Invitation
The Living Senryu Anthology editorial team welcomes submissions of five (5) to twenty-five (25) published and/or unpublished senryu for inclusion in this online anthology. Senryu accepted by the editors will be published within a portfolio of senryu under the author's name. Poets may make as many subsequent submissions as they see fit to build up a body of work within their portfolio of work held within the anthology.
There is no upper restriction on the number of senryu that may be included in a poet's portfolio.
Previously published contributions must cite the published venue, link to online presence (if any), and the date of first publication.
Acceptance of contributions, including previously published senryu, is not automatic. The individual merit of each submitted senryu will be considered by members of the anthology's editorial team before acceptance and publication within the Living Senryu Anthology.
Unless otherwise stated, all content within the Living Senryu Anthology will be covered under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 licensing by default. Our reason for doing this and what it means for authors is explained more fully below.
How to Submit
All submissions of senryu for possible inclusion in the Living Senryu Anthology can be made only via an email message to the editor at
Besides the senryu that you wish to submit for inclusion in the anthology, please supply the following:
- Clear citations for previously published poems in the following order: name of publication, issue number (for journals), place (for contests), month/season and year of publication, URL of original publication or, in the case of print, where copies may be obtained.
- Name by which you wish to be listed in the anthology.
- The year and place of your birth.
- Your current place of residence.
- A brief biographical statement. (Maximum of 50 words)
- A 200px (width) portrait photograph or image of yourself.
- Your email address.
- The URL of your personal blog or website (if any).
- Acknowledgement that your work submitted for inclusion within the Living Senryu Anthology will be covered under the anthology's default Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 licensing model.
N.B. If you do not wish for your work to be protected within the terms of this licensing model, please indicate clearly that you wish to have your work covered by standard international copyright laws instead. Your portfolio will be noted accordingly.
A link to a mail form from each poet's portfolio may be included so that anyone, who may wish to contact the poet (or the poet's executor), may do so without LSA disclosing the poet's email address to any other person or spambot.
Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 Licensing
It is anticipated that the Living Senryu Anthology will become the largest international senryu archive worldwide and a major resource for researchers and readers over many years to come.
As an international archive containing your intellectual property, we are very conscious of the minefield of international copyright laws particularly as they pertain to short-form poems. “Fair use” as interpreted in the U.S. may not apply in the same manner in Nigeria or Serbia for instance and its appropriateness in application to something as minimal as a senryu is questionable and untested in the courts (as yet).
The Living Senryu Anthology has implemented a clear, expansive, and culturally beneficial policy for protecting author rights. As well, we would like to implement a policy granting limited permission for the non-commercial reuse of authors’ works contained within the site – this will primarily aid haiku scholars, researchers, students, teachers, and critics, allowing them to quote works in their own texts. Secondarily, we will have in place an author copyright license which is designed for worldwide use and not subject to the vagaries of regional copyright laws.
When a work's copyright term ends, the work passes into the public domain, although the duration for which copyright applies varies from country to country due to the number of years that copyright continues to apply after the author’s death.
For these reasons, we have adopted a Creative Commons 4.0 international licensing model (details below) for content archived within the Living Senryu Anthology, and invite you to examine the main points of this license to see what it allows and does not allow, in terms of reuse permission.
Among the reasons for reaching this decision is the fact that we do not wish to become directly involved in handling permission requests from scholars or teachers. To contact the author in confidence, assuming that the author’s contact details have not changed, or trying to track down executors in the event of an author’s death, and then relaying back each permission is a time-consuming and complex process. We simply do not have the staff (all volunteer) or time to handle these requests. Our collective experience has been that 100% of such requests for reuse are answered in the affirmative.
Another reason concerns quoting senryu in an educational context. We would like to encourage teachers to expose students to senryu, and these days many institutions (universities) have policies in place disallowing teachers from distributing any text to students in a class, without permission. This situation has come about in part because of for-profit textbook corporations suing teachers, students and universities (points made in the book Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig, 2004). Therefore, without permission, teachers are now forced to compel students to purchase what are too often very expensive and not very creative corporate textbooks. Needless to say, there are no contemporary senryu to be found in them. The Creative Commons license gives permission to teachers to reuse your work in non-commercial environments, including the classroom. We feel strongly that this is good for the senryu community, and good for the next generation—that is, a social good. We hope you agree.
For a good overview of Creative Commons licensing, we recommend this five-minute video from New Zealand: Creative Commons & Copyright Info
The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license is the most restrictive of the Creative Commons licenses. All of your haiku works (and prose materials, if housed here and subject to your agreement with this licensing model) will follow these terms, for anyone wishing to share or “reuse” your works:
Under a CC4.0 CC BY-NC-ND License:
Anyone who is not the author of the work to be reused, is free to share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format -- *only* so long as the following restrictions are adhered to (the author cannot revoke these freedoms):
- Attribution — The user must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. This may done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses the user or the use made.
- NonCommercial — The user may not use the material for commercial purposes.
- NoDerivatives — If the user remixes, transforms, or builds upon the original material, the user may not distribute the modified material.
For you (the author) anyone using your work in any way does so under the following license terms:
- Attribution — The user must include your full name, the source of their quotation, and cite the publication information for each and any senryu you have provided us (the Living Senryu Anthology).
- NonCommercial — no one can use your haiku in a “primarily for-profit” senryu or poetry anthology, unless they contact you and obtain your permission first. No one can use your senryu for advertising or branding.
A teacher can use your senryu, with proper credit given to you (including citation of the source of publication), in an educational sourcebook or textbook, only if that book is not “primarily intended for commercial advantage or monetary compensation.” This means that a large textbook company such as Longman, Pearson, Oxford, etc., cannot reuse your senryu in their textbook (these textbook companies create books primarily for profit). On the other hand, a small press, non-profit press, or educational press, whose primary purpose is educational not “for commercial advantage or monetary compensation,” will be allowed permission to reuse your work, with proper citation.
For more detailed information on the definition of “non-commercial” please visit these pages:
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Defining_Noncommercial and
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/defining-noncommercial/Defining_Noncommercial_fullreport.pdf - NoDerivatives — Your senryu works cannot be altered, or added to, or in any way changed, when they are quoted.
As a collection of senryu by poets, both living and deceased, from so many nations, the Living Senryu Anthology has a preference for Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licensing. We feel it provides a good balance of author protection, and cultural freedom, allowing your works to be studied in school, discussed by scholars and critics and in general provide for the continued visibility of senryu as a worldwide art.