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Photograph by Cindy Zackowitz This website updated on June 10, 2009 ANNOUNCEMENTS: For information about the Robert Spiess Memorial Haiku Award Competition, see the Modern Haiku website. Check out the exciting debut of The Haiku Foundation! ======================================================================================================================= |
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Welcome to our Website! While there are currently just three members of the Alaska Haiku Society (AHS), we warmly invite any poet from Alaska to join us. We also represent the Alaska Region of the Haiku Society of America (the HSA has many members all over the world, and would also welcome more from Alaska). On this website you will meet Cindy Zackowitz (who lives in Southcentral Alaska), Mark Arvid White (who lives in Palmer, Alaska), and Billie Wilson (who lives in Southeastern Alaska). We live so far apart that we've never met (although Cindy and Mark are closer to being neighbors). We envy those haiku poets who are able to meet frequently with other poets. We take turns being the Alaska rep for the HSA. 2009 is Mark's turn. We are so pleased to report that Mark Arvid White has joined us and will be providing old and new haiku here soon on his own page! A temporary spot for his work is on the Recent Work page (button on left), but he'll have his own pages soon! We'll share our work here and our thoughts about haiku. And every so often we'll feature a guest poet, whose work will be showcased here. We plan to regularly add new haiku and haiku ruminations, so please return now and then to see what's new. We hope this site - and the links to other haiku information -- will help encourage more Alaskans to take an interest in haiku. We should include a warning though: taking an interest in haiku often leads to haiku addiction. We'd appreciate your signing our guestbook, and letting us know what you think about our site. We hope to hear from our haiku friends around the world -- and from other Alaska poets who have just learned that there is an Alaska Haiku Society or a Haiku Society of America. If you are interested in learning more, please contact us, and we'll get back to you.
Photograph by Scott Perkins (Billie's son)
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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO 5/7/5? After reading the haiku posted on this website, some readers who haven’t followed the international haiku scene for the past few decades might be asking, "Whatever happened to 5/7/5?" Some might even be saying, "That's not haiku!" Let us explain. Most of us were taught that an English-language haiku always consists of 17 syllables, written in three lines--five syllables in the first, seven in the second, and five in the last. Most of us began writing in that style, and some still do. Though originally thought to follow the form of Japanese haiku, modern scholars have concluded that the definition is not really appropriate for English-language haiku. This is because a so-called "syllable" in Japanese is quite different from a syllable in English (for example, a two-syllable word in English might be four "syllables" in Japanese). Billie writes, "I began writing haiku in the late 1960s. Six of my early haiku were selected by Harold G. Henderson to appear in Haiku Drops from the Great Dipper, published by the Poetry Society of Alaska in 1973. Looking at those six haiku now (and everything else I wrote for the next 20 years), I see that most of them would not be published today. They are "haiku-shaped," but what Peggy Lyles, our first guest poet, has said of her own early work, "uninformed."While the 17-syllable issue has been debated for decades, very few haiku editors include 5/7/5 haiku in their journals, unless the poem is so strong that the 17 syllables are not obvious - the poem sings on its own without any sense that it has been "padded" to meet a syllable count. |
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