from our friends at the Home County Folk Festival in London, ON:
The Home County Folk Festival is now accepting entries for The Great Canadian Haiku Contest! Entries will be accepted via email at haiku@homecounty.ca until April 30th, 2011.
Submit a haiku ( 3 lines: 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables) about a Canadian person, place or thing that represents something about the Canadian identity that is great in the eyes of the writer. "Great" could mean famous, obscure and/or something personally relevant in the eyes of the writer. In the age of Twitter, we limit our communication to 140 characters to express a thought. The haiku is a beautiful form with similar limitations, forcing the writer to express the essence of what they are writing about in a simple, elegant, evocative and compelling way.
Festival artists Hawksley Workman, Royal Wood, Emm Gryner and Tom Wilson will set the winning 17 haiku to music. The result will be 17 "little gems" or "little magical moments of AHA~!", each two minutes maximum. The haiku will be performed by the artists on a workshop stage at Home County Folk Festival on Saturday July 16, 2011. The workshop, hosted by CBC Radio 3's Grant Lawrence, will be recorded for archival purposes and streamed live by CHRW. The poets and musicians own the copyright for future use.
The Great Canadian Haiku Contest is sponsored by a new London radio station, Blackburn Radio Inc. 98.1 Free FM (launching June 21, 2011), with support from CBC Radio 3 and 94.9 CHRW, London's Independent Radio Station.
Contest Details:
Enter from April 1 to April 30 via email to haiku@homecounty.ca. The contest entry fee is $5 and can be paid online at Ticket Scene. (Event name is Great Canadian Haiku Contest) or by mailing a cheque to Home County Folk League, Unit 115, 652 Elizabeth St. London, ON, N5Y 6L3
In the body of the email include:
The haiku writer's full name, email address, ticketscene confirmation number and payment name, how you heard about the contest and the haiku. Contestants are allowed four haiku maximum per entry, one entry per person. Poems will be selected based on originality, imagery, the power of the language, adherence to haiku form, and quality of rhythmic and lyrical text.
The panel of writer-judges will be led by London's Poet Laureate, the acclaimed activist/performer poet Penn Kemp. She will select the top 17 haiku. Winners will be notified via email in early June. Each festival musician will then be given 5 of the winning haiku to set to music. Each artist gets 4 of 16 (ranked haiku winners # 2 - #17), AND each artist sets the winning haiku as well, so the audiences hears 4 different musical versions of the winning haiku.
Winning haiku and runners-up will be notified in mid June. Their names and haiku will be posted on Home County's website and published in the festival program. Winning haiku will be published in London's new literary magazine, Writtle, in July, as well as in Lighting the Global Lantern: A Teacher's Guide to Writing Haiku and Related Literary Forms by noted haiku poet Terry Ann Carter. The guide, to be published by Wintergreen Studios Press (Kingston), will be available from Amazon in September.
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