Editor Interview: tinywords

Haiku and micropoetry

Roadrunner, Frogpond, Heron's Nest, Simply Haiku, Failbetter

Basho, Buson, Issa, Shiki, Gary Snyder, Richard Wright, Marlene Mountain, Jane Reichhold, Norbert Blei, Ed Markowski, Mike Farley, Aurora Antonovic, Martin Gottlieb Cohen, An'ya, Deborah Kolodji

tinywords is unique in that it publishes just one tiny poem per day, on the web and via e-mail, SMS and Twitter, making it one of the world's smallest magazines. It is the largest-circulation haiku publication in English, with more than 3,000 subscribers.
In terms of editorial approach, tinywords eschews literary theory in favor of poems that speak directly to immediate, lived experience with simple, elegant, non-stilted language.

Write the best haiku or micropoems you can. Use natural language and avoid stilted, "literary" styles. Don't worry about writing 5-7-5 syllable haiku -- the spirit is more important than the syllable count. Read a lot of haiku. Read books about haiku by William Higginson, Lee Gurga and others.

Short, surprising, beautiful, breathtaking.

1. Submitters often try to submit more than the stated limit, and/or cram multiple poems into a single form. We have a web form for submissions - please use it, and please reload the form for each separate submission.

Cover letters: n/a. We read submissions via a form on our website, which doesn't have room for cover letters or bio. (Besides, we read submissions blind, so we wouldn't see that information anyway). Do list previous publications for the specific poem you're submitting, however.

We read every submission to tinywords at least once (often more times, since there are multiple editors reviewing each submission).

We strongly prefer work that has not been previously published, so all other things being equal, we'll tend to pass over work that's been published before. By "published" I mean "has appeared in a print or online journal" -- appearance on a personal blog or online workshop is no impediment.

Submissions appear, without bylines, on a page where I and the other editors of tinywords can read and vote on them. After the submissions period has closed, we sort all the submissions in order of how many editors' votes they've received. At that point we start discussing which of the top-ranked poems we'd like to publish, and whether there are any outliers (those that didn't receive many votes) that we should consider. Discussion happens via e-mail and usually wraps up fairly quickly. We'll generally accept about the top 10% of submissions: For the past few issues, I've received several hundred submissions for issues that have featured 30-50 poems.