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
Tag Archives: published
“So that we remember” wins first place in the MacQueen’s Quinterly Ekphrastic Challenge
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
‘Intertextuality’ in What I Hear When Not Listening
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
In Bones 19!
the daily transmutation of muscle into marble
In Bones 19, p.154
‘Noir’ in MacQueen’s Quinterly
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
New article in jemr
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’ in MH
hard frost the hunter walks beside the blood trail
In Modern Haiku vol. 51.1., p.77, Winter-Spring 2020
‘Ammersee Symposium’ in Visual Cognition
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? 
JuxtaFive: The Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship
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’ in Bones Journal
evening fog
the holes in the subtext
disappear
.
Very pleased to have this haiku in Bones 18, 15 November 2019, p. 150.
‘clinging’
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
‘Homewards’ in KYSO Flash 12
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.”
‘The Path’ in Califragile
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
In ‘Hedgerow’
Pleased to see my haiku in issue 127 of ‘Hedgerow’ edited by Caroline Skanne! Thank you Caroline!
In ‘Peonies’
Three of my haiku were translated into Bulgarian and included in the anthology Peonies edited by Iliyana Stoyanova! Thank you, Iliyana!
‘Mother’s Day’ in Butterfly Dream
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’ in Open: Journal of Arts and Letters
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!
3 tanka in Lumachine 31
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.
‘Absences’ in Unbroken Journal
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
Haibun Triptych
Reality Bites
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.
oak leaves …
planning to live past
one hundred
In Blue Fifth Review, The Blue Collection 9: Home
Image: ‘Boat’ by Maria Pierides
Haibun Triptych in Blue Fifth Review: The Blue Collection 9
Grateful thanks to Michelle Elvy and Sam Rasnake for publishing my Haibun Triptych in the special issue “The blue collection 9: Home” of the phenomenal Blue Fifth Review!
Photo magic “Boat” by Maria Pierides accompanies the triptych.
Check it out:
Blue Fifth Review … the blue collection: 9: home (Winter 2018 / 18.10)
‘Boundaries’ in Blithe Spirit
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
In Blithe Spirit 28.3, 2018
‘another spring’ translated into Chinese
another spring
the knotted branch
in the shredder
Blithe Spirit, 27:2, 2017
Stella Pierides
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
另一個春天
將一根打結的樹枝
扔到切碎機中
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
另一个春天
将一根打结的树枝
扔到切碎机中
Chen-ou Liu, 劉鎮歐December 7, 2018
Butterfly Dream: Another Spring Haiku by Stella Pierides
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.
3rd Annual Haiku for Change Event 2018
This September I took part in the Haiku for Change Event organised by Michael Smeer of the Facebook community My Haiku Pond, in conjunction with 100 Thousand Poets for Change (Global) 2018. Poets were asked to write one haiku (or senryu, haiga, or photo-haiku) on change: climate, environment, earth.
Entries were included in the Haiku for Change Event ebook Anthology, a pdf posted on the 100 Thousand Poets for Change blog, and archived by Stanford University as part of their program to document the 100 Thousand Poets for Change movement and community.
Here is my offering:
rising seas
a clutch of turtle eggs
in the park sandpit
The pdf is now up and can be downloaded from the 100 Thousand Poets for Change Blog
‘invisible ink’ in Ephemerae
invisible ink—
and then we become
history
.
Ephemerae, 1, B, 2018, p. 62
‘match countdown’ on Per Diem: Daily Haiku
Thrilled to have my poem featured on Per Diem: Daily Haiku, The Haiku Foundation site. The poem will be up all day today the 23rd of September 2018 here
Many thanks to editor Rob Scott for selecting it!
This poem was written for the AFL Grand Final Kukai 2017 and included in The Tigers’ Almanac 2017, p. 187 (Malarky Publications)
‘or not to be…’ haiku in Ephemerae
or not to be. . .
on a day like this
there’s no question
.
Ephemerae, vol 1B, August 2018, p.28
‘Of This World,’ receives HSA Merit Book Award (books published 2017)
Delighted to announce that my book Of This World (Red Moon Press) was awarded a merit book honorable mention in the Haibun category by the Haiku Society of America!
Heartfelt thanks to Michelle Elvy, Jim Kacian, Clare MacQueen and Johannes S. H. Bjerg for their help and support with bringing this book to life.
While waiting for the judges comments and public announcement by the Society, here is more information and praise for the book:
Stella Pierides has cultivated a terse, idiosyncratic style in her haibun that is instantly recognizable, and as a consequence is one of the shining lights of this burgeoning genre. Of This World certainly is, but it also takes us out of the world at large and into private spaces we feel privileged to witness. A unique and satisfying read.
Red Moon Press
Amazon Europe
Amazon UK
I am grateful for the generous comments:
This is how it’s done! Stella Pierides — in a hushed voice — takes me through what it is to be human — and part of the human history from the roots of Western culture in Diogenes’ tub to the ‘modern’ human — with all the questions and doubts, the uncertainties that come from that.
— Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Writer
Of This World’s marvelous, emotionally resonant haibun are steeped in the grace of the garden, rooted in a physical reality so sensuous that you can smell the fragrance of baking bread, of olives and garlic, of lemon and magnolia blossoms — and yet they also spiral on the updraft of metaphor as poet Stella Pierides ‘put[s] our hearts in the shoes of the hummingbird.’
— Clare MacQueen, Editor-in-Chief, KYSO Flash
A treasure trove of language and image. Pierides walks through dark streets of history, through alleyways of memory – emerging in shiny, unexpected places. Compact, urgent and closely observant, these minute offerings will captivate readers of both poetry and short fiction. An enormously engaging collection.
— Michelle Elvy, Writer and Editor
*
Of This World
ISBN: 978-1-936848-80-5
Pages: 124
Size: 6″ x 9″
Binding: perfect softbound
‘the last page missing’ haiku in Frogpond
the last page missing
from the library book—
late autumn evening
.
Frogpond 41.2 Spring/Summer 2018, p. 27
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72/100 #The100DayProject #100daysnewthings
‘Of This World’ receives HSA Merit Book honorable mention
The Haiku Society of America has announced the names of winners of its Merit Book Awards for books published in 2017.
I am delighted and honored to see my book Of This World (Red Moon Press) included with a honourable mention in the Haibun category! Congratulations to all winners!
And heartfelt thanks to Michelle Elvy, Jim Kacian, Clare MacQueen and Johannes S. H. Bjerg for their help and support with bringing this book to life.
*
So, excellent news! It becomes 64/100 #The100DayProject #100daysnewthings
