cynthia’s winning poem – provided by the judge for this contest, Alan Summers – can be read below:

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Review of “Prospect Five” – Dorothy McLaughlin

“Prospect” is an annual poetry journal, with longer poems written by Australians and published in Australia by Blue Giraffe Press, owned and managed by Peter Macrow. “Prospect Five” is devoted to haiku and tanka, with Beverley George as guest editor. Beverley was president of Haiku Oz, the Australian Haiku Society. She edits and publishes “Eucalypt,” a tanka publication, conducts workshops, and writes essays and children’s books. Her tanka and haiku have earned awards, and some have been translated into Japanese. The cover image and design are by Ron C. Moss, and Rebus Press had charge of layout.

The journal as a whole is unmistakably and delightfully Australian. While some of the vocabulary is special to that country, the themes and emotions are universal. With a few exceptions, I was able to understand and appreciate the poems without resorting to a dictionary, though I did look up some words for their precise meaning and enjoyed this verbal visit to a country and continent so far away.

Haiku, usually three-line poems, are here arranged four to a page, while tanka, which have five lines, are three to a page. They are divided, ten pages of haiku, twelve of tanka, and twelve haiku, with the final two pages given to Blue Giraffe Press 2nd Australian Haiku Competition’s three winners and three commended haiku

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