A Happy New Year 2021 to all my friends! A year filled with Health, Love, Creativity, Happiness, and Peace!
Meanwhile, still in 2020, JuxtaSix: The Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship, the print issue, is available! I just received my print copy from Amazon. It is a very interesting and well-presented issue. I am happy to say it includes an article on Haiku and the Brain that I co-authored. Many thanks to the editors, and reviewers, and well-done to my fellow authors!
the weight
of our arguments
falling snow
Happy to see my poem included In the inaugural issue of the wonderful Blo͞o Outlier Journal!
Thank you, Alan Summers!
Delighted to see my work included in the new journal “tsuri-dōrō – a small journal of haiku and senryū.” The Inaugural Issue is just out! Have a read and submit!
Zoom meeting
a bird flies into
the window
What a wonderful project! The brainchild of Krzysztof Kokot, the International Picture Postcard Project “Haiku Connects Us” brings together poets and poetry from around the world. Beautiful pictures, coupled with haiku…what a treat! So pleased to see my contribution included here!Thank you, Krzysztof!
Earlier this year, I was very pleased to see that The Signature Haiku Anthology: Including Senryu and Tanka, edited by Robert Epstein, included one of my poems.
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!
whether I am here or not returning tide
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
.
You can find it here
Thrilled to have won first place in MacQueen’s Quinterly Ekphrastic Challenge “The Magician”!
A heartfelt thank you to Clare MacQueen for selecting my haibun “So that we remember” and congratulations to all participants in the contest!
Read “So that we remember” here: http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ3/Pierides-Remember.aspx
For the background to the contest and full results see here: http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/Contests/Magician-Results.aspx
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.
Order your copy here
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.
http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/items/show/5991
Enjoy!
.
a woman’s work inside her locked spine
Happy to be included in Bones 19, March 2020. Many thanks to Johannes S. H. Bjerg!
the daily transmutation of muscle into marble
In Bones 19, p.154
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:
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)…
Do take a look!
hard frost the hunter walks beside the blood trail
In Modern Haiku vol. 51.1., p.77, Winter-Spring 2020
Capturing a scientific symposium in a haiku sequence! Remember the #haiku sequence on the Ammersee conference 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? 
A new journal, a new hybrid, and a new year!
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
evening fog
the holes in the subtext
disappear
.
Very pleased to have this haiku in Bones 18, 15 November 2019, p. 150.
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”}
Many thanks to editor Clare MacQueen!
“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.”
Delighted to see my #haibun “The Path” included in Califragile (July 23, 2019)
Many thanks to the editor Wren Tuatha!
Originally In Blue Fifth Review, Broadside #44 Fall 2016 with the beautiful painting below by Maria Pierides
In addition, full text here
Pleased to see my haiku in issue 127 of ‘Hedgerow’ edited by Caroline Skanne! Thank you Caroline!
Three of my haiku were translated into Bulgarian and included in the anthology Peonies edited by Iliyana Stoyanova! Thank you, Iliyana!
English Original
mother’s day
pushing all the wrong
buttons
Frogpond, 38:2, Spring/Summer 2015
Stella Pierides
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
母親節
激起所有強烈
的情緒
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
母親節
激起所有強烈
的情緒
Delighted to see my Mother’s Day haiku appear on Butterfly Dream today! Translated into Chinese by Chen-ou Liu!
Thank you Chen-ou!
Solace (Triptych)
In a dark wood . . .
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
In Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, 25 Feb 2019 h
and check out the whole journal: a rich and rewarding read!
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?
late winter
the street dog’s sad
whimper
In Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, 25 Feb 2019, Mixed forms: Haibun
3 of my tanka translated into Italian and published in Lumachine 31, December 2018
A big thank you to Euphemia Griffo and Stefano d’Andrea for including them in this wonderful Journal.
Thrilled to see that my ‘lifting the veil’ poem was featured on The Haiku Foundation Per Diem: Daily Haiku on the 6th of January 2019!
Many thanks to guest-editor Simon Hanson for including it in his wonderful collection ‘Darkness’!
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.
noon heat
a hairline crack
in the angel’s wing
In Unbroken Journal, issue 20, 2019
