North Carolina Haiku Society

Meetings & Events

At Regency Park.
Photo by Dave Russo.

Monthly Meetings

The North Carolina Haiku Society holds monthly meetings on the first Wednesday of each month unless another date is announced. The meetings are open to anyone with an interest in haiku, beginner or advanced.

The main event of most meetings will be a workshop in that we discuss haiku that we have written. As you might guess from our web site, the focus of the meetings will be on literary haiku rather than "joke haiku" about spam, computer error messages, and the like. Please see Meeting Format below for details.

Date of Next Meeting

Wednesday February 3 in Chapel Hill

Time

7:30 PM

City or Town

Newcomers are welcome! Details about the location of the meeting will be sent to our email list. If you are not on the list, contact us and ask for directions. See our Contact Us page.

Meeting Format:

In general, we'll begin by giving people a chance to ask questions or make comments. Someone might give a brief presentation about haiku or related forms. Then we will move on to the main event: a workshop in that we discuss haiku that we have written.

If you are a free spirit and just want to come and see what happens, welcome!

If you'd like to know a little more about contemporary haiku in English, you could read the topic What's a haiku?, then read the poems on a well-edited haiku site, such as The Heron's Nest or the Harold G. Henderson Memorial Award Collection on the Haiku Society of America web site.

Hope to see you at the meeting!

Ginkos (haiku walks)

Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), one of the "Big Four" of the Japanese haiku masters, thought that haiku poets should practice shasei—"sketching from life"—in order to develop their powers of observation and description. A traditional way to develop these skills is to participate in a ginko, a haiku walk.

NCHS ginkos tend to be informal and democratic. We gather at a location, usually a scenic or historic place, and walk about. We jot down notes about what we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste—as well as thoughts and feelings that arise. After the walk, we turn our notes into haiku and read some of them aloud to the rest of the group. The goal is not to "impress" but to respond to what is around us.

Again: if you are a free spirit and just want to come and see what happens, welcome!

About the 5-7-5 syllable count: For the purpose of our ginko, please feel free to keep the familiar 5-7-5 syllable count or adopt the freer form that is typically published in literary journals that focus on haiku written in English, such as Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The Heron's Nest, and others. Since the early years of the 20th century, many poets in Japan and elsewhere have de-emphasized the 5-7-5 pattern in order to focus on other elements of haiku form and tradition. Other poets have broken with tradition in order to seek new possibilities in haiku. For details, see What's a haiku?

Date of Next NCHS Ginko

To be announced.

Time

To be announced.

Place

To be announced.

Details will be sent to our email list and will also be published in local newspapers. If you are not on the list, you can contact us and ask for directions. See our Contact Us page.

Haiku Holiday

We will celebrate the 31st annual Haiku Holiday with the North Carolina Haiku Society on Saturday, April 24, 2010. Roberta Beary and Lenard D. Moore will be our featured presenters.

Roberta Beary’s book of haiku, The Unworn Necklace (Snapshot Press, 2007), selected as a William Carlos Williams Book Award finalist (Poetry Society of America), was named a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award prize winner. She serves as an associate of The Haiku Foundation and as an editor of the Red Moon Anthology haiku series. In 2009, Roberta Beary and Lenard D. Moore presented Navigating Crosscurrents in the Craft of Haiku: Anonymous Haiku Writing Workshop to critical acclaim at Haiku North America Ottawa. Roberta Beary has won numerous awards for her haiku, including the Kusamakura Haiku Contest's Grand Prize of a trip to Japan in 2005. Her haibun also have been honored; two haibun received Modern Haiku's Favorite Haibun Award and two others were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. You can read more of her work at www.robertabeary.com.

Roberta will read from her most recent chapbook, nothing left to say, poems of sound and silence, edited by Michael Dylan Welch (available from Kings Road Press). She will present a haibun writing workshop with examples of haibun, written by heself and others, that in William Faulkner's words show,"The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." Participants are encouraged to bring a favorite haibun to share. There will also be a lively discussion of the role of haiku in haibun.

Lenard D. Moore, the Executive Chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society, was Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for Eastern North Carolina from 2007 to 2009. He is a past President of the Haiku Society of America: the first Southerner and the first African American to be elected as President of the HSA. Lenard is the founder of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective (CAAWC). His latest collection of poems is A Temple Looming (WordTech Editions: 2008). Lenard will lead a haiku workshop in the afternoon.

Our first Haiku Holiday took place at Bolin Brook Farm near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the United States of America on January 26, 1980. Since then, all of our annual meetings have been held at Bolin Brook Farm—thanks to our gracious host and member since the beginning, Jean Earnhardt. Our Galleries section has a few pictures from past Haiku Holidays. Experienced haiku teachers and poets will conduct workshops, talks and walks. The event is open to anyone with an interest in haiku, beginner or advanced.

Email List

We have a low-traffic NCHS email list that we use for meeting announcements. This is a one-way list: only the webmaster can post messages. If you would like to be on the NCHS email list, see the Contact Us page.