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Frogpond 37.2 • 2014

Museum of Haiku
Literature Award

Haiku & Senryu

Essay Haiku and War

Haibun

Haiku Sequence

Renku

Book Reviews

From the Editors

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From the Editors

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the hu- man voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the
brain and goes straight to the heart.

~Maya Angelou

We could not let this issue go to print without remembering Maya Angelou, who passsed out of this world on May 28, 2014, a few weeks after celebrating her 86th birthday. (Word has it she wanted to live to be 100. How magnificent it would have been to see her reach that goal!) The creative act of writing is and should be transformative. No one knew this better than Angelou, who discovered power, beauty, and brilliance in the spoken and written word: “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” Angelou honed her transformations daily in her quiet place, where “we talk . . . and listen . . . to ourselves.” Her dedication to the act of writing equaled her passion for life: “ . . . it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.” Her trust in that process is a great part of her legacy—something all writers can emulate. Excellence in the “haiku arts” attests to the hard work of transforming our thoughts and re- vising our language. This is true whether we speak of HSA board members selecting over several rounds the “best” of an issue for the Museum of Haiku Literature Award; or essayists weighing the sounds and meanings of words and the formative experiences of our own and other times; or poets themselves, attending to each other as readers, reviewers, and collaborators. It takes uncommon effort to dream ourselves as butterflies and as fully human beings.

As editors, we salute that uncommon effort and are grateful to all of our contributors and readers, to Charles Trumbull and Bill Pauly for their expertise, to Noah Banwarth for production assistance, to Chris Patchel who delights with a taste-of-summer cover design, and to Marcy Clements for lending her frog to our pond. Thank you!

Francine Banwarth, Editor
Michele Root-Bernstein, Associate Editor

Francine Banwarth, Editor
985 So Grandview
Dubuque, Iowa 52003

<fnbanwarth@yahoo.com>

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