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…your readership is very important to us.
Floating around out in the Interether right now are some interesting fruits of my labor from earlier this year. Since I’m not coming up with a whole lot of new material at the moment, think of this as hold music. Only, you know, better. I hope.
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- Issue 1.1 of Multiverses has been released! I picked out all the haibun, so I really like them all. Some other really talented people picked out the haiku, tanka, haiga, and features, so I like all those too. Seriously, it’s a great selection of poetry and I’m pretty sure I’d be impressed by it even if I weren’t on the editorial staff. Go take a look.
- Back in March Aubrie Cox featured on her blog Yay Words! the brilliant new subgenre of doodleku–she drew a doodle for every day and invited her readers to write haiku and tanka linking to it. Now she’s put together an awesome PDF called Things With Wings, containing the doodles and her favorites from among the daily submissions. I really enjoyed this collection because the ku cover a wide stylistic range and the link between doodle and poem is often subtle and thought-provoking. Also, the doodles? Adorable.
- Also back in March, I had the honor of judging the Robert Spiess Memorial Award Haiku Competition, which is sponsored by Modern Haiku. I shared this task with Carlos Colon (a.k.a. Haiku Elvis), so I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that I had a blast. It’s a hard job reading hundreds of great haiku and choosing the best ones, but somebody had to do it. Also, it was kind of cool to be judging a contest honoring a fine editor who lived here in Madison, Wisconsin and published Modern Haiku here for 24 years.
Okay, I’m off to go for a walk and hopefully come up with some ideas for things to put on this blog that I worked on more recently than four months ago. Trust me, an operator will be with you shortly…
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Red Dragonfly 
I’m going to have to make a short cut on this page and come back to those links …. it will take me some time before I can answer such a nice gift …I’m a slow reader!
Hi John,
I hope this finds you well.
Recently, I was reading a review by Michael Dylan Welch where he stated, “. . ..it was back in 1991 when George Swede declared that what haiku needed was more anthologies that focused on poets rather than poems, to show greater depth in the poetry, and I still think this is true.”
It occurred to me that Ohio has a deep tradition of haiku, senryu, and haibun that has yet to be acknowledged. Have you ever considered compiling and editing a haiku anthology written by Ohio poets? Consider that Ohio has produced the following active haijin:
1. Francis W. Alexander (Sandusky, Ohio)
2. Stephen Amor (Fremont, Ohio)
3. Sharon Hammer Baker (Findlay, Ohio)
4. Chris Bays (Beavercreek, Ohio)
5. Dianne Borsenik (Elyria, Ohio)
6. Shawn Bowman (Cleveland, Ohio)
7. Nancy Brady (Huron, Ohio)
8. Andy Burkhart (Cincinnati, Ohio)
9. Matthew M. Cariello (Bexley, Ohio)
10. Tish Davis (Dublin, Ohio)
11. Joshua Gage (Cleveland, Ohio)
12. Connie Post (Dayton, Ohio/Fairborn, Ohio)
13. Timothy Russell (Toronto, Ohio)
14. Skaidrite Stelzer (Toledo, Ohio)
15. Julie Warther (Dover, Ohio)
16. Theresa Williams (Bowling Green, Ohio)
And, of course, an’ya lived in Elyria, Ohio for a time.
What do you think?
Cheers,
~ Elliot