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Thursday 1 December 2022

Haiku Canada Archives//Dr. Eric Amann, godfather of Canadian haiku

 
I've resumed fishing through old boxes, drawers, and shelves to finally start donating again to the Haiku Canada Archives now that they've found an official home with the Univ. of Victoria library. It's part of my ongoing project to declutter my small house and to get "important" materials into various archives. Having the cancer operation has reinforced my goal to get as much of this stuff into good homes while I'm still above ground. I don't know anyone locally who'd know how to do this once I'm gone, and rare items would likely end up in the recycling bin or worse, the local landfill.  

part of email from Vicki McCullough, a member of the Haiku Canada archives committee and current archivist on the Haiku Canada executive:  


Thank you for adding the Cafe Haiku link and that chunk of your story and haiku history. So glad to see your mention of Eric Amann in there -- and the note in your email that Eric Amann has an autobiography that you'll send anon. He didn't hang around on the haiku scene as George Swede has, so I've wondered what we might pull in about him. Other than, well, I have a fat file of correspondence between Eric and Anna Vakar and a few other slimmer files to do with the brief period  Anna was an editorial consultant on Cicada. Now that I've received all I'm going to get from Anna's estate and have done some browsing through the last arrivals, I've decided to start by identifying what is unquestionably most eligible for the Haiku Canada Collection at UVic Library Special Collections -- and that would be these aforementioned files. Then I'll ripple out from there, assessing significance until it's (hopefully) clear what is not eligible to be sent: that is, what does not meaningfully fit the haiku-and-related-forms mandate. I'm imagining a grey area where I'm not sure and will seek guidance from the UVic librarians.

 part of my reply to Vicki about Eric Amann:

IMHO Eric Amann was one of the most important English language haijin to date. His 1960s mag Haiku literally changed the form and to a degree the content of modern English haiku. The other mags of that period, and I subscribed to and was published in most, if not all of them, were strictly 5-7-5 in form and limited in content. The "rules" of haiku back then were strict - haiku were to be about nature, not people, although gradually haijin became aware of senryu, and over many decades the distinction seems to have blurred.

Eric critiqued my early attempts at haiku in his preferred non 5-7-5 form, and after some practising he began publishing my haiku as exemplars of non 5-7-5. The other small haiku mags of that period followed Eric's lead with Haiku as I recall. I was pleased and very surprised when I recently found one of my first acceptance notes from Eric on a torn piece of paper!

The "thread in haiku" piece skims over my personal history, and explains how for several years I was still occasionally writing, and even managing to publish two small chapbooks of haiku (I'd never heard of chapbooks in 1969, I just wanted a collection of my haiku gathered in one place.) After living in the Eel Pie Island commune and living on the streets and traveling in Europe, I returned to Canada in 1972. It was a pleasant surprise to be invited to what I consider to be the founding meeting of what became Haiku Canada at Eric's apartment in east end Toronto circa 1976 or 77. I believe I've posted a description of that meeting somewhere on my blog, and if I find it I'll forward it to you.

 

Book, Old, Pile, Stack, Bookshelf

 

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