Edition 4 of Catchment: Poetry of Place was released in June 2025. The online journal publishes tanka and longer forms of poetry relating to locations within Australia and elsewhere. Edition 4 included a poem of mine about Central Park in New York City. Central Park needs no introduction, having featured in countless movies including Breakfast… Read More Central Park, New York City
The organisers of the Trailblazer Contest have challenged writers to use haiku, or tanka, in new and unusual ways. They’ve challenged writers to incorporate the essence of these Japanese forms into contemporary poetry that is fresh and innovative. You can visit the Trailblazer Contest website here. I was fortunate to have one of my haiku… Read More Haiku Trailblazer Contest
In 2022, Liquid Amber Press conducted a poetry competition which asked entrants to respond to a number of prompts relating to the theme of ‘encounter’. The long-listed poems were subsequently published in Poetry of Encounter: The Liquid Amber Prize Anthology, edited by Anne M. Carson and Rose Lucas. First Prize was awarded to Reneé Pettitt-Shipp… Read More Liquid Amber Poetry Prize 2022
Dick Pettit, from Denmark, contacted me last year asking whether I would like to collaborate with him in writing a haiku shuffle. We subsequently wrote a poem titled Harbour Beacon which was published earlier this year in the New Zealand journal, Kokako, #34. As you can see in my previous posts about the haiku shuffle… Read More Harbour Beacon
There’s been some interest in the poems I’ve published using the haiku shuffle format, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to explain my thinking about this format a little more clearly. I’ve written on this topic in two previous posts (see links below). The first of these explained how the idea grew out of… Read More How To Haiku Shuffle
The widely-read New Zealand journal, Kokako, publishes haiku, tanka, haibun and related forms. As usual, the most recent issue (#32) includes writing from New Zealand and around the world. This issue of Kokako includes a poem of mine titled, Night Sky, which is written in the form of a haiku shuffle. In an earlier post,… Read More Kokako #32: Night Sky
In late 2017, the Canberra-based Haiku @ The Oaks writing group was discussing various ways to present haiku in a live situation. Inspired by the ideas from this meeting, I applied a variation of these thoughts to writing a haiku style poem – a form I now like to call the haiku shuffle. Back in 2017,… Read More The Haiku Shuffle
Gregory Piko 