Your World for the Moment

First published as the introduction for Earthsigns: 2017 Haiku North America Anthology, Sammamish, Washington: Press Here, 2017. The conference took place from September 13 to 17, 2017, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. You can order this anthology from Amazon. See the Press Here page for this book. Read selected poems and see the contributor list.

Renowned Santa Fe artist Georgia O’Keeffe said, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” We find such sharing and celebration in this book’s poems. Earthsigns collects haiku and senryu by 183 attendees of the 2017 Haiku North America conference. Each poem is your world for the moment, a flower of sorts, a sign of the earth.  Haiku celebrate personal surroundings and experiences as they unfold through the seasons. This collection focuses mostly on Southwest images—not only from participants who live in the region but also from many who have visited. With petroglyph-inspired images by Lidia Rozmus, this anthology offers a strong sense of the 2017 conference, its speakers and attendees, and its location, Santa Fe, in the heart of New Mexico.

        Haiku North America began in 1991 and has moved around the continent every two years since then. With the 2017 gathering, HNA comes to the American Southwest for the first time, attracting its largest attendance in the event’s history and consequently its largest conference anthology, Earthsigns. Here you can read poems by many of the leading haiku poets writing in English today, along with what may be the first published haiku by new conference attendees. In all, these poems are signs of an enthusiastic, welcoming, and vigorous community.

        This fourteenth anthology in HNA’s history follows previous collections in arranging poems by each poet’s first name, with the aspiration that we remain on a first-name basis, as friends with each other and friends in the haiku art. May each poem be a flower in your hand, your world for the moment.


        Michael Dylan Welch

        Scott Wiggerman



Haiku by the editors from this anthology:


        woods walk—

        I catch the cobwbs

        that miss my son

                Michael Dylan Welch


        mountain’s outline

        the difference walking

        alone

                Scott Wiggerman