HAIKUsutradhar : 18th October 2024

A FRIDAY FEATURE

Host: Gauri Dixit

Prompter for October : Linda Papanicolaou

OUR MISSION

1. To provide a new poetry workshop each Friday, along with a prompt.

2. To select haiku, senryu, and haiga each month for the journal, haikuKATHA. Each issue will select poems that were posted in this forum from the 3rd of the previous month to the 2nd of the current month.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

1. Post a maximum of two verses per week, from Friday to Friday, numbered 1 & 2. Post only one haiku in a day, in 24 hours.

2. Only post unpublished verses --- nothing that has appeared in peer-reviewed or edited journals, anthologies, your webpage, social media, etc.

3. Only post original verses.

4. For each poem you post, comment on one other person’s poem.

5. Give feedback only to those poets who have requested it.

6. Do not post a variety of drafts, along with a request for readers to choose which they like most. Only one poem is to appear in each original post.

7. Post each revision, if you have any, above the original. The top version will be your submission to haikuKATHA. Do not delete the original post.

8. Do not submit found poetry or split sequences.

9. Do not post photos, except for haiga.

10. haikuKATHA will only consider haiga that showcase original artwork or photos. Post details re: the source of the visual image. If you team up with an artist or photographer, make sure that it’s their original work and that they are not restricted by other publications to share it. We won't be responsible for any copyright issues.

11. Put your name, followed by your country, below each poem, even after revisions.

Poems that do not follow the guidelines may be deleted.

Founder/Managing Editor of haikuKATHA Monthly Journal: Kala Ramesh

Associate Editors: Ashish Narain Firdaus Parvez Priti Aisola Sanjuktaa Asopa Shalini Pattabiraman Suraja Menon Roychowdhury Vandana Parashar Vidya Shankar

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PROMPT:

18th October

Linda Papanicolaou

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Preface: Ernest L Boyer (1928 —95) was an American educator who served as Chancellor of the state University of New York, United States Commissioner of Education, and President of the Carnegie Foundation. Believing that to be educated, people should understand the “connectedness of things,” he developed a list of “human commonalities”—eight universal experiences that we can all relate to, no matter what nationality, tribe, culture, or time period we associate ourselves. A full list may be found online at https://www.schoolartsroom.com/2016/04/the-best-big-ideas-boyers-human.html.

Although one item on the list is already familiar to us as haiku writers—connectedness to Nature—for our prompts this month we’ll be choosing three of the others that you may not have thought about as much. A warning though: Whereas Boyer’s Commonalities are “big ideas,” haiku is a poetry of the particular. Do approach each week’s theme by thinking past the abstract generalization to a particular instance or personal experience.

Prompt for this week: All humans belong to groups or institutions in some way, be it families, school classrooms, sports teams, political parties, military or religious organizations… Write your ku inspired by these.

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Looking forward to reading your haiku.

Write on! Gauri