Haiku Bindii

 On Sunday January 24 six of us again attended a Zoom meeting: Julia Wakefield, Steve Wigg, Maeve Archibald, Stella Damarjati, Lynette Arden and Coral Carter. We once more attempted a renku, this time led by Steve. We’d previously tried a Winter Junicho renku with Lynette as our Renku master. Steve had extensively studied Carley’s Renku Reckoner over the Christmas break and he challenged us with a twelve verse Summer Junicho. We had to leave the renku unfinished after 2.5 hours, and will complete the last three verses by email correspondence.  It was decided that everyone should attempt every verse and we would choose the best fit. As we discussed the appropriateness of each submission we became more and more conscious of the subtlety of the rules. It resembled a game of verbal gymnastics, where we attempted to find links while avoiding other accidental allusions to previous verses. We trod a fine line between providing variety or surprise and descending into nonsense or ...

On Sunday November 29 six of us attended another Zoom meeting: Julia Wakefield, Steve Wigg, Maeve Archibald, Stella Damarjati Lynette Arden and Coral Carter.  Coral introduced us to her publishing house Nulla Nulla Press, which publishes WA haiku poets.  We had agreed to try composing some haiku prompted by 4 or 5 concrete nouns, as demonstrated in Hansha Teki’s Bipedal Verses https://heliosparrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/Bipedal_Verses-Hansha_Teki.pdf   so we could compare our different responses to each prompt. At the same time we looked at the ‘parallel verse’ approach that Hansha Teki demonstrated.  Most of us found the ‘parallel verse’ technique extremely challenging, but we attempted to define its purpose. First of all, it was apparent that you can read both haiku together, so that they form a new poem, as in this example by Hansha Teki, inspired by the concrete noun GALAXY: dust motes          ...