The Haiku Contest - Ashcan!

Walk to Edo, write haiku along the way, and win the contest to become a haiku master. Just ignore the spirits teasing you along the long road to the capital of Japan. The Haiku Contest is inspired by the short story “The Firefly Beast” by Tony Pi from the fantasy anthology Sword and Sonnet, a short story anthology featuring battle poets (truly, all the stories in that book inspire me). What interested me most about this particular story was how a poem can change someone’s mind, decision, or path in life. Here, you are challenged to write poems in response to what you see, and imagine poetry as a vivid, life-altering encounter between speaker and listener, human and non-human, living and dead.