January Haiku Contest

On By angeliquejamailIn Ari Marmell, contest, cretive writing, haiku, New Year's resolutions, poetry, speculative fiction, Strange New Words

Hello there!  I’ve been thinking it’s time to do another haiku contest, and in honor of New Year’s Month, the theme of the contest is New Year’s Resolutions.

Here’s a quick reminder of what the haiku form is all about:  it’s a poem with seventeen syllables divided into three lines offering both description and comment.  The first line contains five syllables, the second line contains seven, and the third line contains five more.  Traditionally haiku often were about nature in some aspect, but within their brief imagery the poet often embedded some sort of opinion (the comment I referred to before).  You can take on as much of that form into your haiku as you like, but for the purposes of this contest, please use the three-line/seventeen-syllable format, as part of the challenge is to express your idea in that tight space.

The subject of your haiku is to be New Year’s resolutions.  The winner will receive the excellent new anthology (in paperback) Strange New Words: Tales of Heroism and Horror by Ari Marmell, celebrated author of fantasy and horror and other speculative fiction.  Anyone who has won a contest on my blog in the last six months is not eligible to win this prize, though you are more than welcome and even encouraged to participate by submitting a haiku for fun and by voting on the entries later.

You may enter as often as you like by submitting your haiku in the comments section of this post.  Please make each entry a separate posted comment; any entries posted together will be considered one entry.  (This just makes it easier to figure out what your intentions were when I’m putting the voting together.)

The deadline is, naturally, the end of New Year’s Month!  So you have until midnight U.S. central time on January 31st to get your entries in.  After that, I’ll put the voting together, and you the readers will determine who wins the contest.

Happy New Year!  I look forward to reading your haiku!

***

UPDATE 1/14/14:  There has been such a wonderful response to this contest so far.  Thank you all!  Please stay tuned to this blog for more posts about this contest, for more information about voting, etc.  I intend to communicate with all entrants via this blog as much as possible, but I will also be posting updates on my Facebook author page, which you can get to by clicking on the link in the sidebar to the side of this screen or by clicking here.  Remember, the deadline to enter the contest is January 31st, and the voting will happen soon after that.  Keep checking back — or better yet, subscribe to this blog to get my posts sent straight to your email (and make sure your settings are arranged to get my posts “immediately”).  Thanks again!

81 thoughts on “January Haiku Contest”

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    1. Of course I prefer that they be in traditional form because I think it makes the challenge more interesting, but as you can see from many of the offerings here, not everyone is sticking to that. Stay tuned to this blog in the near future for a final ruling on this subject. 🙂

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      1. mjlamarche

        keep to the traditional form. the challenge of a defined structure is part of what gives haiku its meditative, zen character. free verse has its place and proponents, but perhaps not in this endeavor.

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      2. I’ve been thinking this, too. I decided last night that if I got enough entries that aren’t truly in the proscribed haiku structure, I would hive those off into a separate contest. Then I thought about it some more. I’m probably still going to do this, but I want to wait and see how the rest of this plays out before making an official pronouncement.

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