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Frogpond 40.2 • 2017

Museum of Haiku
Literature Award

Haiku & Senryu

Essay 1 - "Turtle"

Museum of Haiku Literature Awards Retrospective

Haibun

Haiga

Renku

Book Reviews

From the Editor

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Museum of Haiku Literature Awards Retrospective

by Michael Dylan Welch

Museum of Haiku Literature Awards Retrospective
(complete PDF version)

Here is a sample excerpt from the opening page of this essay:

The Haiku Society of America is rich with traditions. One of these traditions, worth celebrating with Frogpond’s fortieth anniversary in 2017, is the Museum of Haiku Literature Award, which has sought to recognize the best contribution to each issue of Frogpond, as selected by the HSA executive committee. The award began in 1981 by honoring the following poem by Tadashi Kondō from Frogpond 4:1:

hoping the shape
of the navel will be good
father cuts the cord

Since then, selections have included mostly individual haiku, but also tanka, haiku sequences, and renku or other linked verse. Each award has included a cash prize of $100. Total prize money has now exceeded $12,000, with funding provided by the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo—a place well worth a visit if you ever have the chance. The Haiku Society of America and its members are grateful for this ongoing support.

Some Museum of Haiku Literature Award selections have remained memorable, others less so. Either way, they reflect the changing tastes and perspectives of HSA leadership, and may serve, as the following selections indicate, as a microcosm of English-language haiku development over the last several decades. The award continues to encourage the submission of each person’s best poems for publication in Frogpond. Long may this tradition continue.

1981

hot rock by the stream
each of the baby’s toeprints
evaporating

Ruth Yarrow

This poem is 5-7-5, though completely natural. Frogpond had by this time largely moved on from the predominance of 5-7-5 syllables found in early English-language haiku journals (the first such journal was American Haiku, which started in 1963, and Frogpond started in 1978).

1982

the old garden fence
now keeps the goldenrod
from the goldenrod

Paul O. Williams

[feature continues for several more pages] . . .

This excerpt inclues the first page of the feature: page 85. The complete feature includes pages 85-94. To read the complete feature, click on the link to the PDF version:

Museum of Haiku Literature Awards Retrospective
(complete PDF version)

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