tattoo butterfly
fading into her wrinkles
wind through Autumn leaves
This poem tells so many life stories in just seventeen syllables. But even juicier than the details Hawkhead gives us – the older woman, her butterfly tattoo – are the ones he leaves out: Where is that tattoo, and how large is it? And that wind stirring the Autumn leaves – is it the tail wind in the wake of her hog? Her significant other’s hog? Her red Mustang? Her self-assured gait? Her wheelchair? Her freedom is as enviable as it is colorful. I want to meet this woman. Some days, I even want to be her.
John Hawkhead is a writer an illustrator from the South West of the UK who is widely published in haiku and poetry magazines around the world. His book of haiku is available from http://www.albapublishing.com/. His Twitter account is at: https://twitter.com/HawkheadJohn.
Find more information about the International Women’s Haiku Festival and submit your work at this link.
In this harrowing poem, Beary juxtaposes the relentless pounding of rain with an unthinkable, yet all too common, act of violence.
***
mother of the bride
dressed head to toe
in black
Beary’s poem recasts a wedding as a funeral and, in the poem’s gut-wrenching final line, enshrouds the mother of the bride – and by implication the bride herself – in the permanent darkness of the loss of life.
***
moving day
the kids pack up
my first marriage
Here, the home doesn’t just turn into an empty nest; it all but vanishes as material belongings, the absent spouse, and grown children pack up and move on.
Roberta Beary (USA and Ireland) is the 2017 Roving Ambassador for The Haiku Foundation and the haibun editor for Modern Haiku. She identifies as gender-expansive, and writes to connect with the disenfranchised, to let them know they are not alone. Her haiku collection The Unworn Necklace, named a William Carlos Williams finalist by the Poetry Society of America, is in its fourth printing. Her work is featured in A Companion to Poetic Genre (John Wiley & Sons, 2011) and Haiku In English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton, 2013). Her book Deflection (Accents Publishing, 2015), a collection of haibun and haiku sequences on loss and grief, named an Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist, received a Touchstone Award Honorable Mention and won a Haiku Society of America prize. Poet and playwright Grace Cavalieri says, “In Deflection she extends her reach with some of the most searingly truthful work I’ve seen this year.” Beary tweets her photoku on Twitter @shortpoemz.
Find more information about the International Women’s Haiku Festival and submit your work at this link.
Today the International Women’s Haiku Festival features poet Anna Cates. Two of her haiku are alive with flowers and sunlight, smooth pastels and mother of pearl.
lady’s mantle
the sunlight
on my shoulders
This poem renders a haiku moment in the most gracious and vivid terms. You can almost see an impressionist painting: A woman sits next to a window or en plein air, summer sun warming her shoulders as he admires clusters of dainty lady’s mantle. The woman enjoys sitting in the sun, while the lady’s mantle is content to wear its golden glow in the shade. The woman and the flowers are twin sisters.
***
mother of pearl
still inside her shell
smooth pastels
How does the mollusk do it, create that iridescent, otherworldly mother of pearl? All of that is going on inside the shell’s hard, creviced exterior. It’s as though the sea creature, wary of leaving its shell and rendering itself unprotected, makes its own comfortable satin sheets. This poem acknowledges the vulnerability that haunts every girl or woman who, at whatever stage of life, longs to leave her shell and put her mark on a man’s world. But it also slyly suggests that maybe staying in the shell that she has, by her own talents, made so exquisite is okay, too. The choice is hers.
Anna Cates lives in Ohio (USA) with her two cats and teaches English and education online. One hundred of her short form poems appear in the Living Haiku Anthology.
Find more information about the International Women’s Haiku Festival and submit your work at this link.
This month, in celebration of National Women’s History Month, Inner Voices is hosting the International Women’s Haiku Festival. Throughout the month of March, you will find here haiku about women, women’s experience, and women’s unique contributions, written by poets from around the world.
Launching the festival today are two haiku by Agnes Eva Savich.
rosy cheeks
she picks a fistful
of cherry tomatoes
This poem captures a double moment of joy: that of harvesting the juicy treasures of the vine, and that which the poetic speaker – perhaps in the role of mother or grandmother – experiences in watching the rosy-cheeked girl’s moment of discovery. The mirror imagery of the rosy cheeks and the rosy roundness of the cherry tomatoes in the girl’s fist is delightful.
***
breast cancer
sprinklers on full blast
across a church lawn
Here, the “sprinklers on full blast” are a darkly clever amplification of a chemo drip. That those sprinklers are flooding the lawn of a church emphasizes the depths of the fear that extends from the devastating diagnosis to the possibility that, in times of human desperation, even divine power has its limits.
Agnes Eva Savich lives near Austin, TX with her husband, two kids, and four cats. She has been writing poetry since she was 12. Her haiku are published in many modern haiku journals and have been translated into five languages. She has an early collection of poetry, The Watcher: Poems (Cedar Leaf Press, 2009) and is working on her first haiku collection.
Find more information about the International Women’s Haiku Festival and submit your work at this link.
I was delighted to learn that one of my haiku has been named a “Judge’s Favorite” among the six winners of this year’s Golden Haiku Contest, Washington, D.C.
This year’s contest garnered more than 1,000 entries, among them poems from the authors of the other six winning haiku – Terri L. French, Marek Kozubek, Trish Bright, Mark E. Brager, Sandip Chauhan, and Michele L. Harvey.
Aside from the numbers game, the judges of this year’s contest are some real haiku heavies, so I am quite honored that they found merit in my little poem. My sincere thanks to the contest judges, Abigail Friedman, author of The Haiku Apprentice;John Stevenson, managing editor of the haiku journal The Heron’sNest and author of several haiku collection; and NHK World’s Kit Pancoast Nagamura.
The other two haiku in my submission were also named runners-up in the contest. Here they are:
When you send art out into the world, it’s always fascinating to see how folks respond to it.
I had a lovely experience along these lines recently when the Canadian poet Claudia Radmore wrote to tell me that she had blogged about some poems, including one of mine, published in the most recent issue of Haiku Canada Review. In her post, “Enter the Frog, or Haiku from the Haiku Canada Review,” Radmore holds up three poems from the February 2017 issue of Haiku Canada Review as good examples of very short haiku.
This poem is a quiet one and brings to mind the times when people are together trying to share thoughts, when those people might wonder about what a person’s words might mean. It’s a poem of uncertainty. Flickering thoughts could indicate doubt, or hesitation. They could be very important in any kind of relationship and are sometimes hard to pin down. These flickering thoughts, and the image of the person’s face in the flickering light…even that image is strong enough to be frightening, or calming, or loving, or simply an exchange of philosophical ideas. This little poem is packed if you take time with it.
What I find fascinating is the range of emotional possibilities Radmore sees in my poem. I wrote this haiku on a wintry Saturday evening, after a fun and lively conversation. To me, the flickering thoughts warmed my spirit and stoked the flames of my imagination. The conversation wrapped me in feelings of contentment, like an “evening fire” on a cold night, and left me with a certain emotional warmth and with a vista of new and promising possibilities.
In the moment that inspired the poem, I felt no uncertainty, doubt or hesitation, though I love that Radmore pulled those other levels of experience out of the text, and specifically out of my image of “flickering thoughts.” Even though I wrote my haiku on the inspiration of one particular emotional experience, I also hoped that the poem would resonate universally from reader to reader. But I hadn’t anticipated that it would resonate more universally across the boundaries among types of emotional experiences.
And this is one of the things that’s so great about art: When my thoughts and your thoughts find each other in a work of art, they can flicker away to new and unexpected ends. And that makes life rich and endlessly fascinating.
The son of the pioneering American haikuist George Klacsanzky, Nicholas Klacsanzky follows in his father’s footsteps with his own esteemed poetry in the Japanese short forms and through Haiku Commentary, where he uncovers the inner workings of present-day examples of what he calls “perhaps the smallest style of poetry.”
Of my ‘deployment’ haiku Klacsansky writes, “This haiku has a lot of energy to it. It has an immediacy and freshness that most haiku do not have.” His insights into the “energy” of the em dash, the “immediacy” of not naming the type of tree that so quickly drops its leaves in the poem, and the “melancholy” and “stark” effects of the vowels are fascinating to me as the poet.
But I am most struck by what Klacsanzky has to say about the last line of the poem: “The pacing of the haiku is powerful, especially with how the last line comes. Not only is the punctuation used for a significant emotional end, but also the last line (without tricks) is palpable and alarming.”
Of course, I planned none of these effects, per se. But I’m glad the poem has them, and that Klacsanzky’s extremely thoughtful commentary has laid them bare. And I’m glad the poem is, in its own way, “alarming.” The finality of the end of a single human life, much less of the legions who perish at war, should stop us cold. The tree in my poem will likely grow new leaves come spring. The souls lost in battle are gone forever.
If a poet writes a poem and no one reads it, does the poem have meaning? This question is one for the philosophers. As a poet, though, I find I reassuring that a reader with Nicholas Klacsanzky’s deep insights into poetry is so committed to sharing them respectfully and unpretentiously for everyone to experience. Klacsanzky’s Haiku Commentary helps make the world of English-language haiku one of wonder and discovery for all.
In one sense, poems are very much like children: When you put them out into the world, you have no idea where they’ll go, what they’ll do, or whom they’ll meet.
I was surprised when, recently, I was notified by a fellow Ohio poet of the online goings-on of one of my haiku.
I knew some time ago that Paul Miller, editor of the beautiful print journal Modern Haiku, had accepted one of my haiku for publication in the journal’s autumn 2016 issue (47.3). And when that issue rolled off the presses and found its way to me, I was thrilled to read a phenomenal issue jam packed with inspiration.
I consider this a great honor. Modern Haiku is arguably the Rolls Royce of English-language haiku journals. It is competitive to get into, it is rich in high-caliber creative content – haiku, senryu, haibun, haiga, essays, and so forth, it regularly publishes the most prominent haiku poets writing in English today, and it is beautifully produced. To have one’s work published in Modern Haiku is in itself a signal event.
But the poems published on Modern Haiku’s Web Sampler comprise a sort of “editor’s choice” for each issue of the journal, a representative sample of the quality and type of poems the journal publishes and encourages writers to submit.
And something I find especially fun about the Web Sampler for Modern Haiku issue 47.3: Of the 10 poets whose haiku/senryu were selected, fully three (myself included) live and work in Ohio.
Congratulations to editor Paul Miller and to all of the poets who make each issue of Modern Haiku a joy to read and an honor to be part of.
Photo: Tamorlan (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia CommonsTranslations are like lovers: the faithful ones aren’t beautiful, and the beautiful ones aren’t faithful.
This expression, which I picked up in graduate school from one of the musicologists on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pretty accurately sums up the general state of translation. When it comes to translations, we don’t live in glass houses; we live in the Tower of Babel, hearing each other’s languages, but not understanding them – even when, in a literal sense, we speak the same language. We are always, it seems, playing a game of Telephone, mired in human imperfection as we are, and so prone as we are to hearing what we want to hear. Misunderstanding is all but inevitable.
Given the generally sluttish state of translations, I consider myself extremely fortunate that the first translations of some of my poems into a language other than English were exceptionally brilliantly executed. Big thanks to editor Beate Conrad for publishing two of my haiku in English and in German translation in the most recent issue of the German journal Chrysanthemum.
Here are my haiku as published in Chrysanthemum 20 (October 2016), in the original English and in Beate Conrad’s German translations:
full moon glow Vollmondschein
blankets eggs deckt Eier zu
in the abandoned bird’s nest in dem verlassnen Nest
dropping from the cone aus dem Hörnchen tropft
the ice cream melts das Eis, zerschmilzt
into a frown in ein Stirnrunzeln
I love that German allows “full moon glow” to appear as “Vollmondschein,” speeding up into a single word the ephemeral haiku moment the poem conveys. In the second haiku, I love that German syntax allows the ice cream – “das Eis” – to drop from the verb “drops” at the end of the first line to the beginning of the second line. In English, such a construction would come across as stilted:
out of the cone drops
the ice cream …
But as good as Conrad’s translations are, her editing is at least as compelling. I have long thought that there should be an editor’s Hippocratic Oath, paraphrased something like this: I will use treatment (read: I will edit) to help the sick (read: to help the writing) according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing.
Why is it that so many editors perpetrate bloody murder on writing and get off scot-free? Why are good editors so few and far between?
I despair.
But Beate Conrad suggested a brilliant edit to my ice cream haiku. My original text read:
dropping from the cone
the ice cream melts
her face into a frown
Isn’t it so much more vivid that not the face, but theice creamitself melts into a frown, as in Conrad’s edited version?
Brilliant. Just brilliant.
This one edit – so subtle and yet so great – says so much about the essence of poetry, about showing not telling, about using fewer words to say more.
Thank you, Beate Conrad, for making my words better – in English and in German. And thank you for your beautiful journal.
Just the other day, I logged on to do a simple search for something on the Web. I ended up getting sucked in, clicking my way from link to link as through tripping along a stepping stone path that made Homer’s Odyssey seem like the travelogue of a summer road trip.
But, much as I did online the other day, I digress.
While tooling around in that virtual rabbit hole, I discovered quite by accident that two of my haiku had been published in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of the Oxford, England-based World Haiku Review. And not only that – one of those haiku had actually won Third Place in the “Vanguard” category, and the other was published as a “Haiku of Merit” in the “Neo-Classical” category.
World Haiku Review describes Vanguard haiku as “the most radical” treatments of the haiku genre. Here’s my haiku in that category. I don’t stick to the traditional 5-7-5 syllable count, and there’s an uncomfortable tension between nature and human nature that complicates how the relationship between humans and the natural world is portrayed in traditional haiku.
World Haiku Review uses the term “Neo-Classical” to designate what they describe as “the most traditional” haiku they publish. Scroll down a bit to see my Neo-Classical “Haiku of Merit.”
![Summer Fades Away [244/366]](https://live.staticflickr.com/8177/7907623896_c671f1e894_c.jpg)
I was delighted to learn that one of my haiku has been named a “Judge’s Favorite” among the six winners of this year’s 
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