Woodnotes — #17

This issue featured a redesign for Woodnotes, with a thicker new font for the name on the title and all headings inside, and a new font for all the text inside. The font for the interior text proved to be difficult to read for prose, so it was changed again in issue #18, but the new font for the title and headings remained through to the final issue, #31. A telling announcement in issue #17 was an invitation to submit to Woodnotes by “electronic mail,” noting that Kimberly Cortner was the first person to send haiku electronically, with her poems appearing earlier in issue #15. One of several highlights in this issue was “Leaping the Chasm: An Interview with Virginia Brady Young” by vincent tripi, excerpted from the book Raking Sand, which I published with Press Here in the summer of 1993. Another notable change was a separate “Tanka” section, which continued for all subsequent issues, except for issue #25, which tried integrating tanka with the haiku and senryu to see what readers thought (they preferred a separate tanka section). This growing emphasis on tanka in Woodnotes was one of the influences that prompted me to start the Tanka Society of America in 2000. Another important growth point was the first national meeting of the Haiku Society of America west of New York, held in Carmel, California, which Lequita Vance organized and reported on. And as a bit of a diversion, this issue included a longer poem about haiku, “To the Poet,” by Marianne Monaco. Also included as an insert was a four-page survey regarding Woodnotes and HPNC meetings. I summarized the results of this survey two issues later, in issue #19.

Staff

• Editor: Michael Dylan Welch

• Associate Editor: Ebba Story

• Typesetting and layout: Michael Dylan Welch

• Cover art: clipart

Pages 32

Haiku/Senryu 71

Tanka 4

Haibun 1

Longer Poems 1

Essays 1

Reports 2

Book Reviews 1

Mini-Reviews 3

< Previous issue | Next issue >