9th Haiku Competition 2019 of the DHG for Agenda 2020

Agenda 2020 is now available in bookstores or directly from Books on Demand, Norderstedt. Behind us are the tender in spring, the writing and sending in until the beginning of summer, the recording and evaluation and - not self-evident - the layout and publication. We have an appealing agenda ahead of us.

Here are some figures for the submitted texts:

236 texts from 85 authors were submitted for the new agenda. Just over a quarter of the submitters were not DHG members. This time, the three board members Klaus-Dieter Wirth, Horst-Oliver Buchholz and Tony Böhle were on the jury. They rated the texts I had previously anonymized and awarded up to three points for each haiku. The maximum score a haiku could have achieved would have been 9. None of the 236 haiku achieved this score. Three haiku got a remarkable 8 points. In a second round, places 1, 2 and 3 were selected for these three.

So won the first place the haiku of Eleanor Nickolay:

Winter rain -
the crooked fingers
the painter

The second rank reached the haiku of Brigitte ten Brink:

Epiphany
the star singers without
the black king

Third place occupied Gabi Buschman:

left house
into the tap hole of the roof beam
fly wasps.

Seven points were awarded for the haiku of the following authors (in alphabetical order):

Christa Beau, Martin Berner, Claudia Brefeld, Hildegard Dohrendorf, Susanne Effert-Hartmann, Ruth Guggenmos-Walter, Gabriele Hartmann, Claudia Melchior, Martina I. Müller, Dorothea Philipps, Theo Schmich, Brigitte ten Brink and Tobias Tiefensee. Hildegard Dohrendorf, Susanne Effert-Hartmann and Tobias Tiefensee even got two haiku each.

After this rating, Eleonore Nickolay distributed the haiku to be published on the weekly calendar. For the weeks not yet covered, she resorted to haiku from the haiku selection of SOMMERGRAS. In addition, she was responsible for the selection of the other haiku, which were submitted by our DHG members and are arranged as a bonus at the end of the agenda according to the season.   

In the Cover Competition there were 14 entries for evaluation. Here too, the same number of non-DHG members took part. The same jury administered the anonymized images using the same procedure. Anna Würth's photo got the highest score. The picture shows a section of a ginkgo leaf.
Although it is a close-up (or at most an enlargement), the character of the sheet remains clearly visible. The tree is native to southwest China. Coming from Japan by sea, it found its way into Europe's stately gardens in the early 18th century. He soon became an extremely popular, jewel that can be used as a jewel. The Far Eastern exotic origin on the one hand and Goethe's late poem "Gingo biloba" (original first title) on the other hand indicate to this tree a sovereignty with which it is related to haiku in German-speaking countries. The DHG agenda of 2020 is dressed in a classic guise.

The DHG Executive Board congratulates those who have been placed on their success and wishes all Haiku friends a lot of joy in their creative work with the shortest poem form in the world.