COMMENTS ON THE HERON'S NEST

For me The Heron's Nest comes out tops for two very important reasons: the courtesy of their e-mail response makes it such that even a rejection can make your day. Secondly, there is a personalized or individualized response to a submission; very often one of the editors or members of the reading panel will make a suggestion or two, couched diplomatically, which suggests a patient and sensitive reading of the work submitted. Now, if only all those journals could come together to produce an annual, featuring the best of their published work during the year!

Unusual in that it is published monthly, this on-line journal is available in a hardcopy newsletter format. Haiku quality is high, and the editors' detailed comments on one haiku selected in each issue is a sought-after bonus.

Editors extremely responsive and generous. Handsome Website, but paper version is far less attractive. IMHO, the haiku are becoming more and more formulaic (i.e., dull) -- which is a disappointment.

Always dependable -- responses are prompt and issues come out when promised. (Monthly! Quite a feat!) No allowance for anything other than three-liners. No senryu.

High quality haiku, small focused format, comes often and on time, just one special feature.

The emphasis here is on nature rather than human beings.

I know it's available on-line. I just can't make it past the Valentine's Day contest. How about one for Hallmark?

I find The Heron's Nest to be one of the top journals I read. The haiku are generally of high quality, though I wonder if things are getting a bit formulaic recently. What I don't care for is the lengthy commentary on the Editor's Choice. Often I wonder what the commentary has to do with the haiku. Perhaps this is the nature of anyone's commentary on the haiku of someone else. Many of the commentaries in Makoto Ueda's Basho and His Interpreters more than illustrate my point.

Christopher's Heron's Nest carries an excellent quality of haiku, but it's a type I do not care for very much (i.e., haiku moment, nature sketch).

Heron's Nest started out strong -- but has wobbled a bit. Nonetheless, it's certainly better than most of what is on the Web.

Doctrinaire, but the editor explains the ezine's policy satisfactorily.

The Heron's Nest is rising star, with a reliable level of quality. The commentary sometimes opens the chosen poem to me in ways I hadn't always seen, but mostly I find the commentary to be overdone. The poems selected are sometimes odd, and I find the monthly appearance of the journal to be too frequent -- each journal loses its specialness, say, compared to Acorn or Mayfly.

I really like that there is an "editor's choice" with each issue and I like the commentary. That is a wonderful thing to include in any haiku magazine. I do feel however that, as a publication, The Heron's Nest is not publishing haiku of the same quality as the other publications. Their editorial focus is too narrow and that is reflected in their end product. They have lots of visually pretty haiku but, more often than not, there's not much "sense of heightened awareness" in most of them. I've stopped sending work there and know of people who have stopped their (print) subscriptions to the magazine for pretty much the same reason.

A very fine newcomer, and challenging Acorn.

I hate on-line journals.