The Trailblazer Contest is an annual search for haikai and tanka poetry that betters their genres by pushing boundaries through the use of innovation, honing, and truth-seeking.
Our Annual Trailblazer Contest offers a new manner of recognition focusing on poems and poets trailblazing — advancing genres in their various forms (including ones perhaps never seen!) for the benefit of all.
We hope that over the years, our Annual Trailblazer Contest will serve as a way to measure not each of us above another poet, but illustrate the ways in which we have grown, morphed, and even re-visited earlier versions of historical landmarks in haikai and tanka history.
We hope you will all join us on this journey. Your participation is key to its success!
Perhaps you are tired of flowers and favor more grit. Perhaps you'd like to see more surreal or contrapuntal elements. Maybe you write the most sublime 5-7-5 haiku. Or perhaps we’ve never even seen what you have up your sleeve because nothing like it has been published. Use your imagination. Send us your beautiful monsters.
Send us the poems that reflect the direction of movement you would like to see in the haiku and tanka worlds. Don’t just send us a haiku or tanka from your pile. Accept this as a challenge to the way you approach your work and take it another step beyond! And challenge us as well!
The key is to be the most exemplary form of yourself, not the handful of people you think have the key to haiku or tanka. No one else can be you!
Submission period: August 1 - 31, 2021
Sections:
In this contest, there will be no delineation between Tanka/Kyoka and Haiku/Senryu in the submissions.
Criteria:
Submissions are free and will be via Google form (accessible to those without Google accounts).
A note about selected poems: There will be no placements — no "bests" in this contest.
Each selected poet will have a brief interview about their process and it will be published with the commentary written by one of our judges. While the list of selected poems will be released all at once after decisions have been made, these commentaries and interviews will be released every few weeks over the course of the year, as a sort of online anthology.
Those with selected poems will receive a digital certificate.
Results out by early 2022.
Sections:
- Tanka/Kyoka
- Haiku/Senryu (This includes multi-ku/woven poems on a single theme but not sequences that link and shift.)
In this contest, there will be no delineation between Tanka/Kyoka and Haiku/Senryu in the submissions.
Criteria:
- Unpublished poems only.
- One poem per person, per section.
- Single author entries.
- Acceptable to submit as jpg or png to maintain special formatting.
Submissions are free and will be via Google form (accessible to those without Google accounts).
A note about selected poems: There will be no placements — no "bests" in this contest.
Each selected poet will have a brief interview about their process and it will be published with the commentary written by one of our judges. While the list of selected poems will be released all at once after decisions have been made, these commentaries and interviews will be released every few weeks over the course of the year, as a sort of online anthology.
Those with selected poems will receive a digital certificate.
Results out by early 2022.
