Both the quantity and quality of work submitted for this issue were astonishing. Over a 15-day period, we received 875 submissions, including poems, haiga and haibun.

Selecting three months’ worth of daily poems from that incredible pool was really difficult — not just because of the volume, but because we had to say no to many terrific poems. If your work didn’t find its way into this issue, please rest assured that’s not necessarily a judgment on its quality, even in the editors’ own admittedly idiosyncratic estimation.

In the end we picked a bit over 50 poems for this issue — 54 to be exact. These will appear over the next two and a half months, at the end of which we plan to publish a printed and bound version of this issue, as we did with issue 10.1.

This issue was edited by tinywords publisher d. f. tweney, with assistance from Shae Davidson and John Emil Vincent. The background art is based on a photograph by Matteo Angelino. The tinywords website runs on WordPress, and is hosted at Birdhouse Hosting.

It takes a lot of work to put an issue of tinywords together, so I am looking for coeditors. If you are interested in helping with future issues of tinywords, either by editing or by helping with print design and layout, contact me please: dylan (at) tinywords dot com.

Issue 10.1 is now complete, and I’m pleased to be able to offer it as a printed book.

This is something I’ve wanted to do with tinywords for a long time. There is something about the physicality of a book that makes for a completely different experience: Not better or worse, but different. It’s more tactile, more conducive to relaxed reading, more leisurely, and feels less evanescent.

I’ve taken a lot of care to present the poems as carefully and beautifully in this volume as they appear here on the web site. Each poem stands on its own page, with lots of room to “breathe,” and the layout I think is simple without becoming monotonous.

Thanks to Lulu, a print-on-demand service, the print version of tinywords is just $9 plus shipping. If you buy a copy, about three dollars will go to tinywords, and we’ll use that money for the next edition and for our web hosting fees.

I hope you like this edition of tinywords. Of course, you can still browse through all of the poems in the issue 10.1 archive here, and you can read an electronic version of the print issue on Scribd, a document-sharing service, for free.

A few notes about issue 10.1: It was edited by d. f. tweney, with help from Shae Davidson, David Jensen, and John Emil Vincent.

The background art (the drawing of a calla lily) is by d. f. tweney.

The summer issue, 10.2, will begin appearing here tomorrow, with a new, summer-themed look. I hope you’ll join us for it!

There’s still time to submit haiku and micropoetry for issue 10.1 — we’re accepting submissions until March 15. (Use the form in that linked page to submit your work.)

This issue came together with help from Rob Beschizza, who provided the WordPress theme this site is based on.

Scot Hacker at Birdhouse Hosting runs our web servers and keeps WordPress in line.

Bookmaker and übergeek India Amos provided helpful design tweaks for the website.

The background image for issue 9.1 is based on a photo by DigitalLyte.

The issue was edited by d. f. tweney.

This issue is archived as tinywords issue 9.1, and is available as an e-book (and a downloadable .pdf file) on Scribd: tinywords issue 9.1 e-book.

Interested in a printed copy? Let us know in the comments below, or by sending email to dft at tweney (dot) com, and if there’s enough interest, we’ll see about making a nicely-printed and -bound version of the issue.

Image: Courtesy Aalix Roake, AalixR.com

I started publishing haiku in 2000, before I really even knew what it was. I found poems that I liked in a book and started sending them to a mailing list, to friends’ inboxes, to their pagers, to my phone. One haiku per day. Nothing more. The list grew and I built a simple website to go with it. From the converted gardening shed on the back of my garage — my roughly-finished office — I sent haiku winging out over digital networks around the world.

After awhile, it became clear that it was more than just a small circle of friends who were reading tinywords, so I stopped borrowing haiku from books and started publishing my own, as well as asking people on the list to send in their own. My early efforts at writing haiku were, like those of most educated in American schools, exactly seventeen syllables. Easy enough, or so it seemed at first: But soon I found I couldn’t write or get enough haiku I liked to keep the daily pace going.

Desiring a wider audience — and needing more good poets — I sought listing in search engines. Bill Higginson responded, adding tinywords to the top of the haiku list that he curated for the Open Directory. It was like turning on an engine: The site took off, buzzing with an infusion of readers and writers who had discovered the site through Bill’s help, and who were eager to contribute haiku, or comments, or just read and share with their friends.

hum of the laptop
watching a lost world flicker to life

Bill’s help didn’t stop there. He contributed haiku, both his own as well as his translations of the ancient masters, and generously offered suggestions on how I could improve my own haiku. His books provided an invaluable, expert and open-hearted education in the deeper aspects of the art. And he was a generous correspondent, always finding time to reply. He could be prickly: Several times I had to adjust the design of the website because of his complaints about how his haiku were appearing. Of course I resented these criticisms, but after I steamed about them for awhile, I wound up conceding his points and making the changes he suggested. They always made the site better. In time, with my labor over PHP and MySQL code and the occasional pointed comment from Bill, tinywords evolved a clean, simple, minimalist design that kept the focus on the very brief poems that were its heart, and enabled each one to shine forward on its own terms, one per page.

The burden of maintaining tinywords grew, and as the mailing list topped 3,000 subscribers the number of submissions grew overwhelming. With work and family also weighing heavily on my time, tinywords seemed more and more like a burden. I walked away from haiku altogether in June 2008. I couldn’t even bear to look at my e-mail inbox, no longer maintained tinywords, and I even stopped reading haiku journals. So when a friend wrote in October of that year to tell me that Bill had died, I didn’t get the message until months later. And I didn’t have the heart to reply when I did.

There’s little I can add to George Swede’s elegant eulogy to a man whose intelligence, scholarship, generosity and poetry have touched many people’s lives. I never even met Bill Higginson. Yet he was a great patron of this site, and a friend.

over the bay
a jet banks into the haze

Illustration by Aalix Roake, AalixR.com

Second, we’ll be publishing in issues. Each issue will published gradually, one poem per day, but there may be gaps between the end of one issue and the beginning of the next, during which we won’t be publishing anything.

I hope you’ll join us for the new phase of tinywords. To subscribe or unsubscribe to our daily email list, click on the subscriptions link on the left side of this page.

And if you’d like to submit to tinywords, we’ll be accepting micropoetry submissions until November 24.

Note: This haiku was previously published in tinywords on 14 April 2006.

tinywords is now accepting submissions for issue #1. This issue will be edited by tinywords publisher d. f. tweney and will be published, one poem per day, starting December 1.

I’m looking for very short or micro poems of no more than 5 lines, and ideally less than 140 characters. This could include haiku, senryu, tanka, cinquains, or other forms.

Longer works (e.g. haibun) will also be considered if they include a very short poem that can be excerpted.

I’m also interested in artwork and/or poem-artwork combinations (e.g. haiga) that could fit with the theme of miniature poetry.

I’ll accept submissions for a 2-week period only, from November 10-24.

Please, one poem at a time, and don’t submit more than 5 in total for this issue.

I will arrange collections of short poetry into issues. There may also be art and essays, perhaps even a review or two.

The poems, art and other works will be published here, one at a time, one per day.

I’ll also send the daily poems to the subscribers of the tinywords mailing list & tinywords twitter account. If they’re too long (over 140 characters) or non-textual, I’ll send links.

When the issue is complete, you’ll be able to view everything from that issue here in the archives.

I daydream of making each issue into a printed and handbound book, but we’ll see how that goes.

I will aim to publish an issue every quarter. I’d like to invite some guest editors to edit some of these issues.

I’m going to need some help.

Now, a similar notion has hit many people thanks to Twitter, which — because it is tied to SMS — is limited to very short text messages (140 characters in Twitter’s case). The result has been an efflorescence of very short poetry and flash fiction.

Some notable examples that I know of: Twitter-based literary journal Seven by Twenty, flash fiction author Arjun Basu, someone posting as micropoetry (with the encouragingly truthful tagline “more people write poetry than read it”).

Among haiku poets, w.f. owen posts as haikunotebook, Alan Summers is haikutec, Brian Pike is paiku, and I’m sure there are others. (Please do let me know who I’ve missed.)

Tom Watson has assembled some (mostly unintentional) “found” poetry on Twitter. While not Twitter-oriented, Four and Twenty is a journal of very short (<20 word) poems, delivered via PDF. And other literary journals, like the brand-new Scarab Magazine, which is delivered as an iPhone app, have embraced Twitter as a way of communicating with their readers and advertising new issues.

There’s a collaborative poem going on where each line is submitted by the public via Twitter: The Longest Poem in the World.

And, of course, tinywords has a Twitter account.

I’m interested in how such small numbers of words can be made to carry such large and varied poetic freight, and I’d like tinywords to highlight the best examples.

tinywords has not been active since mid-2008, but I’m considering bringing it back online. If I do, it will be in a new form, probably not exclusively focused on haiku — though haiku will continue to be an essential component of the publication.

I’m still working out the details and rustling up co-conspirators. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

All of the haiku published on tinywords from 2000-2008 will remain online, at their original URLs. To dive into the archive, why not start with a random haiku?