right hand pointing

Right Hand Pointing, your journal which somewhat snottily prohibits haiku in its submission guidelines, here presents our second winter haiku issue. We do love haiku. But we don’t like to see it published alongside other styles and forms of poetry. Haiku, we believe, is best presented in the company of other haiku and related forms of verse.

This issue, like last year’s, is guest-edited by our long-time supporter and contributor Eric Burke. Let me tell you something about Eric. Eric has got some serious focus and discipline. Just short of 149 people submitted haiku to this issue. We allowed submitters to send in up to 10 poems and many did. I estimate that Eric read around 750 haiku, from which he selected the 42 poems which appear in this issue. I read a sampling of the poems Eric declined. It would have driven me slap crazy to have had to turn down that many poems, because so many were so good. If I had that dilemma, I undoubtedly would have consumed a whole pot of coffee and then, overnight, created a separate online haiku journal to accommodate more poems. Then I would have had a fourth journal to edit / co-edit. It would have forced me to follow my usual pattern of talking some fine person into coming on as a co-editor of the new haiku journal so I could dump the work on them (see: Kaminski, L. & McMunn-Tetangco, E. (2017), Agreeing to Co-Edit Literary Journals: Cautionary Tales. Journal of the International Academy of Literary Ethics, Vol 4 (3), pp. 13-33.)

Our special thanks to Eric for his hard work and sensitive reading for the issue. We hope you enjoy it.

Dale