Woodnotes — #3

With this issue vincent tripi and Paul O. Williams began to shape the journal to focus increasingly on poetry rather than just HPNC’s local haiku news, but the “news” roots of Woodnotes would continue throughout the journal’s history, helping to build a strong sense of community, with all our well-documented activity becoming the envy of other haiku poets elsewhere. I also joined Woodnotes with this issue, as an associate editor. I did all the typography, layout, and design, except for the cover design in early issues, plus proofreading. In the typesetting, I remember it was difficult to get a proper em dash with Microsoft Word and the old PageMaker layout software (this was 1989, after all)—or perhaps I didn’t yet know how to make the software do what I wanted. Consequently, I used two hyphens instead, and experimented with using a tilde—something I would now avoid. Such punctuation abuse is as incorrect as misspelling a word. I was also still typing two spaces after periods instead of one, which is an error in proper typography that I wouldn’t fix until issue #6. These small details show how Woodnotes was evolving, including the featuring of 38 submitted poems with this issue, the first step in moving Woodnotes from being a newsletter towards being a poetry journal. As a further indication of this progress, this issue identified Woodnotes as the “quarterly journal” of the Haiku Poets of Northern California, no longer just as a “newsletter.” I’m not sure why the “Woodnotes” title was smaller on the cover of this issue, and it wasn’t straight, either, but prior and subsequent issues did not have these concerns. This issue also used light-yellow paper for the interior pages, something not done for any other issues. Perhaps later issues could have played with different paper colours, but that would have been more expensive. Of note in a short report about the HPNC meeting held on 27 August 1989 (the first one I ever attended) was that vincent tripi read a paper by Anita Virgil on the differences between haiku and senryu. This paper prompted a discussion that included “significant disagreement on the definitions of both genres, and even the notion that the distinctions are not worth making.” Has anything changed in the decades since then?

Staff

• Editors: vincent tripi and Paul O. Williams

• Typesetting and layout: Michael Dylan Welch

• Cover and interior art: Mary Fields

Pages 20

Haiku/Senryu 38

Haibun 1

Essays 4

Reports 2

Mini-Reviews 2

Editorials 1

< Previous issue | Next issue >