Rotary Club of Oak Bay Meeting of 15 November 2016 - Dr. Jim Force on his Haiku poetry

Reporter: Brian Lamb

President Lori McLeod chaired the lunch meeting today and Ron Cooley provided our invocation.

Our visitors and guests were introduced by Sabrina Corraini as follows:

1 guest Rotarian, Kris Amudzinski from Prince George, Downtown

1 guest Rotaractor, Nalin Dhillon

5 guests:  Colleen Force and Linda Cook, guests of Jim Force; Sean Dannele, guest of the club; Atam Uppel, guest of Sanjay Uppel; Scott Murghy, guest of Mandy Pui

Announements:

Neil Rawnsley explained how the tax auction, taking place on Nov 22, works. This has also been covered in a couple of emails so I won't repeat again here.

50/50:

Our Master of Fines and Goodwill was Pete Lawrie today and he did his normal great job of making the extraction of fines quite painless and happy.

Guest Speaker:

Sanjay introduced our own Dr. Jim Force to talk about one of his great passions in life, "haiku". Jim first became interested in haiku while teaching in Calgary in the early 1990's.  Since then he has had over 380 works published in over 80 journals, anthologies and books. His work has been published in 10 countries and translated into Chinese, Croatian, German, Japanese and Romanian.  Jim has received several awards for his poetry, most notably the First Place Award in the 1995 Haiku Society of America Renga Contest. The renga, “After the Thunder,” was a 36-verse composition he wrote collaboratively with two other haiku poets.  He is currently a member of the Haiku Arbutus Study Group in Victoria, Haiku Canada, and the Haiku Society of America.

By providing us with examples of haiku poetry, Jim was able to expose us to the form of this style of poetry. Lynne Murray filled in for Tom Croft and thanked Jim for his presentation which helped us get to know him better.