Once in a while I summon the motivation to submit poems rather than just self-publish, and so once in a while I place poems in journals. Funny how that works. The latest success: two haiku in the March issue (Vol. XXII, No. 1) of The Heron’s Nest, an online quarterly edited by the excellent modern haiku poet John Stevenson. They’re both on Page 6. As in most haiku publications, I’m identified only by name and location (which is actually one of the things I really like about haiku culture; I hate how much mainstream poetry orgs focus on personality). Although I gave Plummer’s Hollow as my location, in fact both haiku were written in the UK.
I should also have a haiku in the latest issue (43.1) of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America, but since they don’t send out contributor copies and I’m not a member, I’m not entirely sure. Anyway, here’s the haiku they accepted last September:
bare hand
so lovely and cool
harvesting leeks
A memory from childhood. This was actually the second time they’ve published me, but the first was decades ago before I knew much of anything about haiku so it doesn’t count.
Oh, it does count. :) Perhaps it shows you didn’t properly appreciate your own talent then?
No, I think it’s just that standards were a bit more lax then about what constitutes good haiku. Everyone’s upped their game since about the mid 90s, as English-language haiku poets got more exposed to 20th-century Japanese haiku, and as more objectivist, surrealist, and experimental tendencies began to be celebrated. There was this collective realization that haiku could be way more challenging than most of us had assumed.