Twenty20 and a haiku

Today’s prompt at NaHaiWriMo was “bad poetry”. So naturally I didn’t have to put in much effort there. Could offload quite a few from my collection and feeling considerably lighter as a result.(In fact,everybody has been outshining everybody else
there today.) Honestly, we needed a breather. Terri Hale French, the prompter for this month, has been really cracking the whip lately, coming up with the most unusual prompts and I at least, have been struggling to cope.

Anyway, that leaves me with some time to talk about this journal
I stumbled upon the other day on a friend’s profile in Facebook…Twenty20 journal(http://twenty20journal.com). Featuring minimalist fiction as well as poetry, this is a quality journal. Crisp content,easily navigable and niftily edited by guest editor(for the current issue) Aju Mukhopadhyaye, this magazine only publishes prose or poetry that does not go beyond 20 words.And a story when limited to 20 words, could make for some really taut prose, giving it almost a haiku like quality and( making it as exciting as twenty20 cricket)! I particularly liked the one by Vinita Agrawal. The ones by Shubhankar Biswas,Rumjhum Biswas and Anindita Deo were good too.

And i liked this poem by Len Kuntz in the previous issue.

The New Boyfriend

The dog barks at me now.
The kitchen smells of new cologne.
I hear he’s tall, speaks French.



They also accept visual art and haiku and Japanese forms of poetry,too; though I couldn’t find any in the current issue which is India-centric. The next submission deadline is September 8, in case you are interested. Please do check out this journal if you haven't seen it already!

After bad poetry and good journal, the thing that remains to be talked about is good poetry. I read quite a lot of good haiku in the past few weeks, but the one that has remained with me (And by that i only mean the one i can remember now offhand, not that the others were inferior in any way)is this one:

yoshino cherry tree—
it was never a question
of if

—Johannes S. H. Bjerg
Tinywords Issue 11.2 | 3 August 2011

I am sure you'd agree with me that this was worth remembering.