Haiku Acceptance Speeches!
Thanks to everyone who voted! Ironically, there's still no acceptance speech from the presidential candidate for whom these Haikus were intended, and we were a lot faster than the other guys in counting the votes for your poems, but here is the winner and the runners-up. The deadline for voting was at 12:00 p.m. ET, November 9, 2000. Thank you to everyone who took the time to participate. There were a lot of excellent entries and you can check them out here.
Listen to host Lisa Simeone talk to Ruth Albrecht of Eugene, Oregon. Her short poem won the NPR Online Presidential Acceptance Speech Haiku contest. Her poem and those of our finalists are on our web site at www.npr.org (2:30)
The Winner!
Golden leaves flying
Winds wafting from coming snow -
Yes, I promised, but --
-- R.E. Albrecht, Eugene, Oregon -- 333 votes
Runners-Up
Yes! There is a God!
"Hail to the Chief" is mine now.
I must kiss my wife.
-- Rachel Hill, Washington, DC -- 305 votes
The pencil strokes fall
And I land on your raised grasp --
Freedom has spoken.
-- Jan Wills, Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- 166 votes
Cricket on bamboo
Candidate on stump no more
We continue -- zzzzzzz
-- Tom Burke, Columbia, South Carolina -- 129 votes
Must roll up our sleeves,
we have a new beginning.
(Oh, I won! I won!)
-- Diane M. Manuel, Orchard Park, New York -- 105 votes
NPR Reference Librarian Alphonse Vinh read through hundreds of entries and winnowed the best down to the five listed above.
Alphonse Vinh, NPR Reference Librarian
Alphonse was educated at Yale, the University of Michigan, Boston University, and Simmons College. His undergraduate studies were in Greco-Roman civilisation and literature. He has done graduate work in theology and has a master’s degree in library science.
He has published reviews, essays, poetry translations and poems in various magazines including Choice, South Carolina Review, Crisis, New Oxford Review, Southern Cultures Magazine, Southern Quarterly Review, The Stoic Forum and Zirkus. His first book, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: the Collected Letters, 1933-1976, was published to good reviews in 1998 by the University of Missouri Press.
The victor won one of our cool fleece vests (estimated retail value $68) with the NPR logo!
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