After 99 issues Haiku a Day has ended — I wanted to go out strong, and 99 seemed like a good place to stop. In honor of the 99 issues, I created a best-of collection called Haiku a Day - Opus and am also releasing all the raw material used to create HaD in its entirety under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
This zine contains my favorite haiku for each month of publication, as well as some background stories on the creation of Haiku a Day. Only ninety-nine copies were produced, each of them hand-numbered. Numbers 1 and 99 are in my archives, the rest are being released, and when they're gone, they're gone. It will never be released again in print, nor will it be released electronically. To get a copy, get $5 to me somehow via my address listed below.
The complete archives of Haiku a Day, including the raw material I used to create the zines, are being released here. You can find it as:
In June of 2005 I was at a conference in Pittsburgh and used the opportunity to visit one of the best bookstores in the world (Copacetic Comics). There I picked up a copy of the first of Snakepit anthology, a collection of the daily comics Ben Snakepit decided to start drawing several years ago.
Reading it late at night, I had the idea to do something similar: write a haiku a day, collect them up at the end of the month, and send them to friends. My friends and I have a penchant for communicating in haiku --- there are times when we'll just send them back and forth on our mailing list for a day. And while I don't mean for it to be a diary (like Ben's comic is), what you have in your hands sometimes reflects what was happening that day, or what I happened to be thinking about.
Note to purists: while the Japanese poem form known as the Haiku has more behind it than the 5/7/5 syllable form, that's all I'm using it for. I like the restriction of trying to communicate an idea in only seventeen syllables.
Feel free to print yourself out a copy. If you'd like to receive one by mail, send me something. It could be anything: something you've made, a postcard, a letter, an interesting clipping, a doodle you made on a napkin, whatever.
Thomas L. Kula
P.O. Box 250138
New York NY 10025
The haikus for a particular month are sent out near the beginning of the following month, and appear online here a month after that. Or so.