Haiku Contests in English on the Internet: An Overview
Haiku Contests in English on the Internet: An Overview

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to present the case of haiku contests in English that take place on blogs and Internet groups, as well as by email. Haiku, a Japanese genre of poetry, has achieved world-wide popularity and has even acquired culture-specific traits belonging to the culture and language spoken by the poets writing it. There are online haiku communities gathering authors from Europe, Romania, Africa, the Caribbean, India, and so on. These haiku poems come to share specificities belonging to their authors due to their culture and due to their belonging to the respective groups. The essay will rely on issues discussed by Alain Kervin in his books Pourquoi les non-japonais écrivent-ils des haïku? and Histoire du haïku contemporain. Contemporary life can facilitate our preference for such short poems as haiku, which can be read very fast, just as we read the headlines and brief posts on social networks. Goodman (1967), cited in Paran (1996), sees reading as a ―psycholinguistic guessing game,‖ as readers keep making hypotheses. His theory will be applied to explain haiku‘s appeal worldwide.

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