Haiku from Space!: Great Sources for SciFaiku

It's no secret that I'm very interested in the development of haiku as a genre. So it came as a surprise when I discovered, thanks to folks over at Self-Published Sci Fi, a whole branch of the genre that I'd never heard of before.

SciFaiku, a portmanteau word for Science Fiction haiku, is a genre that has its origins in a document known as The SciFaiku Manifesto, published in 1995 by Tom Brinck. The manifesto outlines that SciFaiku should adhere to the tradition rules of the Japanese poems, with one notable exception: their theme should be expanded from the natural world to the speculative and exciting world of Science Fiction.

At first, Sci-Fi and haiku may seem like a bit of an odd couple, but in practice it's a match made in heaven. The same sense of wonder that attends a great haiku exists in good science fiction. Here's a good example straight out of the manifesto:

Asteroids collide
without a sound...
We maneuver between fragments.

Since SciFaiku and the internet developed at roughly the same time, many of the best sources for this kind of poetry can be found online. Brinck's own website remains one of the best places to get examples of the genre as well as a more in-depth understanding of it. At the University of Michigan, Dan Horn has compiled an impressive database of SciFaiku reviews. Teri Santitoro and J. Alan Erwine over at Sam's Dot Publishing put out an amazing print and online magazine called SciFaikuest which covers the best new poems in the form, as well as similarly-themed tanka and haibun. And as always, Wikipedia provides a nice round-up of other sources for Scifaiku.

As someone completely new to this genre, I'm already becoming immersed in the available online material about SciFaiku. Hopefully, you too will allow this genre to open you up to new possibilities for haiku, and for poetry in general.