From the Editors
As we look back to our inaugural issue of Frogpond, published in June 2012, we remember the quote by Eleanor Roosevelt that preceded our first letter: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” In that letter we shared our hopes and vision for the journal with our readers:
As we look to the future, what we do know we can—and want to—do is assemble a Frogpond that reflects the multifarious nature of haiku practice, whether in solo poem and prose or collaborative sequence. We want to make room for many voices: the new as well as the familiar, the near as well as the far, the young as well as the old. We want, as well, to represent the full range of our community’s thoughts and reflections in insightful reviews and concise essays that touch on process, purpose, and possibility. The root word of essay means, after all, to try, in essence to dare ourselves to experiment, explore, and grow—something Eleanor Roosevelt obviously knew a lot about.
For this, our last issue, we’ve chosen two quotes that speak to our tenure as editors: we wished above all to reflect the haiku community in our work and to do it well, to work hard at it. This is also something we wish for our readers in their writing. And something we wish for ourselves as poets, too. Thank you for allowing us the privilege to serve as your editors; thank you for your patience, your cooperation, your excitement on being published, your willingness to try again when your submissions were returned. Your passion for the art has fueled ours. We’ve read thousands of haiku and related forms from around the world, and far from jading our appetite, the experience has whet it. Your voices reaffirm that haiku nourishes all of us, gives us hope in a precarious world, allows us to share our shortcomings and dreams, and celebrate our successes. This is the haiku community we have come to know and appreciate during these past four years.
We are grateful for the support of the HSA, for its officers and editors, past and present. As we readied pages for print, we were saddened to learn that Leroy Kanterman has passed from this world. He was a cofounder of the HSA in 1968 (see p. 119) and was still writing haiku. He sent his last submission to Frogpond in 2014. Our deepest sympathy to his family and friends. We are especially indebted to our proofreaders, Charlie Trumbull and Bill Pauly, who picked the bones of each issue and returned pages of corrections to us with humor and wit. Behind the scenes, Noah Banwarth directed and guided the workings of the design program, and when the motherboard in the computer failed while working on this last issue, he got us up and running again! We simply could not have not succeeded without his patient expertise. Our deep appreciation also for our families who supported us and cheered us on when we all but disappeared under the workload. Thank you to all of our essayists and book reviewers who went an extra mile to add their perspectives to the pages of Frogpond. And kudos to our “frog artists” who brought a measure of whimsy to the pages, including the delightful pair by John Parsons in this issue.
On this journey we call an editorship, it has been our greatest pleasure to collaborate with each other, to respect each other’s strengths, to value each other’s work ethic, and to become good friends in the process. We made a team, along with Christopher Patchel who took our breath away with each and every one of the covers he designed— from the very first three leaves, which spoke so eloquently of the autumn season and of haiku form, to the origami snowflake, which reminded us how simple operations such as folds or juxtapositions might achieve profound complexity, to our final cover here in your hands. We are especially delighted with this issue’s rusted keys and their mottled blue patina, an oblique statement surely that haiku, for all its ancient provenance, still works to open our hearts. For so many of us, writing and reading haiku provide the key to a life lived with attention, even should our key be the one pointing in its own direction! Our Frogpond immersion has been such a key, and we look forward to testing it in new locks.
