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Volume 36.2
Summer 2005

Robert Spiess Memorial
2005 Haiku Awards

The editors of Modern Haiku are pleased to announce the winners of the third annual competition to commemorate the life and work of Robert Spiess.

The judges were Pamela Miller Ness and Lee Gurga. We received 316 entries from 83 poets, representing 10 countries. Haiku were to be written in the spirit of the following “Speculation” (Robert Spiess, A Year’s Speculations on Haiku, Modern Haiku Press, 1995):

It is [the] subjective aspect that accounts for very much of the difference between a haiku that is merely descriptive per se and one that engenders intuitional feeling—and this is the deciding factor between a haiku in which the poet simply records stimuli and one in which the poet is in accord with the haiku moment.

The awards are as follows: First Prize: $100 plus a signed like-new copy of Bob’s first book, The Heron’s Legs (1966, out of print); Second Prize: $50 plus a copy of Bob’s The Shape of Water
(1982); Third Prize: $25 plus a copy of Bob’s Some Sticks and Pebbles (2001). Three poets are awarded Honorable Mentions, and each will receive a copy of Bob’s A Year’s Speculations on Haiku (1995).

Special thanks to Billie Wilson for the idea of a competition to remember Bob
Spiess and for all her hard work as contest coordinator.

 

First Prize:

wild berries—
one training wheel lifts
round the curve
Carolyn Hall

Second Prize:

winter light—
she holds the teacup
with both hands
Marjorie Buettner

Third Prize:

Orion rising
she reaches to loosen
the pup’s collar
Darrell Byrd

Honorable Mentions (unranked):

spring stars—
washing my daughter’s lipstick
off the mirror
Marjorie Buettner

 

still arguing
we swim the same river
further upstream
kirsty karkow

 

winter rain—
   finding that part of silence
      which speaks to me
Marjorie Buettner

 

 

© 2006 Modern Haiku • PO Box 1570 • Santa Rosa Beach, FL 32459