Twitter / haiku of the day

Twitter/haikuoftheday

What is haiku of the day?

While recovering from being hospitalized for an illness last year, I began sharing haiku with my friend and mentor Tom Davenport and my friend and photographer Fritz Kirsch daily. I called this 'haiku of the day' and we enjoyed it so much I continued with it until recently deciding to use Twitter to share haiku instead of email. The exchange prompted haiku by my friends, so I will include some of theirs on occasion too. I thought others might enjoy them through Twitter on their cell phone or through the various ways on gets Twitter messages. The format of Twitter is ideal for haiku.

Want to see your haiku on haiku of the day?

If you write haiku and would like me to post it to haiku of the day, feel free to send it to me using the contact information below. If I like your haiku or believe it has merit, I will publish it. Please do not send any poems you do not have permission to publish. It must be your own writing, or a haiku that is traditional or for which no copyright exists.

Send your haiku to me by direct message or use the Contact form.

There are two styles for writing haiku in English. The first style attempts to create complete English sentences with punctuation. The second style allows the ambiguity present in the way haiku is written in Japanese to come through in English, foregoing capitalization and puncuation. For example: "A cicada song / in the leaves; between the roots / live generations." Or: "a cicada song / in the leaves between the roots / generations" I prefer the second style.

I am not a purist and believe haiku as it is practiced in the West is an evolving form of poetry based on essential principles of concreteness, observation and expression of intense experience. It does not need to conform to 5-7-5 syllables (Basho admonished against syllable counting), but must conform to the spirit of haiku and its honest evolutionary forms.

I am not a haiku expert. I write in the style and form of my choosing. I follow the haiku way as I see it.