April 17, 2010 - William Hart, Billie Dee

Billie Dee, William Hart, Deborah P Kolodji
Pacific Asia Museum

For the past decade the Southern California Haiku Study Group has been holding a monthly kukai workshop. Although we're a "haiku study group," this format didn't allow us much time for actual study.

So, we are going to try out an alternative schedule to try for the rest of 2010. We are still going to hold kukai meetings but will rotate between three different types of meetings:

1. Kukai Workshop
2. Anonymous Haiku Workshop
3. Program and Featured Reader

In March, we tried our first anonymous haiku workshop, which allowed us a chance to discuss what was working and what was not working in various haiku-in-progress.

For our April meeting last Saturday, William Hart was our featured reader and he read from his four published chapbooks of haiku.

This was followed by an excellent program presented by Billie Dee, "Spinning the Classics: Exploring the North American haiku canon." Billie offered five examples of contemporary English language haiku, all from the first edition of Cor van den Heuvel's "The Haiku Anthology." We had a wonderful discussion of each haiku, analyzing each of them in depth.

Upcoming:

April 24, 2010 - 9:00 am. "Hike-ku" at Fish Canyon. Meet in the Vulcan Material Company parking lot (take the 210 east from Pasadena to Mt Olive, turn right on Huntington Dr, turn left on Encanto Parkway and follow it until it ends in the company parking lot).

May 15, 2010 - 2:00 p.m. - Kukai Workshop Meeting - Pacific Asia Museum
May 15, 2010 - Haiku Anthology Deadline
June 19, 2010 - 2:00 p.m. - Anonymous Haiku Workshop Meeting - Pacific Asia Museum
July 17, 2010 - 2:00 p.m. - David Lanoue, Luce Pelletier, Pacific Asia Museum