Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

(The feeling that you are being targeted; and the slightly unsettling mysteries of exactly why and how will no longer go away, For, on an early autumn trip to the seaside, while out along the beach scavenging for driftwood, you are about to find; lodged in a tangle of seaweed...  your third little message-stuffed capsule tied with that same elegant cord to an almost entirely deflated golden balloon only slightly bigger than your fist. As you reach down to extract it from its place at the high water mark, the thought crosses your mind: what little air there still is inside must be the breath of a Japanese poet!)

Dear Finder,
 
Welcome to the world of contemporary Japanese haiku! (This time the message is typed in impeccable English ...) Congratulations on finding our windmailed balloon! Today, we would like to tell you about another of the major players in our national haiku industry - the private sector newspaper companies. Here is an example of what they print:

Elder says   
sea wind makes it sweet - 
summer orange

(Kennosuke Tachibana)

This haiku appeared recently in the Asahi Haikuist Network, a weekly column carried by one of the three English language daily newspapers here in Japan, the IHT-Asahi. The author’s family name, Tachibana, means ‘winter orange’, so some of us feel that he may well have a thing about citrus! Certainly, the expression is very clipped. The editor of this column, David McMurray, who lives in the curl of ‘the toe of Japan’ at Kagoshima, will often suggest improvements to struggling authors prior to publication. The AHN is also available online (www.asahi.com/english/haiku).

The IHT-Asahi’s parent newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, publishes a much bigger regular Japanese haiku column, too (Asahi Haidan), as well as running ‘culture centers’ (adult education colleges) the length and breadth of the land. In these, you will find a variety of (twice- )monthly classes on haiku and related forms taught by well-known poets. By way of example, we’ll just open the pages of the Osaka Asahi Culture Center’s brochure and tell you what you could study if you were over here ... Well, first of all there are five different haiku courses, each with a different teacher. Both traditionalist and modernist perspectives are well-represented,  with Teiko Inahata  (Kyoshi’s granddaughter)  and Mikihiko Itami, (Vice-Chairman of Gendai Haiku) both featuring. Then, there are three courses on senryu and another three on tanka. There’s also one on renga, too. When averaged out, such courses generally cost participants about 2,000 yen per 90-120 min. lecture (you later calculate: 11- 12 pounds sterling or thereabouts!), but it does give one the chance to study under a teacher one might otherwise only ever see on television.

The Yomiuri Shimbun has exactly the same set-up, employing different selectors for its haiku columns and different lecturers for its culture center courses. The English language Daily Yomiuri now has a somewhat didactic occasional corner, ‘Go-Shichi-Go Haiku in English’, written by Susumu Takiguchi in Oxfordshire, which usually features a few English haiku by Japanese and others. The Yomiuri Culture Center at Senri Chou, Osaka, has the only regular public course on English Haiku Composition in Japan, led by a bloke called Tito. Here is one of the participants’ recent poems:

a sneak thief
of bamboo shoots
whistling on his bike - 
clear spring morn

(Mari Kawaguchi)

In addition to the long-established weekly haiku column of its Japanese parent, The Mainichi Shimbun, there used to be an English haiku column in its offshoot, the Mainichi Daily News, but this has now retired to an Internet website (www.mainichi.co.jp/english/haiku). It is edited monthly by Isamu Hashimoto. In terms of the number of haiku submitted, however, the Japanese haiku column of the parent newspaper receives thousands of submissions each week, whereas the monthly English haiku Internet site receives less than one hundred in four times as long. You can count your lucky stars that you’re composing in English! If one does have a Japanese haiku selected, though, one can briefly relish the satisfaction of knowing that a million or more people have probably read the poem. At a nearby Culture Center, Mainichi have haiku's senior stateswomen, Nobuko Katsura, 88, teaching composition:

Futokoro ni, chibusa aru usa, tsuyu nagaki

Beneath my blouse,
The melancholy
Of having breasts -
This season of rain goes on.

The fourth member of Japan’s giant circulation daily newspapers, the Sankei Shimbun, as well as the national broadcasting corporation, Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), also run a large number of such ‘culture centers’, where haiku and related arts are always on the menu. All four of the above-mentioned mass-circulation Japanese daily newspapers also run TV channels, but, unlike NHK, these have surprisingly little haiku programming. Still, the newspaper column/culture center showcasing of our most popular poetic forms - haiku, senryu and tanka - is probably quite unparalleled in the rest of the world.  What other race sets quite such store by poetry?

(The very end of the tiny paper message, which, as its outermost furl, had been pressed against the inside of the transparent plastic capsule, is heavily stained, no doubt by the first few drops of seawater leaking in while bobbing on the waves. All you can make out is something about ‘incoming windmail’ and a suspicion of ‘Sincerely yours’.  Hmmmmmm.)