Issue #0 – First Blossoms

Recommendation: This issue PDF is best viewed in 2-page (side-by-side) mode (available in Desktops/Laptops/Tablets) as sometimes the artworks are spread across two pages for aesthetic value. To do that, download the PDF, open it using any browser or Adobe Acrobat Reader & click the 3 dots in the top right after opening the PDF and select “Two page view”. The issue reads just fine even in “One page view”.

Download Issue #0 PDF

Alternatively, if you want to experience 2-page view on your mobile as it is intended with the design of the journal, please download the following version of the issue and read the PDF in landscape orientation: Issue #0 PDF (mobile 2-page version)

Please report any inconsistencies/mistakes in the journal to me by sending a mail to haikuseed@gmail.com, I will fix them and upload the updated issue PDF online.

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Hope you enjoy reading this inaugural issue of Haiku Seed Journal. We would love to hear your thoughts about this issue, good or bad, whatever they are. We would love to see you share your haiku or your favorite haiku from this issue (along with the artwork) on social media. Do tag us, it helps more writers and readers know about us as we are still a new journal trying to find our place in the publishing landscape.

Once again thank you to all the contributors that have submitted haiku to our journal in 2022 and to all the readers who followed the journal closely. I know the submission and them the selection process for the #HaikuSeed prompts and Issue #0 were inconsistent in 2022 and I wish I could select more haiku to publish in Issue #0 but due to many limitations I had to leave out many brilliant haiku. I will run a tighter ship in 2023, so look out for updates and announcements about the journal in upcoming months.

— Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta
Founding Editor
@coffeeandhaiku

Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature / Week #41

The #HaikuSeed prompt last week was fog with an additional photo prompt

This week there will be no commentary, sorry! Too busy with work and all. I loved how the haiku captured beautiful moments in nature and brought focus to certain aspects of how fog exists, moves and interacts. Some wonderful senryu again. Perhaps I will add short commentary to a few featured haiku on Twitter over the week as I find time. Hope you enjoy last week’s blossoms.

sunrise
the fog coalesces
into a purple heron

Alaka Y

lost
in the fog
but for my footsteps

C. X. Turner

rolling fog . . .
shadows deepen
in slow motion

Don Baird

driving slowly
with windows down
pea-soup fog

Joseph P. Wechselberger

foggy morning
the shuffling gait
of grandpa

Lorelyn Arevalo

fog map–
the shifting path
of a story

Pippa Phillips

Diwali week—
mother’s old silks
drape the dining table

Rupa Anand

winter’s sun
reluctantly rising
with a sigh

薫音 (Kaon)

opaque fog –
near becomes
far

Valentina Ranaldi-Adams

creeping fog
across the battlefield
buried memory

BA France

morning fog
the eerie stillness
of dew point

Eavonka Ettinger

harsh winters
now and then
a road loses its way

Meraki

autumn dawn
a heron fishes
the fog

Kerry J Heckman

harbor fog
i stumble
through goodbye

Luna

midnight fog…
the shadows
of skeletal trees

Nancy Brady

shrieking chimps
echo across the jungle
fog of war

morning dew . . .
fog of starlings
rolling in and out

petro c. k.

I see my breath
morning’s also
floating over the pond

Skyeku

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Footnotes

I’ve started this journal with an idea to see amateur haiku poets like me write more nature-themed haiku, having seen all sorts of topics being written in haiku form by aspiring writers on Twitter and other places on the internet. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. But I’ve grown into a classicist when it comes to haiku as I really looked at what most of the haiku written by masters like Basho, Issa, Buson do. So I’m not too quick to warm up to contemporary haiku. It is an undeniable fact that the haiku form in English has been evolving for decades now and it will continue to. So while I keep this journal to inspire and feature nature-themed haiku, I will occasionally break from it because I see some expertly written haiku that I cannot help but appreciate what the writer has achieved and it makes me rethink the kind of haiku I want to feature here.

HSJ readers and contributors, if you like these feature posts with commentary, we would consider it a great encouragement and would love it if you shared it with others on the social profiles. On Twitter you can tag us at @HaikuSeed_, we are looking to gain audience of both writers and readers as we aim to grow.

Thank you for writing haiku for our prompts and reading the journal. We hope our journal inspires you. Keep writing!

— Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta
Founding Editor
@coffeeandhaiku

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Copyrights Disclaimer:

All featured works are copyrighted to the respective writers. We would love it if you cite being our journal if your work is going to be published elsewhere, no obligations though.
Photos used in our journal are taken by and copyrighted to Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta unless stated otherwise.

Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / Week #40

The #HaikuSeed prompt last week was candle with an additional photo prompt

A lot of senryu or senryu-like submissions for this prompt. Usually, if the verse centers around concrete elements of nature while having a light human presence in some form, the line between haiku and senryu becomes blurred. And if the verse includes no nature and on top of that includes deep thoughts or expressions that are abstract and are hard to perceive as concrete images, I see them being strongly senryu than haiku even if there are elements of nature in it. Not surprising given the prompt. Few of the common scenes, words & aspects in the haiku submitted this week include flickering candle, wind-flame & love-candle juxtapositions. I would have liked to see more nature-themed haiku for this prompt (and for all #HaikuSeed prompts, after all, this is intended to be a nature-themed journal). But the senryu that were written contain some exquisite craft and depth, so I’m not one to squander the chance to showcase how haikai poets’ minds and spirits work wonders with just a few words irrespective of what label of Japanese poetry it falls under.

Continue reading →

War Is a Kigo – Featured Haiku With Commentary / Patterns

A note from our founding editor Sankara Jayanth: We do not mean to be insensitive and we have no intention to disrespect personnel who serve their country or died serving their country in war. But war is war. Murder is murder and that is what happens in war, no matter how proudly and how righteously someone does it. Patriotism is a very tilted scale to gauge someone’s humanity. So you will not find here haiku or commentary that praise laurels to soldiers and armies who defended this country or that. This column will be about everything that war affects, poisons and kills, so please understand this motivation and intention of ours before determining something we talk about here being insensitive. But we will listen to reason and if we are insensitive, we will learn from it and be better. This column comes purely from a rage and angst about the violence we bring upon every living thing on earth while also being believers of religions and gods and heaven and what not.

We have Arvinder Kaur‘s haunting haiku written for the #HaikuSeed pattern to thank for seeding the idea for this new column on our journal where we will dive into the featured haiku, starting with the image of war painted by it and then following the trail to darker places that exist right behind the verse.

pattern bombing
fireflies flicker in and out
of the empty trenches

– Arvinder Kaur, @arvinder8

Pattern bombing is a tactical strategy where aircrafts drop bombs in a predetermined pattern and timing to produce the desired effect. And the desired effect they are going for is usually murder of humans and any living thing that happens to be in their canvas for murder.

Is the writer being allegorical when she says fireflies flicker in and out of empty trenches? Are the flashes of lights rising from the trenches souls of dead soldiers?

Continue reading →

Announcing “War Is a Kigo” column

In War is a Kigo column, we shall feature haiku that paint a picture of war – be it the scorched earth patch in a garden, the bloodied swing in the park, the wails of children, the agony of the parents, the untended houseplants, the dog searching for its human, and what not. The horrors of war are many. Our intention behind running this column is to remind ourselves of the horrors that are happening elsewhere that we are often unaware of or ignore because we will surely become sad thinking about all the suffering, to provide an outlet to our angst and helplessness sitting a world away from the conflict being able to do nothing, to record the bravery and tragedy on behalf of the victims in the only way we could. Through art. Through haiku.

I say, War is a Kigo. I wrote the following haiku with a little illustration a couple of years ago, I don’t know during which conflict. But the history of human race makes it quite evident that in terms of our experience of time, war is indeed a season. A season that spans year-long over some regions on Earth where all other seasons are pushed aside to accommodate this one.

At the time of this writing in March 2022, everyone is talking about the Russia-Ukraine war. But wars, war-like conflicts that kill thousands of people, are happening in places like Yemen, Afghanistan. Indeed they have been happening in many places around the world all round the year, every year but they don’t get much attention. Why, is a whole another can of worms.

There is also this ironic relationship between war and haiku. At least in my mind that is and I won’t mince words when I touch that relationship because it is the truth every which way you look at it. Japan’s poetry form haiku has become so popular all over the world, written in many countries in their native language even. I’m will not go and find out if haiku made in-roads into English literature before World War II, I think it did, but the fact is:

atomic bombs
for them, for us
their poetic forms

The bombing by Japan on Pearl Harbor in USA killed 2,390 people, most of them US service members.

The nuclear bombing by USA (and UK, apparently they had to approve the attack) on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, mostly civilians.

… and we write haiku.

— Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta
Founding Editor
@coffeeandhaiku

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Submitting Haiku For War Is a Kigo Column

It is true that you might not be able to work-in all the traditional haiku writing conventions into your haiku about war and there will be exceptions in our selections for this reason. But nevertheless we are still looking for haiku that have a natural element in them, haiku that describe a brief moment in time or thought, a juxtaposition of two images that evoke a response in the reader.

We will announce calls for submission on our Twitter account @HaikuSeed_, there is no fixed schedule as of now for this column. You are requested to submit your haiku through the Google Form we will make available during the submission period.

Copyrights Disclaimer:

All featured works are copyrighted to the respective writers. We would love it if you cite being our journal if your work is going to be published elsewhere, no obligations though.
Photos used in our journal are taken by and copyrighted to Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta unless stated otherwise.

Announcing “Haiku Horticulture” – A Fortnightly Haiku Prompt

In short, Haiku Horticulture is a weeklong writing process where writers work on an idea seeded by #HaikuSeed_HH prompt that yields one haiku at the end of the cultivation period.

Writing a haiku is a lot like cultivating a plant. You sow a seed, an idea sprouts from it in your mind. You see the potential, so you pour your efforts into the seedling. You cultivate it with patience and care, trimming the leaves that are detrimental to the growth of the plant if necessary. And after some time, a flourishing bloom appears in your garden.

With Haiku Horticulture, we expect you, the writer, to ruminate on and cultivate your haiku for one week before you decide it has bloomed fully from the first day you have seen it sprout from Haiku Horticulture prompt (#HaikuSeed_HH).

We often stick with our first idea. We often also neglect the potential our ideas have and trade it for fruits that can be reaped instantly, a sign of impatience. We want to make haiku writers see the fruits of patience in haiku writing. We also want to help haiku writers understand and observe more closely how their mind and heart shift and change perspectives ever so slightly, maybe just a word or two. It may not be quite different from the first version, but you would have spent a week cultivating it and you’d know that this version of your haiku is the best expression of your idea.

Haiku Writing and Submission Guidelines

Below we outline a rough idea about how you could approach writing a haiku for Haiku Horticulture:

Write a haiku (Day 1)

This version is the one you’d post if it was any other prompt. Keep it in your notes. This is haiku you want to cultivate and get it to bloom. Submit this as an entry for Sprout (Version 1).

Cultivate your haiku (Day 2-6)

Over the next few days, work on your haiku, see if can be improved. You can do anything that is required to cultivate it – change one word or re-write the whole haiku, but do not change the core idea that you’ve used in Sprout (Version 1). Keep a track of all the different variations you have tried in your notes. Select on of them and submit it as an entry for Cultivation (Version 2).

See your haiku bloom (Day 7)

You have spent a week cultivating your haiku and it has bloomed to its full potential. Submit this as an entry for Bloom (Version 3).

Selection Process

We expect you to submit 3 versions of your haiku through the submission form in the order in which you’ve written them over a period of 7 days. As described earlier, the 3 versions are named Sprout (Version 1), Cultivation (Version 2), Bloom (Version 3).

While evaluating the best written haiku for a feature on Haiku Seed Journal‘s Haiku Horticulture column, only the final version i.e., Bloom (version 3) will be considered. But we shall post all 3 versions of the selected haiku in order to showcase how haiku evolve over time in a creator’s mind before they become the simple yet tremendously artistic verses that they are.

Haiku Horticulture – Twice a Month

The prompt post Haiku Horticulture – Prompt shall be posted on Mondays of weeks #1 and #3 every month. Submissions close on Mondays of weeks #2 and #4 respectively.
The feature post Haiku Horticulture – Showcase shall be posted at the end of weeks #2 and #4 every month after selection process is completed.

Misc.

The 3 versions need not be written exactly on the days we mentioned above. We know great haiku can often be written impromptu, but our initiative focuses on patience and cultivation. So we hope you honor the spirit of Haiku Horticulture initiative by cultivating your haiku for a few days until you can say to yourself your haiku has fully bloomed.
The progress you show in the 3 haiku versions need not be drastic. It could be as simple as remove one word or adding one from your initial versions.

— Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta
Founding Editor
@coffeeandhaiku