From Haiku Headlines of the Day to the Spam Haiku Archive, these shortest but most flexible & evocative poetic forms are a powerful presence on the Web.
Haiku defined, in our glossary of poetic forms.
The poets in our Forum are carrying on quite pithy conversations in the form of exchanged haiku & tanka.
“A cynical celebration of conspicuous consumption in haiku form” contributed by visitors to Bela Selendy's
Poetry Free-for-All.
The photo galleries at David Coyote’s Den are stocked with landscape and still life photographs, beautifully reproduced and most accompanied by a haiku caption.
Fragmented Light is
Bridget Rose Duquette’s collection of “haiku, senryu, rensaku and poetry of the moment,” grouped by topics such as nature, love, holidays, and soul & spirit. Little prisms.
Bela Selendy says his Javascript haiku generator, subtitled “100 Trillion Haiku,” will actually make “about 7.62e+39 different Haiku poems” using completely random combinations of words. Be sure to bookmark your favorites or
send them in a haiku e-postcard before you click the New Haiku button -- they may not return in your lifetime.
HAIGA Online is a journal of painting & haiku poetry inspired by the Japanese form of poem-painting which combines them,
haiga. Each issue includes a series of quite beautiful
haiga both traditional & experimental, “interactive”
haiga with hidden poems you find by clicking & paintings for which you are asked to write poems.
Ken Sakamoto’s
Haiku Circus is a weekly haiku comic strip that appears in lots of college newspapers -- whimsical & varied, each sticking to the 5-7-5 syllable scheme but often not akin to traditional haiku in theme or feeling.
Salon Magazine's Charlie Varon & Jim Rosenau issued
a challenge to their readers, who responded with
a whole lot of sweet'n'sour haiku condolences for anyone who's watched a hard drive die. Read them & then read Scott Rosenberg's
story of how they were almost hijacked on the Net. Are haiku information? Does information
really want to be free?
Jeanne Emrich has compiled a long sequence of suggestions for how to make haiku a habit in your own life.
Among the many resources for haiku writers & artists at Haiku Hut are
Short Stuff, a wide-ranging journal of short form poetry published both online & in print, and
PhotoHaiku.Net, a collection of haiku combined with photographic images.
Kei Grieg Toyomasu's Haiku for People! page includes a brief historical introduction to the form, selections from the classical Japanese masters, including
Basho &
Issa, as well as a number of contemporary haiku “written by People!”
Haiku North America is a biannual conference & celebration of haiku -- “one of the largest gatherings of haiku poets in the United States and Canada... a long weekend full of papers, panels, workshops, readings, performances, book sales, and much socialization with fellow poets, translators, scholars, editors, and publishers.”
Haiku World is dedicated to helping publishers, poets, and readers discover one another. It does so by gathering information on haiku magazines, haiku contests, and haiku books, and by hosting the
Shiki Monthly Kukai, a peer-reviewed contest for haiku written on assigned topics.
Under the motto “putting the hai back in haiku,”
Haijinx published four online issues in 2001 - 2002, then migrated to print publication, always focussing on “modern interpretations of the haikai poetic and artistic tradition, including the role of humor in haiku.”
Mario Cavallini’s
metered haiku site uses a Java applet to display haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa, Jane Reichhold & himself -- one line at a time, pacing your apprehension.
In the host’s words, “Mountain-Home is an online community for the discussion and composition of modern waka... heart song of the Japanese people... now not bounded by language or geography... primarily expressed in the five-line form familiar to readers of contemporary tanka.” The Mountain-Home ensemble of poets from all over the world has created a
Modern Waka 100 Verse Sequence.
The cooperative
Japanese Text Initiative from the University of Virginia & the University of Pittsbugh has produced this online version of the most famous, if not definitive, collection of classical Japanese tanka, chosen from the 7th to the 13th centuries.
Fascinating reading from Jane Reichhold's
AHA! Poetry site, the Sea Shell Game is an elimination contest, pairing haiku submitted by readers, each pair
compared & commented on by expert judges until a winner stands alone.
Simply Haiku is a very fine journal with separately edited sections of haiku, tanka, renku, haibun, haiga in both traditional & new forms, featured interviews with haiku poets & teachers, and its own series of kukai (peer-judged competitions).
Snapshot Press out of Liverpool, England publishes haiku/senryu/tanka books, the haiku journal
Snapshots, the tanka journal
Tangled Hair, and
the Haiku Calendar, for which 52 seasonally appropriate haiku are selected by competition each year.
What do SPAM and sex have in common? You must visit the SPAM haiku site’s sex-themed poem ventures and peruse! And if you get lost, never to return, we shall miss ye, miss ye, miss ye....
The members of our
Poetry Forum created this very American collection of topical haiku.
Look in the upper righthand corner of Nik Makepeace’s site for travel diaries & you will find his Haiku Corner, the result of a neat bit of programming that searches for 5-7-5 syllable patterns in the diary writers’ entries. As Nik says: “I know these aren’t haiku or even senryu, and in any case some may argue that art trouve isn’t really art, but sometimes they provide some enjoyment...” Indeed!
The World Haiku Club “endorses individualism, celebrates diversity and encourages international exchanges of haiku poems, viewpoints and friendship through internet discussion lists, local, regional & world events,” and its magazine,
World Haiku Review.
