Robert Epstein describes a signature poem as “a unique and authentic expression of one’s haiku spirit or sensibility,” a poem by which the poet would wish to be remembered.
Now Gregory Pico, noting in one of his posts that “Some writers selected their most awarded and anthologized poem, while others chose a poem that best captured their poetic style, or portrayed a place or event of deep personal importance,” selected a few of these poems to feature on his website. Mine was included! Thank you so much, Gregory Pico!
Happy to see my haiku “hard frost” included in the “Sample haiku & senryu of Modern Haiku,” 51.1 Winter – Spring 2020! . hard frost the hunter walks beside the blood trail .
I am very pleased to see my haibun diptych ‘Intertextuality,’ originally published in Sonic Boom 4, included in this Anthology! Grateful to editor Shloka Shankar!
Sonic Boom writes:
We are delighted to announce the publication of our second anthology, ‘What I Hear When Not Listening: Best of The Poetry Shack & Fiction, Vol. I.’
Featuring work by 41 contributors to our journal between the years 2014 and 2019, this collection brings together the best pieces that were published under The Poetry Shack and Fiction sections of the journal from issues one through fifteen.
Happy International Haiku Poetry Day 2020! And what a day it was! The Haiku Foundation announced the Touchstone Awards, hosted HaikuLife, the haiku Film Festival, and administered the collaborative poem “EarthRise” on the theme “Nurse.” And everyone had fun!
I contributed a video haibun, “Noir,” to HaikuLife as well as five poems..
My haibun triptych “Noir,” published in MacQueen’s Quinterly, made into Video haibun “Noir,” in collaboration with Rob Ward, was presented as part of HaikuLife on IHPD! Many thanks to Rob Ward, after-effects artist and animator, for bringing the stills to life, and Alex Menzies for permission to use his haunting piece Gretchen from his composition Faust for this video.
Great news about the project arranged by Alan Summers, Karen Hoy, and Bertel Martin in collaboration with the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Haiku sent by a number of haiku poets (one of mine included), were matched with Japanese block prints and are now displayed on the Museum website. A big thank you to Alan and Karen, and congratulations to all poets who took part.
From the Museum website:
In autumn 2019, poets from around the world responded to a call for haiku, a form of short Japanese poetry, based on Japanese prints in the collection at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. People sent in more than 800 beautiful, thought-provoking poems from thirty countries worldwide. See the selection below.
Many poems were inspired by woodblock prints in our popular 2018-2019 exhibition series, Masters of Japanese Prints.
The project was arranged by haiku poets Alan Summers and Karen Hoy of creative writing consultancy Call of the Page. The call for poems was linked with a haiku workshop delivered at the museum with writer and producer Bertel Martin of City Chameleon.
Huge thanks to Alan, Karen and Bertel as well as to all the poets who took part. You are bringing the world together through poetry.
Issue 2 of MacQueen’s Quinterly is out and I am delighted to have a haibun triptych included! Many thanks to editor Clare MacQueen! Read “Noir” here and below:
Noir [A Triptych]
Snow white
A small room, white walls, white lino floor. Sheets like snow. Her deep breathing. Hair the color of frost. Beads of sweat on her forehead, in the folds of her neck. She is dreaming.
crow’s call a night unlike any other
and her life
A small room. Unmade bed, a chair toppled over. Two plastic cups on the floor. Walls of indistinct colour. The Book of Sand open at the foot of the bed.
no one here lives like a princess— mushy peas for tea
as it might have been
A room 5’x5′. No curtains. Aretha Franklin’s “I say a Little Prayer” from the room next door. Birds. On the pavement outside her window, fag ends and chewing gum.
diaphanous— lives of others in frequencies I can hear
Happy to see the article I co-authored “Reading English-language haiku: An eye-movement study of the ‘cut effect’” is now available in JEMR (Journal of Eye Movement Research).
The current study, set within the larger enterprise of Neuro-Cognitive Poetics, was designed to examine how readers deal with the ‘cut’ – a more or less sharp semantic-conceptual break – in normative, three-line English-language haiku poems (ELH)…
Capturing a scientific symposium in a haiku sequence! Remember the #haiku sequence on the Ammerseeconference I wrote in 2018? It was included with the conference proceedings in a special edition of Visual Cognition, Vol. 27, issues 5-8, May/September Routledge, 2019 – (scroll to p.2 of the editorial). Why have a volume of papers when you can describe the whole thing in a few haiku?
Honored and thrilled beyond measure to have the opportunity to describe my journey from “Hairballs to Haiga” in a “craft essay,” with four of my felting haiga “haikufeltings” in the debut issue of the Journal MacQueen’s Quinterly, MacQ for short (see URLs below). Grateful to Clare MacQueen for highlighting haikufeltings in her introduction to the issue, giving this hybrid work a home among such a superb collection of writings. Check it out! And Happy New Year! Essay Felting haiga Introduction to the issue (scroll down)
Great news! JuxtaFive is ready and available to read online! This edition of the Haiku Foundation Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship includes several articles, reviews, haiga and a special section on Women Mentoring Women (and the article Knocking on the Doors of Perception on Haiku and the Brain contributed by me and co-authors: Thomas Geyer, Franziska Guenther, Jim Kacian, Heinrich Liesefeld, and Hermann J. Mueller). Here
clinging to the surface of things ... melting snow
Haiku in HSA Members' Anthology 2019. Photo of installation by the British artist Cathy Wilkes commissioned to create the British Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2019. haiga
Honoured to have my haibun “Homewards” included in “White Blossoms” [An e-Collection of Photographs and Words] by Susan Tekulve in KYSO Flash 12! {scroll down the page to “Magnolia blossoms and red clay”}
“White Blossoms:” “In addition to photographs and lyrical prose by essayist and novelist Susan Tekulve, this collection contains prosimetra by authors such as Rick Mulkey, Stella Pierides, Brenda Sutton Rose, and Carl Sandburg, among others.”
Heaving streets, bulging with holiday shoppers. Shop windows in garish colours blink their version of hell. As soon as I get the present I came for, I head for home.
Running for the bus, I bump into someone, or he bumps into me. The double-decker reeks of wet clothes. A young woman, clutching her baby close to her chest, is arguing with the bus driver who refuses to let her on without a ticket.
We stay put for a good thirty minutes, until a passenger, with a shaking hand, taps his debit card on the card reader and pays the fare for her.
the baby babbles . . . raindrops on the bus window
and without props
It hasn’t rained for weeks. The two workmen in my back garden, digging the foundations for a cat enclosure, sound industrious. There is a young apple tree standing right in the middle of it, and I have instructed them to shorten its branches so that it can be contained within the structure. I imagine my two cats spending happy hours climbing it, perching on its branches. But when I look outside, I see the tree is missing. I am told it was taking too much space and they decided to remove it for me, at no extra cost.
short shrift the town crier’s hoarse voice
against freezing
I own five hot water bottles. As you might have guessed, I feel the cold more than others. When I place these hot, felt-wrapped receptacles on my coldest parts, I experience the bliss others must take for granted.
clang of a spade I imagine the workmen striking gold
The shelves in the beauty aisle are piled high with hand creams. Tubes, jars, bottles, tins of brands I never knew existed. So many! I stand here for a while, wondering whether this abundance could be attributed to the forthcoming Brexit. After all, all sorts of strange events in the last couple of years have been attributed to it. I imagine that both remainers and leavers would need a cream to soothe their hands after clapping for one or the other speaker; after rubbing their eyes in disbelief on reading the daily news or covering their ears for hours in the gesture perfectly captured by Munch’s “The Scream.” Could this be it?
The ossuary, a white-washed, rectangular building, is dark and cool. A musty smell envelops me as I enter. I am searching for the metal box containing my mother’s bones.
I’ve been told she is confined to one on the shelves that run the length of the room. I start searching methodically. Each box has a small hand-written label with the deceased’s name on its front. Several labels are blank. One has a dried daisy flower stuck on it with Sellotape; another, a star in cross stitch; yet another, a tiny motorcycle sticker. Photographs of the dead looking youthful are taped to several boxes, or placed next to them, complicating identification of the containers’ occupants.
Disheartened, I leave the grim building to walk in the dappled shade of the graveyard. The hum of the city mixes with birdsong. So many years since I was in Athens. I stop to read the names of the deceased on headstones, marvel at the stone angels, at the oil lamps. Soon my head is swimming. A woman burning sweet-smelling incense over a grave turns to look at me. I quickly look away, but then, returning her gaze, I nod and she smiles.
In my teens I spent school holidays in the local library. From opening to closing time, the library was my home. In the sizzling Athenian summers, it was the only cool place to be. The silence in the reading room felt like a blessing. Sitting at my desk I listened. A page turned. Someone shifted in their chair. Someone sighed. Silence again. I revelled in the sounds of human presence in this magic emptiness. A paradise. Except one day, when a cicada started singing. Having found its way in, it perched on Borges’s “The Book of Sand.” Heads turned. There was a commotion. A reader screamed, “Get this thing out of here!” The librarian, arm raised, raced to the shelf to swat the culprit, but the insect was no longer there.
turning the page I come across the truth … midsummer darkness
And yet
The road twists and turns for miles ahead. The refugee caravan moves haltingly forward. Mothers carrying their babies; dazed children, old people, the young, all stagger towards a safer future. Crossing the Red Sea, walking through deserts, wading across the Suchiate River, the caravan camps at Calais, rests for a night on Lesvos, repopulates the Sicilian city of Sutera, rows across river Evros. Razor wire carves memories on children’s skin. A voice over the megaphone: “Achtung, Achtung!” Babies are born, grow teeth, learn to speak. It rains, it snows, it shines. New words enter dictionaries. Poems emerge from sleeping bags.
each spring breaking through the soil . . . the human heart
We carry on
We turn out the lights, fall asleep and emerge head first into the real world. Belief, disbelief, nuance, knowledge; science, art, even poetry we leave behind. We enter this eternal world without walls, where we have control over nothing, yet we are nothing less than the seed of the cosmos. Here is our true home: fluid, quiet, boundless.
In the morning, once the alarm clock’s trill drags us back into consciousness, we dress in soft flesh, teeth and nails, and catch the bus to work.
The main course is boiled beef with green beans, mushrooms, and sautee potatoes. A typical dish in this part of the world. What is atypical is the sauce that accompanies it. Unlike the horseradish recipes that make your nostrils flare, this delicate sauce introduces a surprisingly mature interpretation that sings to rather than stings the palate. My neighbour has chosen condiments that balance the flavours to perfection. I can feel the character of the well-tempered sauce on my tongue. No excess. No diversions. Clear limits. Boundaries.
noticing the rose after the rain starts – petrichor
Stella’s shasei (sketch from life) haiku is tightly structured with an emotional undercurrent: “another” in L1 shows the narrator’s attitude to the passing of time while the symbolically rich image of the “knotted branch” in the shredder in Ls 2&3 makes this haiku visually and emotionally effective.
