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Friday
evening registered guests and speakers gathered at Millikin
University for a banquet and were treated to a vocal jazz
performance including the famous Sesame Street song, "Rubber
Ducky."
 Being
haiku poets, many rubber ducky senryu were immediately generated
from this otherwise dry event. The next night at the open
microphone reading, we heard a medley of rubber ducky senryu
read by Penny Harter and Peter Mortimer with a quacking
accompaniment by Professor Del Doughty.
At the
Saturday evening banquet, Peter Mortimer, publisher of Iron
Press, shared his perspectives on publishing haiku books
in the United Kingdom. He is the publisher of Global
Haiku: 25 Poets World-wide which was celebrated
with a reading that shared the work from seven of the 25
poets in the anthology.
The
poets represented in the reading included David Cobb, Lee
Gurga, Penny Harter, Peggy Lyles, Bill Pauly (who also read
work by Raymond Roseliep), and Michael Dylan Welch.
Also
Saturday evening we had an open-microphone haiku reading
with several Millikin students and members of the public
attending, followed by our late-night presentation and reading
of haiku by Jack Kerouac by Professor Bertrand Agostini
entitled, "In the Heart of Zen, in the Heart of the
World: Jack Kerouac and Haiku."
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Peter Mortimer, Publisher
Iron Press, England |