The Haiku Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the HaikuNow! International Haiku Contest 2010.
1st Prize (Traditional)
war memorial
the shine on a bronze soldier
from so many hands
—Cherie Hunter Day
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1st Prize (Contemporary)
distant thunder
the future
in my bones
—Lorin Ford
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1st Prize (Innovative)
what we say what we do
pear blossom in winter
—Olga Dugan
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The judges for our first contest were Billy Collins (Traditional) and Jim Kacian (Contemporary and Innovative). In addition to the 1st place winners, who each received $100, the judges also chose 4 runners-up ($25 each), as well as other noteworthy poems.
To see all of their selections and read their commentary, go to the new page that’s been created for HaikuNow! 2010 (and be sure to click on the PDF to see the other noteworthy poems).
Our judges have made their decisions. Now you be the judge. What do you make of the judges’ selections? What can you add to their comments on them? Of all the haiku selected for each category, which strike you the most, and why?
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http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/docs/HaikuNow2010Results.pdf
Great haiku, indeed!
Could someone direct me how to view
the other noteworthy haiku?
Could you send me the link?
Many thanks
Keith
Lorin, we just had a thunderstorm roll through…and I can tell you first hand, you nailed it! I felt it in every bone! Thanks.
Love, love, LOVE the piece by Olga!
It’s as fresh as the day you wrote it and this shows how being specific, without being overly specific, can achieve this end. It’s a very illustrative haiku in many ways. Thank you for sharing it.
Jack,
Thank you for sharing your thoughtful comments. I wrote the haiku several years ago about our family trip to Washington DC. It’s the only haiku I wrote on the subject and I put it in my card box not even aware that it was 5-7-5. I’m glad I could share this experience with you through haiku.
Cherie
On further consideration, there is something welcoming and public about Cherie Hunter Day’s haiku and I think this involves us as readers and joins us with all those others who couldn’t keep from touching the bronze soldier depicted in the war memorial.
It is not a museum piece, distant and canonized and forbidden to be touched. The memorial, and the poem itself, are offered in the public arena to bear the expressions of all of us; the memorial and its corollary, the poem, are vulnerable to all the elements, and this makes them all the more touching.
P.S. I meant above to say “not her subject,” not “now her subject.”
I’d also like to add that perhaps Ms. Day’s choice of writing her haiku in the traditional mode is most fitting for the subject. War is a messy, horrendous affair, and yet adherence to norms, to protocal, to rules, is something that manages it for us. The armed services are particularly bound to tradition and formal rules and I can’t imagine a poem on the subject of a war memorial breaking from tradition without somehow tarnishing the memory of the war dead. It would be a different matter if Ms. Day was discussing war itself; but that is now her subject.
I’d like to single out Cherie Hunter Day’s haiku for praise, especially because it was written in the traditional haiku form of 5-7-5 syllables. Since this is a form that is rarely adhered to these days, I feel the quality of the poem deserves some praise and merit.
It is a poignant poem: it reaches into our innermost feelings of loss and sorrow for those who died in the defense of our country. I particularly like the fact that Ms. Day did not see it as necessary to specify which war memorial she was alluding to, since a monument to the war dead affects us regardless of the conflict memorialized in the monument.
There is not a single syllable added or missing in this poem: it reads flawlessly and so much so that had it not appeared in the category of “traditional” haiku, I never would have thought to count the syllables-that’s how precise the poem is in form.
And, the pain expressed in the poem is expressed concretely by the many hands that have touched the monument: almost everyone feels the inability to let go of those lost. And, because of the universality of this feeling of loss, the poem goes beyond its particular reference point and leads the reader emotionally to all their memories and sympathies for those who died and the sorrow of the survivors.
I especially like the “shine on a bronze soldier,” because this lightens the feeling of loss; it epitomizes how we overcome grief by our shared sense of loss and shared sense of respect for the departed. It makes of the lost soldiers a beacon that we in our fear of the darkness create through love.
Fine, fine work Cherie Hunter Day.
Yes, I was delighted with Olga’s poem too…it was remininiscent of Ashbery. But a lot easier to follow!
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