First Haiku Slam
at the National Poetry Slam

Yes, it’s true. In 1993, more or less on a whim, I entered the first-ever National Haiku Slam held in conjunction with the National Poetry Slam [link no longer works; see the Wikipedia page instead] in San Francisco, 29 September to 2 October 1993. I don’t remember the location, but I do remember that the room was packed with at least a hundred people. I got third place. The eventual winner, who I think was Tracie Morris, graciously told me that I was clearly the only poet writing “real” haiku and should have been the winner. I recall that I won my round to get third place by reading the following poem, instead of reading in-your-face senryu that normally pleased the crowd, and that perhaps the unexpected seriousness of the poem caught the attention of the audience—and the judges who scored the poems for each round:

after the quake

     the weathervane

          pointing to earth

Otherwise, I suspect I performed selections from Fig Newtons: Senryu to Go, or other similar poems. I’ve generally not participated in poetry slams, haiku or otherwise, but have twice been featured poet at the Seattle Poetry Slam [link no longer works; explore various Wayback Machine pages instead], where I read selections of my haiku. These two performances, once with James Whetzel accompanying me with music, have both been for the organization’s annual Haiku d’Etat haiku slam (I was the featured poet before the slam itself). The Haiku d’Etat event in Seattle took place in November every year, in the week before Thanksgiving, and always attracted a hefty crowd, but seems not to have been held since the pandemic started, and may have ended sooner than that.

Postscript

My “after the quake” poem has been republished in at least 35 other places (see “Paperclip Poems”), read for the Empress of Japan, translated into French, German, and Italian (and perhaps other languages), made into a bookmark (see “Haiku Bookmark”), and has been repeatedly anthologized (see “From The Haiku Anthology” as one example). I originally wrote the poem in response to the 17 October 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake that killed at least 60 people in the greater San Francisco area, where I lived at the time (see “Tremors”). It was so early in my literary haiku writing that I hadn’t yet started my practice of using notebooks (see “My Haiku Notebooks”) where I would date the poem, so I don’t have a record of the specific date of composition, though I do know I wrote it in Foster City, California. I submitted the poem to the Haiku Poets of Northern California After Shock anthology on 10 December 1989, and to Frogpond (where it was first published) on 11 December 1989, so the poem would have been written sometime from late October to early December of 1989. See also “The Last Leaf,” the complete sequence that first included this poem.

—13 June 2026