I am pleased to announce that the World Haiku Club has been invited to give a high-profile haiku workshop as part of the County of Cumbria festival, England. The haiku workshop will be held in Cockermouth as an important event of the World Haiku Festival to be presented for the Japan Fortnight which the County of Cumbria is organising. The date is set for Friday 6 July 2001 and it will be an evening event, provisionally 6-8 p.m.

Cockermouth is William Wordsworth's birthplace and a gateway to the Lake District. WHC is honoured to be invited to give the workshop at the Wordsworth House which is the very house, now a museum, where the great poet was born. Being a nature poet, Wordsworth is revered and loved in Japan as anywhere else in the world, and his poems and poetics are discussed among haiku poets in Japan. The Wordsworth House is reserved only for special occasions. For example, after WHC's presentation, the British Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, is giving his talk there in the same month.

If members have a plan to visit England, you might be interested in combining it with a journey to Cockermouth. If enough people are coming, we can organise an informal ginko and kukai in the Lake the following day. Wouldn't it be nice if we can have a WHC members' meeting in the Lake District?

Kengin,

Susumu
14/03/01