'Straight From the Haijin's Mouth' is one of the features that makes up my haikai column in a fine
line, The Magazine of the New Zealand Poetry. This edition is from the March 2012 issue, and is reprinted with the kind permission of Laurice
Gilbert, Sandra Simpson and Ernest J. Berry.
Straight
From the Haijin's Mouth
I asked award-winning haiku poets, Sandra Simpson and
Ernie Berry, 'What's it like to send your haiku out into the world?'
Sandra
Simpson's answer:
Selecting haiku to send to an editor or judge can be difficult –
they’re all my babies, I love them equally.
As it turns out though, I love some
more equally than others. With experience comes the knowledge that
while some are “publishable” (but not outstanding) some are
altogether better (and some we don’t discuss!).
Most editors like a set of 5-15 haiku
which means I can try some poems that are a bit “different” in
the mix. Re-reading submissions a month later is a good practice –
the haiku often turn out to be not so great as I thought and go back
through the editing process.
Getting to know a journal’s ethos
helps, although editors can often surprise with their choices.
This haiku, for which I never had high
hopes (thinking it was a bit obvious), was published in The
Heron’s Nest and won a Touchstone Award for one of the best
haiku published in English in 2010:
slicing papaya –
the swing
of her black pearls
The poems to which editors and judges
respond are almost invariably (the above example notwithstanding) the
ones where I have strived to be honest about the moment.
This haiku came complete while visiting
Otago Museum and was a runner-up in last year’s HaikuNow! Contest
(limit one haiku; a tough ask):
in the cabinet marked Mesopotamia a
broken face
But I also have plenty of haiku that
will never be published … and that’s okay. To write the good ones
I accept that I have to write the bad ones.
Ernie
Berry's answer: My
first foray into the world of poetry was about age 5 when Aunt Haysl
of Hay's Ltd in Christchurch saw fit to publish one of my poems in
her weekly children's page of the Christchurch Star-Sun. 60 years
later I started dabbling in poetry again as a retirement project in
Mexico where the kindly editor of an American journal targeting
snowbirds* was so impressed with my work that he appointed me 'poetry
editor' and insisted I supply a new poem for every issue forthwith
and recruit other poets from Mexico and California.
After returning to Godzone in 1993, a
friend gave me a book of poetry titled Haiku Menagerie which
proved a life-changer for me because it consisted entirely of 'haiku'
a genre I'd never heard of till then but which catered nicely to my
predilection for poetic brevity. I took to haiku like a duck to a
frogpond and my first haiku was accepted for publication by an Aussie
mag, Paper Wasp in 1995 and within 2 years I was being
published in haiku journals in NZ, USA, Britain, Ireland, Belgium,
Croatia and Argentina, etc., etc. Being published 'world-wide' and
winning the odd contest was quite a thrill and has kept my nose to
the grindstone of octogenarianism...
petrified forest
a child inspects
my
legs
~second place in the ukiaHaiku Festival
Contest 2008
*
people from northern USA who migrate south annually to escape winter.
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