Carpe Diem Sneak Preview

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

As our first anniversary is coming closer I love to look back at our first year of Carpe Diem and I would like to give you all a sneak preview into our second year of Carpe Diem.

As I started with Carpe Diem a long cherrished wish came true. It started with the deep wish to create a place on the world wide web for haijin to write and share their haiku and I hoped to promote the haiku as an Art with a capital A.
First I tried it with a weekly haiku meme "Tackle It Tuesday" at Chèvrefeuille's haikublog, my base haikublog on blogspot (Google). It wasn't a big success, but it became clear that a daily haiku meme would be an opportunity to share and promote my beloved haiku. In September 2012, I was attending Haiku Heights daily haiku challenge, the website by Leo, the idea to have my own daily haiku meme became a major task

Our first logo

and a deep wish came true as I started Chèvrefeuille's Carpe Diem, a daily haiku meme on October 1st 2012 with the first prompt Waterfall which I posted already on September 21st 2012. This first prompt had six (6) contributors. Four of them are still loyal contributors to Carpe Diem almost a year later. I started to write Carpe Diem Previews to look back on the haiku which were published and I introduced the Carpe Diem Special episodes in which I elected a haiku written by another haiku-poet for inspiration. In October 2012 Basho, whom I see as my master and role-model, was the first featured haiku-master. The months following we had also the other three great haiku-masters and the greatest haiku-poetess, Issa, Buson, Shiki and Chiyo-Ni. They all were introduced and I shared their most beautiful haiku with you all for your inspiration.

With the coming of December, the winter month (at least in my part of the world), I introduced, the classical Japanese kigo (seasonwords) and used them for prompts. To me, and to the contributors, this was really a tough challenge, but it was a joy and a big success. So I decided to use kigo in the months in which the changing of seasons occurs. In January 2013 I introduced a new feature Carpe Diem's Imagination in which a photo, painting or other image was provided for inspiration. It was another success and on a certain regular base I published other episodes of Imagination.
I almost forgot the Carpe Diem Lectures, which I started in November 2012 to share a bit of my knowledge about haiku.
This year, 2013, Carpe Diem evolved and I started several special weeks as we had e.g. in April 2013, The Zodiac days.

In April I had my 25th anniversary as a haiku poet, so that month the Specials were all haiku written by myself. April was a very festive month not at least by becoming 50 yrs of age of your host, but also the month of haibun. I started Carpe Diem's Kamishibai an all new feature in which the goal was to write haibun.

Carpe Diem has evolved to a weblog worth visiting and worth to grow further. I started new features and they were all (and still are) very succesful as there are the Tan Renga Challenge; Freestyle; Little Ones and recently Distillation. And we had wonderful Special haiku by Jane Reichhold. It was really a honor to may use her haiku in July. And last but not least we had the wonderful music by Karunesh and Guy Sweens. Really Carpe Diem has started to become a worldwide respected weblog with honored guests. Of course I hope that Carpe Diem will become a bigger family, a bigger community of haiku poets, but that's all hidden in the future behind the veils of time.

Logo Carpe Diem September 2013

I will lift a little bit of the veil and share a bit of the future of Carpe Diem.
In our first anniversary month we will have all prompts which you all suggested and the Specials are by Garry Gay  a well known modern American haiku poet (and photographer) who created the Rengay, a kind of Renga. I will write a Carpe Diem Lecture soon about this Rengay and I am preparing a kind of new challenging feature around this Rengay.
In December I will prepare another month with Inspirational music as we had in August. I have already found the musician for that month, but I have to contact him for permission. Of course our Carpe Diem features e.g. Tan Renga Challenge and Distillation will be continued on a regular base and I hope to introduce a few new Carpe Diem features.
As we enter 2014 I will have a few special months which I can say nothing about at this moment, but I think that you all will like those special months.

Well ... our second Carpe Diem year looks great and I hope that you all will be part of that new Carpe Diem year.

Namaste

Chèvrefeuille, your host

PS.: If you have suggestions for our prompts ... then please share them in the Prompt Suggestion Section of our weblog.