Category Archives: Poems

Blog, Haiku, NaHaiWriMo, Poems

Something about April

April is not only the cruelest month. It is also National Poetry Month – for some of the world, anyway. Let’s not split hairs. We all want to celebrate poetry, so let’s do it. Poets, writers, publishers, readers, poetry lovers are planning get-togethers for poetry-related events: fests, readings, workshops, write-ins, stay-in-bed for poetry, day-dreaming…this kind of thing.

This is what I will be doing: I’ll be celebrating at ‘Couplets,’ a multi-author blog tour for April, to help promote poetry and poets for National Poetry Month. Co-ordinated by Joanne Merriam of Upper Rubber Boot Books  it is going to be a fe(a)st.  I am taking part and will be posting, besides my daily haiku, poetry-laden posts during the month. Come over to my web home and we’ll eat poetry words together!

Meanwhile, here are a few links to keep us going till then:

The Haiku Foundation: They say: “April 17, National Haiku Poetry Day, is a celebration of the genre of haiku, a kind of poetry whose origins date back a millennium in Japan; and more specifically, of English-language haiku, which has now been written for more than a century”. But you don’t have to wait till the 17th! You can explore this wonderful site, founded by Jim Kacian, and enjoy the best haiku and haiku poets in the world.

While visiting THF, check out their Per Diem: Daily Haiku series. In March they post my selection of haiku of the senses: haiku by some of the best poets highlighting the interconnectedness of sensory experience (Per Diem can be found on the front homepage of the Foundation, at the bottom right-hand corner). In April they post  “Poems from Aotearoa, New Zealand haiku, featuring flora and fauna specific to those favored isles, and human activities, such as Anzac Day (April 25).” Editor: Sandra Simpson.

The Facebook page of National Haiku Poetry Month, or NaHaiWriMo, moderated by Michael Dylan Welch, has been running since February 2011. Although their haiku ‘month’ is February, they ‘haiku’ the whole year round. You can read or indeed “write at least one haiku a day, inspired by daily writing prompts”. The community is friendly and warm, encouraging…join them and surprise yourself! I have!

Poets.org has a page listing events and poetry resources here

Feel free to add/share any other events you may know of.

 

Blog, Blog items Poetry, Poems

Happy World Poetry Day!

Every year on the 21st of March UNESCO  celebrates World Poetry Day. A decision to proclaim 21 March as World Poetry Day was adopted during the UNESCO’s 30th session held in Paris in 1999.

For UNESCO, “the main objective of this action is to support linguistic diversity through poetic expression and to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard within their communities. Moreover, this Day is meant to support poetry, return to the oral tradition of poetry recitals, promote teaching poetry, restore a dialogue between poetry and the other arts such as theatre, dance, music, painting and so on, support small publishers and create an attractive image of poetry in the media so that the art of poetry will no longer be considered an outdated form of art…” Link here

So, Happy World Poetry Day everyone!

Blog, Haiku, News

Shortlisted tanka news

Delighted and honoured that my tanka was shortlisted for the Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Vol 4.

The anthology series founded by tanka poet and editor, M. Kei, announced the short list for the fourth annual volume (2011) in March 2012. The nine editors headed by M. Kei (USA), Patricia Prime (NZ), Magdalena Dale (RO), Amelia Fielden (AUS), Claire Everett (UK), Owen Bullock (NZ), David Terelinck (AUS), Janick Belleau (CAN), and David Rice (USA), embarked on the amazing feat of reading all tanka published in English during 2011 with the goal of selecting the best individual tanka, kyoka, waka, gogyohka, gogyoshi, tanka sequences, tanka prose, and responsive tanka for inclusion in the annual anthology. The team read approximately eighteen thousand poems to choose about three hundred for inclusion in this, the fourth and final volume in the Take Five series. Well done to the editors and to the poets among us who got selected! I for one am thrilled and hugely encouraged!

The announcement can be read here

> Language > Place, Blog, Haiku, Short stories

Other Worlds (haibun)

Other Worlds

I had been walking for hours. Hungry, thirsty, sweat dripping down my face, I was hardly capable of thinking, or imagining, my usual pastimes. Yet, here it was, in front of me, an impossible sight, a mirage. What else could this door-frame be in the middle of fields, in the center of the Peloponnese?

The air around me was hot, suffocating, as if half of the baked earth had floated upwards and was now swimming in it; it resonated thick with the sound of cicadas. The relentless sun had been plaguing me all morning. And it was the sun – more than anything else – that made me sit under that frame; on the thin band of shade it provided.

Resting my head on my knees, I lost consciousness. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came to the frame was casting an elongated shadow.

Getting up, I felt my knees stiffen. I took a closer look. I could now see this ‘thing’ was not really a door frame. It was carved out of a kind of wood I had not seen before, of a tree I’d never encountered in my life.

Puzzled I touched it lightly. It moved! Alarmed, I jumped back. It stopped moving. I started feeling the frame for clues.

At the top right hand corner I traced something protruding, something like a splinter or a thin nail. I pulled gently. A slight breeze brushed my face, as if a door had been opened. I could smell jasmine, lemon and tar all mixed up; I could taste the salt of the Aegean sea! I heard the cries of sea-gulls and the flutter of their wings. A door had really been opened to another world.

doors –
butterflies
on wild thyme

.

A version of this haibun was published in Contemporary Haibun Online, Jan 1, 2012, vol 7 no 4

> Language > Place, Blog, Haiku, NaHaiWriMo

LanguagePlace Blog Carnival

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LanguagePlace Blog Carnival: Call for submissions to edition #14 on the theme of The Senses in LanguagePlace. If you have written a short story, a flash, a poem, a non-fiction piece involving any one of the five senses – or indeed any of the twenty one senses we humans are supposed to possess – this is the time to send in your link(s): see here

You haven’t written such a piece? Looking for inspiration? Visit The Haiku Foundation Home page for the Per Diem: Daily Haiku ; the NaHaiwriMo facebook page; they are sure to tingle your writing!