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Der Lärm des Herzens, pub. Haiku heute, Tübingen 2005. ISBN 3-936487-07-3. Price € 9.00

This book, the second in an annual series, is entirely in German. Whilst the pleasure of reading it may be denied to most members of Blithe Spirit, they may be interested in the way it has been put together.
The editor-in-chief, Volker Friebel, describes it as a project to develop German-language haiku. Participants are ‘independent’ - they may or may not be members of the German Haiku Society. The initial action is on a website:
www.Haiku-heute.de, where people send in haiku and haibun for consideration, also occasionally essays, and then discuss each others’ work, back and forth. I am told that in 2004 some 3,000 haiku were submitted in this way, and another 500 added to these by the organisers by culling them from current printed sources. A monthly rating in which all contributors have a vote reduces the nominated haiku to 30%, so that by year’s end about 1,000 survive. A jury appointed by the editors scores these and the winnowed top 150 are finally reviewed by three editors and so the contents of the annual anthology are established. Some of the more interesting critical remarks that have been made during the year on particular haiku are added, as well as a few haibun and articles. There are no personal favours. In this volume, participants may be represented by a single haiku or anything up to fifteen, and one assumes there are participants none of whose haiku have made it at all.
My impression is that in the two years it has been running the Haiku-heute (Haiku Today) project has indeed been liberative. It has provided a forum to those who have hitherto found the insistence on 5-7-5 an impediment to progress, as also the rickety fence set up between haiku and senryu, and the bias towards lyrical depictions of the natural world in which humans are little more than bystanders. The urban environment is better represented.
You may like some examples, with my translations: