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Frogpond 34.1 • 2011

Museum of Haiku
Literature Award

Haiku & Senryu

Revelations Unedited

Essay - Grayson

Essay 2 - Yarrow

Haibun

Rengay

Renku

Tan Renga

Book Review

From the Editors

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From the Editors

The articles of this issue have an underlying theme that was unintentional—no thematic guidelines were announced. Yet, somehow the seven of them share a common focus most clearly expressed by the title of the essay by Randy Brooks for the regular feature, Revelations Unedited: "Genesis of Haiku: Where Do Haiku Come From?" For Brooks, a haiku is not the result of an earth-shaking epiphany, but rather of an everyday experience meant to be shared. In Essays, Gerald St. Maur argues that a haiku should be the product not only of the visual sense but also of the auditory. Yoàv Tenenbaum contends that the haiku emerges from feelings distinct from those that create photos or paintings. Ruth Yarrow thinks that more haiku should reflect current social conditions, while David Grayson believes that they should better reflect the place in which most of us live, the urban environment. David Cobb takes another angle—that haiku should arise from and signify the history of a time and place. Finally, Ian Marshall digs deep to propose a philosophical basis for all haiku—the phenomenological. This confluence of concerns indicates another stage of growth in the maturation of our poetic genre.

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Last year, on a haiku conference book table, we discovered anthologies with work that had first appeared in Frogpond, but whose editors had not credited our journal. These editors said that they did not ask for prior publication details, that they assumed it was up to the contributors to specify. Such an editorial stance surprised us and now that we know it exists, we ask you to ensure that Frogpond is credited with prior publication. After all, we went to the effort to select your work from over 16,000 submitted items per year. Anthology editors have a much easier job, having to choose the best from among only hundreds.

George Swede, Editor
Anita Krumins, Assistant Editor

E-mail: gswede@ryerson.ca

George Swede
Box 279, Station P
Toronto, ON M5S 2S8

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