milky way

What exactly is “postku?” There are many strains of haiku in English that have diverged from the genre enough to warrant questioning the validity of continuing to use the name “haiku,” or even the more loosely defined “ku,” both in terms of facing questions of authenticity to the Japanese original, and in terms of the creative constraints inherent to genre expectation within the English language traditions. And yet, these poems still bear unmistakable traces of the haiku lineage via their keen perception, striking use of imagery, disjunction, white space, haikai humor, and linguistic play. 

In postku, we are tracing the contours and potential trajectories that the short poem may follow as it moves beyond the haiku and blazes a new path forward. This section is dedicated to taking the essential DNA of the haiku lineage and extrapolating into the future, finding poetry that is from the haiku, but beyond what we may allow ourselves to truly call "haiku" in any conventional sense. 

Experimental short forms that expand from haiku ideas, micropoetry with a haiku flavor, this is a place for short poems that have wandered so deep into the forest they have become a wild, unrecognizable thing, from multifaceted single lines to atomistic poems stripped of all unessential elements and distilled to the rawest forms: micro-poetry, poem-words, and deconstructions. 

In postku, there is a tendency to break language down to the building blocks—approaching the range limit of brevity— an impulse to splice imagery and concept, to architecturally reconfigure language in order to find new forms of meaning and explore poetry as psyche. Interiority, micro-narrative, word-play, fresh language, striking juxtapositions, and newly minted visions give postku a scintillating energy and freshness with echoes of the timeless depth of the haiku.   

Clayton Beach
Editor, Postku 

Please submit up to 10 postku in the body of an email to the editor with "UtB Submission - Postku" for the email subject.  
claytonbeachpoetry[at]gmail[dot]com