Haiku Contest Winner

     I am proud to announce the winning poem of our haiku contest!



The grey morning fog

Rakes its fingers on the ground

Trying to hold on

     Some of you may recognize this as the poem posted in the comments on my "How to Write a Haiku" post, and indeed, it is. Congratulations to our winner, Rosemary Mucklestone. Rosey is a historical fiction and sci-fi writer, and you can find her prose works here.
     Everyone congratulate our winner! Good luck for next time, everyone! Our next contest is an art one, the theme being "Mothers", and we have a prose one going on right now (you can find that one here). If you're really more of a poet, sign up for our newsletter, it's up on the right here, and we'll email you June first with a new poetry contest.

Haiku Contest

This contest is now closed. Winners will be announced May 1st.

Post by Elisabeth TenBrink Kelley, co-founder

     Hello everyone! The haiku article seems to have attracted a fair bit of attention, so now we're going to have a contest of them! (If you missed that post, you can see it here.) It can be on any theme you want, as long as it's a haiku. So, here's the submission guidelines. Yeah, I know, it's long, and kind of random, we'll find a way to organize them later, but for now, the things that will get you disqualified are generally at the top.


Your submission must be a haiku. If you don't know what a haiku is, see here.

Include the "Haiku Contest" in the subject line.

Include a short author bio, if you wish, of less than 200 words. You can include your Twitter handle, Facebook page, website, etc. either in your bio or on the side.

Your name or pen name should be in the body of the email ONLY.

Your submission should be as an attached dox. doc. or txt.

The contest will close on April 20th. Winners will be announced on May 1st. The winners can be seen here or in the newsletter.

There are no font or formatting requirements, if you win it will be re-formatted anyway. However, if the font and such are important to the piece, let us know in the email and we won't.

There are no age requirements.

There is no entry fee.

All rights remain with the author, we only ask to place winning and other exemplary submissions on our blog and in our newsletter.

Because many publications for poetry do not accept things that have been previously published in any way, you may ask that your submission not be displayed and we won't. This doesn't stop you from winning, and we'll still put your author bio in there.

Your submission should not contain any identifying information.

All rights remain with the creator.

It must be your own work.

We allow previous and simultaneous submissions.

You can submit as many haiku as you want.

Send your email to windowtothesoulcontests[at]gmail.com. Any questions should be sent there as well.

Because you can't really critique a haiku that isn't just plain wrong, we will instead advertise you by Tweeting your haiku along with your links, and posting them to Facebook.
We will give feedback on all submissions.

We also have an art contest, for anyone who's interested. Deadline is March 20th, and the winner's entry will replace our banner, the thing up top that says "Window to the Soul" on it. You can find the guidelines here.

How To Write A Haiku

Post by co-founder Elisabeth TenBrink Kelley

     So, haiku. To start, I will tell you what a haiku is, and where they came from. Haiku are an ancient Japanese poem, and you can probably find a good few of them on the internet written by actual Samurai. Unlike many other poem types, haiku have no set rhyme scheme. In fact, they rarely rhyme at all. To be a haiku, it must have three lines, the first with five syllables, the second with seven, and the last with five again. While there are many beautiful haiku that I could use as examples, I’ll instead have to use mine, so as to avoid any copyright issues.

Dazzled

A ray of the sun

Reflected off the bright floor

And dazzled my eyes

     As you can see, haiku are very short, and the last line having fewer syllables than the previous one gives it a sense of trailing off. Because of these two things, it is often tempting to make a silly haiku, but I would recommend against it. While, as with all writing types, you can make anything your own in poetry, haiku came from a noble people, and were used to express small beauties. While you could say that mine hardly expresses a beauty, I found something profound about having my eyes stabbed with light. This shows that it doesn’t need to be something commonly seen as a beauty, but something that the poet finds beautiful, profound, or thought-provoking.
     Now let’s analyze my poem a little for the syllables.

(A) (ray) (of) (the) (sun)

     This line is simple; each word is one syllable.

(Re)(flect)(ed) (off) (the) (bright) (floor)

     This one has seven syllables, yet the same number of words because “reflected” is a three syllable word.

(And) (daz)(zled) (my) (eyes)

     Here I return to five. I have found that this last line tends to be a strange type of conclusion, but it usually does conclude. An example (which I can’t show here in full, for the reason I said earlier)would be one that in its last line revealed the “flower” that was flying as a butterfly.
     To find the number of syllables in each line, it really does work to clap your hands. If you are in a place where that would cause strange looks, or you’d just rather something easier, you can usually find an internet program to do it for you. If you look up “Flesch-Kincaid grade level finder” you’ll probably find a few things that ask you to input your text, and then they tell you the grade level. But the cool thing (and what matters to you at the moment) is that some of them will tell you the number of syllables in your text. Once you’ve found on of these, just copy and paste the lines individually, and now you know if you have a haiku!

     That you everyone for reading, I hope I've been helpful, and may your haiku turn out as great as those of the Samurai!

Miss TenBrink Kelley is the co-founder of this blog and an aspiring author and poet. For more of her poetry, see her mostly-abandoned blog here.


We currently have one on-going contest. It is an art contest, and the winner's entry will replace the banner at the top! See details here.