Contest Description
What to Submit?
1 original poem on the theme of birds. Haiku form only with 5 7 5 syllables preferred. Date your poems and do not write your names in your entries.
HAIKU (plural: haiku, from archaic Japanese): The term haiku is a fairly late addition to Japanese poetry. The poet Shiki coined the term in the nineteenth century from a longer, more traditional phrase, haikai renga no hokku ("the introductory lines of light linked verse"). To understand the haiku's history as a genre, peruse the vocabulary entries for its predecessors, the hokku and the haikai renga or renku.
The haiku follows several conventions:
(1) The traditional Japanese haiku consists of three lines. The first line contains five syllables, the second line contains seven, and the last line five. In Japanese, the syllables are further restricted in that each syllable must have three sound units (sound-components formed of a consonant, a vowel, and another consonant). The three unit-rule is usually ignored in English haiku, since English syllables vary in size much more than in Japanese. Furthermore, in English translation, this 5/7/5 syllable count is occasionally modified to three lines containing 6/7/6 syllables respectively, since English is not as "compact" as Japanese.
First Prize, Glory
Second Prize, Glory
Third Prize, Glory
Seven Runner-Ups
Preparing Your Entry
Submit one copy of your poem online. Format your poem. Please make your entry easy to read — no illustrations or fancy fonts.
English Language
Poems should be in English. Poems translated from other languages are not eligible, unless you wrote both the original poem and the translation.