My best of 25 years of haiku and tanka never got officially launched thanks to Covid this spring but I have a box of copies.

They are an oversized shape so cost a bit more to ship but for $15 it can be yours, all in.

If you want a sample of the style, here’s a trifold of haiku I’ve written since spring.

I made it for the Seabeck Haiku Getaway Oct 30-Nov 1.

I’ve wanted to go to this for years but it’s a fair hike to Washington. This year it was online.

Some I knew previously, or met in person. Interesting to see people.

Brad Bennett gave a great talk on Euphony. Imagine, nearly 150 people gathered for this topic.

Generally rhyme in English (but not in French) haiku avoid rhyme as it is very dense in a small form. Assonance and consonance are okay, but I’d never thought of slant rhyme as a way to write a haiku. David O’Meara’s talk at the Ottawa Public library years ago described how to brainstorm around sound to move the poem forward using sound links to help ideas cohere but to apply this to haiku as well is interesting.

Brad Bennett gave the example of “pond willow” instead of “summer willow” in a haiku as doing more sound work. The p near willow unconsciously suggests pillow, restfulness and the specificity of pond instead of a generic summer makes the image crisper and brighter.

Teachers have taken cracks at that since grade 9 English but I get onomatopoeia better this time with his subtler examples.

Sessions were recorded so I look forward to seeing this again, and the ones I missed.