Two weeks left for the early bird for our online haiku course starting June 1st

It's half way through April, which means that the 'early bird' rate for our online haiku course (starting June 1st) expires in just over two weeks.

The early bird rate is £45.00 rather than £55.00 full price, so if you'd like to take advantage of this, please email karen@withwords.org.uk for a course description, and comments from previous participants.  There are only two places left currently, but the course will also run again from August 1st.

If you want to get your head around the technicalities of haiku without the pressure of writing yet, we  also run a one-to-one haiku reading and comprehension course by email.

The Blue Monkey Renga helps launch a new and important community centre: Paulton Library Community Hub at Hill Court Shopping Centre

I'll be at Paulton Library, at The Hub Tuesday and Wednesday to launch the community renga where visitors can add a short verse, even something akin to an anecdote, if the spirit moves them.

 

I've run highly popular renga for the public in previous times, always a brilliant experience, and occasionally with rengaistas from the internet helping out too, so we'd love help again!

What is Renga?

Renga is a traditional Japanese group poem that is ‘shared writing’: everyone is allowed the chance to write, or orally suggest a verse.

Renga is simply writing incredibly short lines (2 or 3 line verses) with almost teasingly invisible connections to each verse.  People can chose to listen or write, and above all share in the decision-making of each verse.  When completed the renga poem is jointly owned by everyone.

It’s very inclusive, creative, and encouraging, and the making of this communal poem is as important as the final result.

Councillor John Bull has very kindly provided an opening foray of verses so no one need be shy producing the first verse.

The Blue Monkey Renga

starlings swirl
like leaves against
the evening sky

daffodils
from verge to verge

on the allotment
an old man grunts
behind his spade

If anyone would like to add verses by leaving a comment on this blog, or  email: renga@withwords.org.uk and we'd love to add your verse!

Why is it called The Blue Monkey Renga?  Help us bring the Blue Monkey alive!  Send us your renga verses!


Paulton Library Community Hub opens at Hill Court on Monday 15 April.  Bath & North East Somerset Council has been working on the project with Paulton Parish Council and local ward Councillors John Bull and Liz Hardman.  The vision being that this facility will aid regeneration of the village’s shopping centre.

The new Hub will provide the same range of services as the current library plus the additional benefits of a coffee bar, WiFi and a meeting room that anyone will be able to hire.  The Hub will also provide the opportunity for a range of other organisations to deliver their services in an accessible, central village location.

Keeping the new facility open for as many hours as possible will be an important part of the project.  The old library wass staffed for 14 hours a week but by using a combination of existing staff, self-service machines and volunteer support the new Hub will be able to stay open for much longer.

Paulton - THE COMMUNITY HUB

• Address: 1-2 Hill Court, High Street, PAULTON, BS39 7QG
• Telephone: 01225 394041
• Email: councilconnect@bathnes.gov.uk
• Library Manager: Judy Terry
• Car Parking: Free parking available at the back of The Hub
• Location: Next to poppies flower shop 

Opening hours are:
Monday: 09:30 - 16:30
Tuesday: 09:30 - 18:00
Wednesday: 09:30 - 16:00
Thursday: 09:30 - 16:30
Friday: 09:30 - 16:30
Saturday: 09:30 - 12:30

World Monuments Fund invites entries for their second FREE TO ENTER annual haiku contest during National Poetry Month, April 2013

HAIKU CONTEST GUIDELINES
http://www.wmf.org/get-involved/haiku-contest

World Monuments Fund invites entries for their second annual haiku contest.

Haiku is a traditional Japanese form that emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression.

Submission

Submissions are accepted April 1-30, 2013.

All haiku must be submitted through the online submission form:
http://www.wmf.org/get-involved/2013-haiku-contest

All haiku must be previously unpublished and submitted through the online submission form.

All haiku styles accepted.

One entry per individual.

Awards

First Prize, $100; Second Prize, $75; Third Prize, $50; and three semi-finalists.

All six winning haiku will be published on WMF’s website.


Adjudication

Alan Summers who runs With Words, will adjudicate.

Need inspiration? 
Explore World Monuments Fund's projects in Japan, or all field projects:

Japan:
http://www.wmf.org/our-projects/project-map?tid=All&tid_1=All&tid_2=All&tid_3=All&watch_year=All&country=Japan&funder=All&list=1

Rest of the World:
http://www.wmf.org/our-projects/project-map


Rights

All rights revert to the authors after publication.


More about the WMF Haiku Contest Judge Alan Summers

Alan Summers runs With Words, a nonprofit that provides literature, education, and literacy projects, often based around Japanese literary genres.

He is a recipient of the Japan Times Award and the Ritsumeikan University of Kyoto Peace Museum Award for haiku.

Alan is a founding haiku editor for Bones Journal, and serves as Special Feature editor of haiku/haibun for the Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts. He has four haiku collections, the most recent being Does Fish-God Know, and has also co-edited various haiku-based anthologies:
http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/does-fish-god-know-haiku-collection-by.html
http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/new-book-review-of-does-fish-god-know.html
http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/a-must-have-book-for-any-haiku-fan.html

His haiku has appeared in 75 anthologies in fifteen languages, including Japanese, and has been printed in Japanese newspapers including Yomiuri Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, The Japan Times, and The Mie Times. A forthcoming work is Writing Poetry: the haiku way.

Alan is currently working on two novels, and also The Kigo Lab Project. He blogs at Area 17 and is a featured haiku poet at Cornell University, Mann Library: http://tinyurl.com/MannCornell-AlanSummers

Alan also runs popular online haiku workshops:
http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/dates-for-next-online-haiku-tanka.html

National Poetry Month at WMF
http://www.wmf.org/national-poetry-month

Newstead Abbey is best known today as the ancestral home of Lord Byron
(1788–1824). http://www.wmf.org/project/newstead-abbey

The ties between poems and monuments are both ancient and contemporary, abstract and concrete.

As Myra Sklarew writes in her poem "Monuments": Each of us has monuments in the bone case of memory. Monuments secure a culture's present by honoring its past and ensuring its future. Poems about monuments fasten the cultural, socio-political, and aesthetic issues that monuments distill to the page.

At World Monuments Fund, we share these concerns in the conservation projects we undertake every day, some of which also directly support the conservation of poetry. At the Goethe Gallery in Weimar's Residenzschloss, we completed urgent conservation work on the stucco and painted surfaces of the walls and ceiling of the "Poet Rooms,” commissioned by Maria Pawlowna in 1834 to commemorate influential Weimar poets Goethe, Herder, Schiller, and Wieland. At Las Pozas, a Mexican surrealist landscape, WMF helped restore the Edward James Cabin, including the conservation of the poems he wrote on its walls. The Scottish capital's cemeteries, where many important poets are buried, was on the World Monuments Watch in 2010 and is the focus of a current conservation and stewardship project, while Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home of Lord Byron, is on the 2012 Watch.

Please join us this April in exploring the special relationship between monuments and poetry, highlighting the many poems that bear witness to the world's most treasured places: http://www.wmf.org/get-involved/national-poetry-month


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22nd to 31st days of Alan Summers as featured poet at Cornell University USA

Haiku poems by Alan Summers at Cornell University, Mann Library  

http://haiku.mannlib.cornell.edu/category/author/alam-summers/

 

blue brush stroke©Alan Summers

thunder snow
the wind-shifting scent
of fox

Alan Summers
fox dreams (2012) ed. Aubrie Cox; Temps Libre Coups de coeur – Favourites (janvier 2013) 

toy suns
the winter-dark rain
smashes the city

Alan Summers
Blithe Spirit (vol 23 no. 4 November 2012); Does Fish-God Know (YTBN Press 2012) 

Does Fish-God Know

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the moon is broken
Battersea Power Station
from a train window

Alan Summers
Award credit: Winner, World Monuments Fund 2012 Haiku Contest

 

 

 

the names of rain
a blackbird’s subsong
into dusk

Alan Summers
Haiku News Vol. 1 No. 35 (2012)

subsong:
http://tinyurl.com/blackbirdsubsong


 

 

Hirst's butterflies disturbing the exhibits people

Alan Summers
Roadrunner 12.3 (December 2012); Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts Vol.1, No.1 (2013)

Damien Hirst: http://www.damienhirst.com/

 

 

 

chestnut moon shifting in my memory ghost floors

Alan Summers
Roadrunner 12.3 (December 2012); Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts Vol.1, No.1 (2013)

 

fading stars
a hedgehog haphazards
its way back home

Alan Summers
The Heron’s Nest Vol XIV, No. 2 (2012)

 

 

Valentine’s Day
my wife reads up
on Henry VIII

Alan Summers
Blithe Spirit vol. 20 no. 3 (2010); The Humours of Haiku (Iron Press 2012)

 

 

 

British sales: http://www.ironpress.co.uk/books/humours.html

International and card purchases: http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/browse/anthologies/the-humours-of-haiku/

 

 

 

pull of stars turning cold the snail's navigation

 

Alan Summers
Does Fish-God Know (YTBN Press 2012); Blithe Spirit (February 2013) 

 

 

 

 

 

this small ache and all the rain too robinsong

 

Alan Summers
Modern Haiku vol. 44.1 (Winter/Spring 2013)

 

 

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