Here's one of our periodic catch-ups on news and comment – normal service will be resumed tomorrow...

* You say haikai
With the traditional boundaries and definitions of haiku, senryu, tanka, tanka prose, haibun and even prose poetry starting to blur – well OK, there are still pedants out there lecturing on the sanctity of 5-7-5 – we're adopting the term haikai as a portmanteau term for all Japanese short form poetry. And as for the ongoing 'is a poem or is it prose' debate, we're grateful to IS&T contributor Larry Kimmel for this comment... "I've no problem with the designation prose poem."  There are poems were lineation helps the poem, or, perhaps, helps the reader in seeing the structure of the poem, but sometimes, I believe, it is something of a toss-up between the prose format or the lined format.  Also, sometimes hard to say if something is prose or poem.  If I recall correctly, Borges, in an intro to one of his poetry collections, says that he sees little difference between prose and poems and hopes his readers will except the prose portions of the book as poems."

* Twittering haiku
Talking of haiku, we'd like to remind readers that a couple of IS&T contributors – Alexis Rotella and Rachel Green – now regularly publish new haiku on Twitter. Could can find them at, respectively, @mamasanta and @leatherdykeuk