The Haiku Poets of Northern California have announced their 2004 haiku, senryu, tanka, and rengay competition. First prize in each category is $100. The deadline is 10/31/2004 for haiku, senry, and tanka; 11/30 for rengay. Read the entry guidelines.

In the Japan Times, former Haiku Society of America president Hiroaki Sato reminisces about Princeton professor Earl Miner, a scholar of renga and haiku, and describes a talk that Miner gave to the HSA in 1979.

Book note: bottle rockets press recently published a piano practice, a chapbook of 35 haiku and senryu by Rochester poet Tom Painting. The chapbook is side stapled and has a 4"x 5 3/4" format. It costs $5.00/copy plus $1.00 shipping in the U.S. ($2.00 S&H for Canada & Mexico, $3.00 elsewhere.) Make checks payable to: "Stanford M. Forrester" (not bottle rockets) and mail them to: P.O. Box 290691, Wethersfield, CT 06129-0691.

To find out more, check out the bottle rockets web site.

LitKicks is sponsoring a live, online, 24-hour poetry party starting on Friday, July 23. It sounds like great fun -- mark your calendars, and then stop by their web site on July 23 to check it out!

A Winter's Day is a new renku-style animated film, in which 35 directors each created a short animation based on a different haiku. Here's a brief note on the movie, plus an audio interview about it with a film festival organizer.

Haiku for a cancer patient: In this NPR commentary, a cancer ward chaplain talks about how one of the ward's patients, a man named Cleon, writes haiku about his grandson. His haiku are direct, raw, and almost cathartic. Click here to hear the story.

New trend: turning worthless spam e-mail into bizarre, dada-ist poems, also known as "spoems." Poems created include, of course, haiku.

"It's estimated that in Japan today between 1 million and 2 million people regularly compose the miniature Japanese poems called haiku, or the slightly longer tanka verses." Read more in the Taipei Times' review of Rediscovering Basho, a new book edited by Stephen Henry Gill and C. Andrew Gerstle.

This news story, from a Korean site, provides a brief, intriguing intro to the Japanese filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro, whose "tatami shot" style of filmmaking has been compared to haiku. Here's Ozu's filmography and a brief intro to Ozu's career.

Gary Gach, author of What Book!?, has a page of interesting notes on haiku.

Hurrah! tinywords is now the #10 result for the query "haiku" on Google. That means it's on the first page of results for most searchers. Excellent!

Many thanks to the haiku fans and tinywords friends who have already linked to tinywords from their web sites. As previously promised, I'm giving away one free tinywords T-shirt each month to a randomly-selected webmaster whose site includes a link to tinywords.com, using the word haiku in the link. This month's winner: Celia White of poetryweblog.

There will be more chances to win a T-shirt. Just add a tinywords.com haiku link to your site, and then send me an email to let me know the URL where I can find your link--then I'll enter you in the contest!