A New Resonance 13: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku

It’s fair to say that the mission for the New Resonance series has changed over time. What began simply as a showcase for rising talent has evolved into something considerably more. We now see New Resonance as a place where a poet of any pedigree and prior success might successfully exhibit a substantial amount of work in a single venue, still a remarkably rare event in the haiku world. And while we still maintain that this is one step toward recognition on a larger scale, and hence the adjective “emerging” still obtains, we also recognize that an even more palpable effect of this recognition is the creation of a highly specific community, the New Resonance community, the members of which will nearly all go on to publish their own books and have a larger forum for their work and ideas. But they will have started here, and that will be a fact that will gather them together in their own minds and in ours. Given that we’ve already conducted one memorable New Resonance reading (at Haiku North America 2009) and are planning others, there’s good reason to think that this community will have a collective force in the growth and development of English-language haiku, and, based on the high quality of the work you’ll find in these pages, that our genre has a very bright future. Read more