Woodnotes — #16

This issue excelled in essays and reviews, along with many fine poems. To start, Patricia Neubauer offered the third of her “Go to the Pine” essays: “Go to the Pine: The Making of a Haiku,” in which she explored such matters as season words, imagery, juxtaposition, the order of images, surprise, mystery, and allusion, with example poems by a variety of poets to demonstrate her observations. And near the end, William J. Higginson wrote a review about “Bashō and His Best Interpreter,” meaning Makoto Ueda and his book Bashō and His Interpreters. In between was a vibrant mix of haiku, senryu, tanka, and haibun, plus a healthy set of mini-reviews and four longer book reviews. Every year, too, HPNC’s president would announce what Garry Gay dubbed the “Gavel Award,” later renamed as the “Chime Award.” Announcements of these awards, celebrating a poem chosen from the previous year’s issues of Woodnotes, would usually appear briefly in the “Woodnotes” news section of Woodnotes, but in this issue the award was given a page-and-a-half appreciation by Paul O. Williams. The poem itself was engraved on a gavel awarded to the poet. This issue also began the tenure of Ebba Story as associate editor, replacing Christopher Herold who was a coeditor.

Staff

• Editor: Michael Dylan Welch

• Associate Editor: Ebba Story

• Typesetting and layout: Michael Dylan Welch

• Cover art: clipart

Pages 36

Haiku/Senryu 86

Tanka 2

Haibun 1

Essays 1

Reports 2

Book Reviews 5

Mini-Reviews 9