Southeast

Southeast Region

This region includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, and the United States Virgin Islands.

The Southeast region welcomes all poets as it seeks to build haiku-related activities throughout its territory. Past activities have included a haiku weekend in the late 1990s linking “Haiku and Music,” which invited poets (working with musicians) to put their own lines to music, and to hear their haiku sung. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the annual Sakura Festival has been promoting haiku through an annual contest since 1991. And in Key West, Florida, the Robert Frost Poetry Festival has featured haiku poets for many years, and also has an annual haiku contest. More recently, the Alabama State Poetry Society has begun to include haiku in its yearly contests. HSA members in our region have only occasionally been able to get together, but we encourage interaction by e-mail. We hope you will want to contribute to our online regional anthology. For more information about haiku activity in the region, please contact the Southeast regional coordinator.

—Peter Meister

Regional Links

Lingering Sunlight: Southeast Regional Anthology
http://newinfo.uah.edu/colleges/liberal/fll/german/
haiku_HSA_southeast.html

Sakura Festival Haiku Contest
Http://Sakura.Ua.Edu/Sakurahome.Html

Key West Robert Frost Poetry Festival
http://www.robertfrostpoetryfestival.com/index.htm

River Song Haiku Society
http://site.riversonghaiku.org/

Alabama State Poetry Society
http://alabamapoets.org/

Join the HSA

http://www.hsa-haiku.org/join.htm

Regional Coordinator

Peter Meister
959 Old Gurley Pike
New Hope, AL 35760

<meisterp@uah.edu>

Peter Meister was born in Ohio and raised in Indiana, where he began writing poems in the mid-sixties. He has been publishing poems in such places as the Kansas Quarterly, South by Southeast, and Friends Journal since the late seventies. In his youth, he protested against the Viet Nam War; this slowed his progress through the College of Wooster, but he did eventually return for his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania and went on to complete his PhD in German at the University of Virginia. He teaches German at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and has several volumes of literary criticism in print (for example, German Literature between Faiths: Jew and Christian at Odds and in Harmony). For Peter, literature and religion exist along a continuum; he particularly likes haiku that seem or are grounded in Zen.

new load of soil—
trying to follow
my wheelbarrow track

this foreign churchyard:
   water going through water,
      as the bucket fills

our houses . . . our hills . . .
   what is the snow’s name for snow?
      for rivers? for spring?