[Return to Haiku Entry Page] [Ray Rasmussen's Homepage] About this Haiku Web Site I began my interest in haiku poetry when I photographed the Kurimoto Japanese Garden in Edmonton, Canada. I created a web site with my photographs and then began to seek Asian poetry to accompany the images. There I discovered the 'haiku' ... a sparse, but complex form or poetry passed on to us from Japanese masters like Basho and Issa from hundreds of years ago, but Westernized in the last century by English language writers. Haiku poems resemble photography in that landscape photographers simplify and illustrate nature with their visual images. I made contact with some members of the World Haiku Club, notably, Debi Bender, and have been writing haiku, creating modern digital haiga, and writing haibun type essays ever since. The web sites below illustrate my journey with these forms of expression.On many of the links, the journey is shared with other artists/poets. In presenting this information, I do not mean to set myself up as a master of the haiku form ... I simply enjoy the practice of writing haiku and its related forms of expression and enjoy in particular designing web sites that integrate haiku, photography, and digital art. ~ Ray Rasmussen |