Report on the Bindii Meeting June 29 2024

Julia Wakefield, Jake Dennis, Steve Wigg, Stella Damarjati, Maureen Sexton, Subha Goonaratne and Lynette Arden met on Saturday June 29 at 3pm, using Google Meet. Apologies were received from Ewan Rourke and Maeve Archibald.  

We workshopped our haiku, some of which addressed the the topic for this meeting, which was ‘creepy crawlies’. We also commented on some of the winning and shortlisted entries for the Touchstone Awards,

https://thehaikufoundation.org/2023-touchstone-awards-for-individual-poems-awarded/

https://thehaikufoundation.org/2023-touchstone-awards-for-individual-poems-long-list/

in the context of the techniques that Jane Reichhold listed on her website. Many of the winning poems paid little attention to any of the rules, which was a lesson to us all about the danger of falling into a conventional trap, whereby you strive for orthodoxy rather than authentic poetic expression. On the other hand, it’s also easy to become too obscure or ‘clever’ for a general audience. We all agreed to send each other some examples of our own haiku that had been published, to remind us of the standards and conventions that various publications accept – and between us we came up with a very impressive collection! Some of us also sent email comments on each other’s haiku, which allowed us more time to study the poem and give a more extended critique.

Our next scheduled Googlemeet is on Saturday July 27, at 3pm. We have agreed to workshop haiku that we are preparing for the Haiku Down Under competition (this is only open to HDU conference attendees), addressing the topic of ‘a sensory haiku’ (the deadline for entries is August 12).

Julia Wakefield 

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