Your Thoughts on Brussels Sprout

Whether you were a contributor or reader in the days when Brussels Sprout was originally published (from 1988 to 1995, under the editorship of Francine Porad), or if you’ve more recently discovered or explored this journal, what are your thoughts? What does Brussels Sprout mean to you, or do you have a story to share about the journal or its editor? To contribute your thoughts, please email Michael Dylan Welch at WelchM@aol.com. Also included here are related notes and selected links.

Your Thoughts

I appreciate the opportunity to get acquainted with such a fine journal from before my era of haiku writing. I will browse the archive further. I like the illustrations I’ve seen so far, too.

—Sheila Sondik

Fun to dive into this 30-year-old time capsule.

—David Berger

I find these “older” styles of writing more engaging than some of the more recent “avant-garde” haiku where the juxtaposition is far from the sensibility of what seems to be the original inspiration.

—Kim Weers

Brussels Sprout is where I started my haiku journey with an initial submission in early autumn of 1992. Francine Porad was the editor. What little I knew about haiku at the time was gleaned from examples I saw in The Poet’s Market, which in those days included samples of work published in various journals. Francine did not accept anything from that first submission, but she did tell me what was right about my offerings (simple, effective language, vivid images) and what was wrong from a haiku perspective (telling more than showing, a lack of juxtapositions). I benefitted from her guidance and turned around another submission, from which my first published haiku came to appear in the first Brussels Sprout of 1993.

blanket of snow

   hides its shadow

      brilliantly

As it happens, Francine was also the first haiku poet that I met in person. She was serving as president of the Haiku Society of America when I attended my first meeting, in the autumn of 1993. Both of us, coming to New York from out of town, happened to be the first to arrive at the meeting site on the campus of Columbia University. I think we immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits. To this day, I try to emulate Francine in my work as a haiku editor.

—John Stevenson

These pages are most enlightening for folks who had never been exposed to Brussels Sprout. I particularly loved the Editors’ Choice Awards.

—Bill Fay

Notes

• A complete set of Brussels Sprout has been archived in special collections at the University of Washington library in Seattle, along with other Haiku Northwest materials. Many issues of the journal are also available at the University of Wisconsin Madison library.

• In “The Brussels Sprout Haiku of John J. Dunphy,” Dunphy says “Brussels Sprout was a haiku magazine back in the day—and a damn fine magazine at that. It ranked alongside Modern Haiku and Frogpond as one of the United States’ most respected haiku journals.”

• Michael Dylan Welch collects 38 individual haiku and senryu, one renku, and one sequence in “My Poems in Brussels Sprout.”