Haiku conference begins

Acclaimed poets from around the country will be in Hot Springs today and Saturday for the 23rd annual Autumn Haiku Conference, with workshops and live haiku poetry readings at the Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa, 239 Central Ave.

Howard Lee Kilby, president of the Arkansas Haiku Society, said the guestlist for this year’s conference includes “some very outstanding haiku poets,” including the featured poets, Lee Gurga and Stanford M. Forrester.

Gurga is the former president of the Haiku Society of America and former editor of Modern Haiku magazine, who is now editor of Modern Haiku Press. A news release said he recently “placed in the second category, out of a pool of more than 28,000 poems, in the international Ito-En Tea Contest.”

Other guests will include Kelly

Sauvage Angel, Robert Epstein, Tom Murphy and Terri French. The poets are flying in from all over the country, Kilby said, noting Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, Texas and Wisconsin are all represented at the conference.

Kilby said these guests “are like celebrities” in haiku.

Explaining haiku, Kilby said it is “a 17th-century Japanese form of poetry” that is “concerned about this very moment. Not 6,000 years ago or the future.

This moment.” He also described the “very popular idea of Japanese culture” of “ichi-go ichi-e,” which he defined as “this very moment, never been here before.”

In addition to performances, the conference will also feature multiple workshops that Kilby said can be attended by newcomers with no knowledge of haiku.

Those who attend the workshops, he said, could come away with “a new form of creativity.”

Kilby said he first learned about haiku in the early 1990s. In 1993, he joined the Haiku Society of America, which he called “one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”

“It’s a very peaceful kind of (use) of the mind, much like yoga,” he said.

All events at the conference are free and open to the public. Kilby said he once trained in yoga with an instructor who didn’t charge for the classes. This, he said, inspired him to keep the conference free to attend.

“Let people enjoy things without charging,” Kilby said.