All original haiku and translations by William J. Higginson have all been removed from tinywords, by Mr. Higginson's request. These total about 15 haiku in all. To anyone who is looking for the missing haiku, please accept my apologies.
posted by Dylan at 9:58 PM

Haijin paul conneally collaborated with students from the Martin High School Anstey Charnwood Leicestershire UK [editor's note: we're not sure where the school name ends and place name begins there] to produce an excellent gallery of haiku collages, for "Big Art Day 2003." Check it out!
posted by Dylan at 10:56 AM

no haiku today:
technical difficulties!
we'll be back next week.

To be more specific: the editor's laptop croaked.

Unfortunately, while I'm usually pretty diligent about backups, I didn't back up the past month or so of tinywords email -- including a lot of correspondence about various haiku submissions. That leaves me without many "autumn" haiku for the coming weeks. Rather than run haiku out of season, I'm just going to put tinywords on hold until I get access to my mail files again. My new boss is helping me get the data off my hard drive, and once we've done that, I'll be able to catch up with my email again -- and put all those submissions into the queue. I expect that will take a couple of days. In the meantime, I'm not checking tinywords email at all. Be patient if you haven't heard from me in awhile.
posted by Dylan at 4:44 PM

New contest: Passing along another haiku contest announcement here:

2003 San Francisco International Competition for Haiku, Senryu, Tanka and Rengay

Sponsor: Haiku Poets of Northern California

Deadline: In hand, October 31, 2003

All entries must be original, unpublished, and not under
consideration elsewhere. There is no limit to the number of
submissions. A first prize of $100 will be awarded in each of the
four categories. Second and third prizes of $50 and $25 will be
awarded for Haiku only. Contest results will be announced at the
first HPNC meeting in January. All rights revert to authors after the
contest results are announced. Winning poems will be published in the
Spring/Summer issue of Mariposa, the membership journal of the Haiku Poets of Northern California. This contest is open to all except the HPNC
president and, for their respective categories, the contest coordinators
and the judges (who will remain anonymous until after the competition.)

Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka Submission Guidelines
Type or print each entry on two 3 x 5 cards. In the upper left corner of
each card identify its category as Haiku, Senryu, or Tanka. On the back of
one card only, print your name, address, telephone number and e-mail
address (optional). The entry fee is $1.00 per poem. Send haiku, senryu
and tanka submissions, along with entry fee, to HPNC, c/o Carolyn Hall, 26
Buena Vista Terrace, San Francisco CA 94117.

Rengay Submission Guidelines
All rengay must be titled. For two people (Poet A and Poet B) follow this
linked format: 3 lines/Poet A, 2 lines/Poet B, 3/A, 3/B, 2/A, 3/B. For
three poets (A, B, and C) the format is: 3 lines/A, 2 lines/B, 3 lines/C,
2/A, 3/B, 2/C. Type or print each rengay on three letter-size sheets.
Include full authorship information, stanza by stanza, as well as all
poets' names, addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses (optional)
on one copy only. On the other two copies, mark stanzas with letters only
(poet A, poet B, poet C) to indicate the sequence of authorship. The entry
fee is $5 per rengay. Send rengay submissions, along with entry fee, to
HPNC, c/o Fay Aoyagi, 930 Pine Street, #105, San Francisco CA 94108.

All Submissions
Make checks or money orders payable in U.S. dollars to "Haiku Poets
of Northern California (HPNC)." Cash (in U.S. currency) is OK.
Enclose a business-size SASE (U.S. first class postage or an IRC) for
response to queries and for notification of contest winners. No entries
will be returned, with the exception that late submissions, or those
received without payment, will be returned using your SASE; without an
SASE these entries will be discarded.

Thank you for participating in this contest.

Contact: Dan Brady, Email List Manager for Haiku Poets of Northern
California: hpnc at creativeideasforyou.com
posted by Dylan at 7:11 AM

Bike-ku: Bicycling Magazine is soliciting haiku about cycling, for an upcoming anthology. "Aimed at the intelligent reader and rider, the book highlights poems of all lengths, forms and styles, all bound by a common theme - the sport of bicycling. ... Haikus about road racing, villanelles about derailleurs, travelogues in rhyme - it's all acceptable, if accessible and well-written." Contact: Bicycling Magazine, Justin.Belmont at rodale.com. (via WHC Newsletter)
posted by Dylan at 7:46 PM

Submit your haibun: The World Haiku Club is soliciting haibun submissions for its upcoming magazine, the World Haiku Review. Details (from the WHC newsletter):

1. haibun prose - this element of the haibun is all too often just
"prose". I favour prose that has many of the characteristics associated
with haiku - present tense (and shifts of tense though predominant voice
"present"), imagistic, shortened or interesting syntax, joining words such
as "and" limited maybe, a sense of "being there", descriptions of places
people met and above all "brevity".

2. haiku in haibun - usually only one - this should link to the prose
"renku" style - not a direct carry on from the prose telling some of what
has already been said - no - it should lead us on - let our mind want for
more, start travelling. Linking by "scent" will be greatly valued!

3 . Each poet may submit 1 haibun only.

4. Include your name (and nom de plume, if applicable); and your state or
province, and country of residence (if more than one, please include all).

5. Works in non-English languages must be accompanied by good English
translation, which will be used for selection purposes.

SUBJECT FIELD OF EMAIL: "Haibun Submission for World Haiku Review"

Send haibun submissions by email to Paul Conneally at:

paul.conneally at ntlworld.com

Deadline: Tuesday, September 30, 2003, your local time.
posted by Dylan at 7:44 PM

Jane Reichhold has published a new issue of Lynx.
posted by Dylan at 7:39 PM

New archive feature: With 633 haiku and counting, the tinywords archive page has been getting huge, and it's slow to load, even on my reasonably fast DSL connection. So -- I made some changes to the underlying code. The archive now defaults to displaying just the most recent 50 published haiku. If you sort by number of comments, most recent comment, etc, it shows the top 50 matching results. You can click to show 25, 50, 100, 200, or all haiku in the archive.

If you enter a query in the archive page's search form, there's no limit on the number of haiku shown -- the page displays all matching haiku until you clear the query.
posted by Dylan at 6:59 PM

New rules. I've made some changes to the comment system on tinywords.com. First, I've renamed "comments" as "responses." Second, responses must be shorter than before -- they are now limited to 250 characters. Finally, you may only post one response at a time per haiku. Once you've posted one response, you must wait until someone else posts a response before you can reply again.

I'm hoping this is sufficient to curb the argumentative and self-important tone that discussion on tinywords has taken recently. Even more, I'm hoping that the word "response" -- and the short character length limit -- will encourage people to post their own haiku in response to the published haiku. I'm not making that a rule -- you can still post prosaic comments of praise and critique. But I'd be delighted if each haiku published on tinywords generated its own renga -- a linked chain of haiku verses, each one responding to the ones that have gone before it.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments on the new rules: dft at tinywords.com
posted by Dylan at 10:37 AM

tinywords now has an icon: a simple black-and-white image of a heron standing among reeds, thanks to longtime subscriber and tinywords poet gK. In most browsers, if you bookmark a tinywords page -- or create a shortcut on your desktop -- you'll see this icon on the resulting shortcut. Thanks for your help, gK!
posted by Dylan at 10:08 PM

Catching up. I'm working through a huge backlog of haiku submissions this week. Frankly, it's been piling up for awhile, as other obligations have consumed my attention lately. As of today, I'm up to May. That is, if you submitted haiku to tinywords in April 2003 or earlier, you should have a response by now. If you sent haiku to us in or after May, however, you may have to wait a few more days.
posted by Dylan at 6:51 AM

tinywords took a short, unannounced vacation last week, but we're back now. thanks for your patience.
posted by Dylan at 8:06 AM

The 6th annual Suruga Literary Festival sponsored by Zen Temple Daichuji in Numazu, Japan is seeking entries for English haiku. More information at the contest Web site.

Deadline for entries: Dec. 20, 2003.

(via World Haiku Club newsletter)
posted by Dylan at 7:11 AM

A Milwaukee area paper has a profile of tinywords haijin Jeffrey Winke. "Bookish and polite, this advertising and PR copywriter has a secret, mad soul." Who knew? Congrats, Jeff -- now that you're famous, don't forget you knew us when!
posted by Dylan at 10:38 PM

Over the weekend I upgraded tinywords' archive page, which lists all haiku published on tinywords. In addition to displaying each haiku's publication date, author, and first line, the new page also shows the number of comments and the date and time of the most recent comment. You can also click on each of the column headings to sort the list -- and you can bookmark your favorite view. For instance, here's the haiku archive sorted by most recent comment. Enjoy!
posted by Dylan at 10:20 AM