On The Acorn Book of Contemporary Haiku

In perusing my poetry shelves to see what was what, it occurred to me that, as a semi-regular feature, I could delve into the items found there and share a thought or two. So, the first couple of shelves consists of anthologies of Eastern or Eastern influenced verse, haiku, tanka, and traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Indian verse. In addition there are some modern anthologies of English and American verse in traditional forms, which brings us to the first item on the shelf, The Acorn Book of Contemporary Haiku, edited by Lucien Stryk and Kevin Bailey.

The first thing I realized about this book is that I must have purchased it on a London trip because it is going for ridiculous sums via amazon and has evidently never been published in the States. I bought it for 4.5 pounds, probably as a remainder at the Ulysses Bookshop near the British Museum.

I'm over halfway through the volume (so it goes for perusing part of this "project") and I have to say it is as fine a collection of contemporary haiku as I've run across. The hint of regret (have to say) I believe betrays the fact that I'm recommending something that is costly and difficult to get a hold of.

The volume's selection and tone bears all the earmarks of Stryk: poems stark, precise, and imagistic in nature. Stripped to the bone, the bones boiled, and placed out on large leaves, gleaming as they dry in the sun. Imagine my surprise when I ran smack into three poems that have graced past issues of Lilliput Review. Here they are:

Spring

The earth bears
everything,
even your sadness.

David Lindley

ancient headstones
the name and numbers
worn to murmurs.

William Hart

Summer

When the page was blank
no one thought, suddenly
a flower would appear.

David Lindley

One of the things that surprised me a bit was the lack of acknowledgment, a pet peeve of mine. Don't get me wrong; I don't think it is something a press or poet is obligated to do, it's just a courtesy. I explain to folks that it is akin to being accepted for publication for a poet/writer. It is a great lift and, most importantly, recognition of quality in the editorial process. This is not a gripe with this particular press or either poet, just me talking out loud. In my estimation, these are great examples of the finest work in haiku form and I'm proud to have helped them see the light of day. As far as I'm concerned, it is the poet who owns the work, from inception through publication and in any further incarnations, unless they explicitly sign that right away. And they'll never do that here at Lillie.

So, no harm, no foul ... just a little boy griping.

But I digress (and feel the better for it). Here's a selection of a few items that grabbed my attention and held it.

in the corpse's
half-closed eyes
the flame of a candle

Vasile Spinei

one word
but so many varieties
of rain

David Findley

Another robin in my mousetrap:
few of us fail to give
humanity a bad name.

Anthony Weir

The old barn
--looks more like a tree
----each year.

Hannah Mitte

late afternoon sun
the shadow of the gravestone
slants towards my feet

Brian Tasker

Works Gloves

On the garden gate
left here with me --
Shape of her hands

Bob Arnold

The white kitten
playing and playing
with the faded cherry petal

Vincent Tripi

Still in my garden
--------I bend to pluck a weed but
----------------see its smiling face.

Harold Morland

In the garden of Saleh
The silence is soothed
By the whispered lisp of leaves.

David Gascoyne

sunrise
the fisherman's shadow stretches
across the river

George Swede

A moorhen dives
Ripples spread
To the ends of the earth

Aasha Hanley

I hear the magpies
and you you have give me
this sense of longing.

Paul Finn

I was equally delighted to see a number of poets whose work has appeared in Lilliput featured in Acorn. From this selection alone are the fine poets George Swede, Vincent Tripi, and Bob Arnold. What is most amazing, really, is I've just dug through to the first layer of this exemplary volume. If I have the time and space, perhaps I'll highlight a few more poems from the 2nd half of this work sometime soon.

For an additional insightful, theoretical review (with a large selection of poems) of The Acorn Book of Contemporary Haiku, see Lynx Book Reviews (last review toward the bottom of the page - and from this review which I read after completing this post, I discovered another Lillie poem in the volume, from the 2nd half I haven't gotten to, this one by Gary Hotham).

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In the Bashô Haiku Challenge update, I can say that I've narrowed down the nearly 500 haiku received to somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 poems after two complete read-throughs. Lots of decisions still to made, one big one being exactly how long will this year's chapbook be. I believe I'll let content dictate form in this instance, so living with the poems for another two weeks or so should help answer that question very well.

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This week's featured issue is #152, from November 2006. Hope something grabs you here:

After Basho

Chrysanthemums bloom
in a gap between the silence
of the stonecutter's yard.

Michael Wurster

trumpet vine
still waiting
for you

David Gross

in the park
--struck
by a falling leaf

Peggy Heinrich

Four ancient rocks rose from the earth:
Grief, Rope, Axe, and Sparrow

Gail Ivy Berlin

And, before I flit off, one more:

baby sparrow--
even when people come
opening its mouth

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Chiron Review & an Albert Huffstickler Memorial

Chiron Review is to the small independent press what The American Poetry Review is to university and corporate presses. Founded in 1982, CR has consistently represented the best of small press poets publishing over the last three decades. It is one of my favorite small presses and mostly certainly my favorite that does not focus predominately on the short poem. Edited by Michael Hathaway, CR contains poetry of most shapes and sizes, fiction, interviews, essays, reviews, and general lit mag news. There is an interview each issue with the featured poet; in the issue I have at hand (#86, spring 2009), the poet is S. A. Griffin.

The poetry is expansive, both in quantity and quality. Edited by the renowned Gerald Locklin with his son, Zachary, a nice balance of different approaches is achieved, leaning to the modern open verse style. No ax to grind, no particular approach: quality seems to be the measure. The works are generally grounded in the everyday stuff of existence; there are not many castles in the air here or flights of academic fitfulness. In this issue, there were well over 100 poems judiciously laid out over 48 pages (CR shares the tabloid newspaper format of the The New York Daily News or The New York Post or the above mentioned American Poetry Review) and I dare say there is something here for everyone. Here's a mixed sampling of work that grabbed me:




When I Meet Her by the Seashore

I shall
untwine her time
unravel her travel
undo her mood
unfasten her battens
unmesh her dress
unbutton her bubbles
unleash her fresh.

And then I shall
unwind her behind
uncouple her trouble
unearth her worth
unstaple her paper
unzip her yip
unbuckle her tickle
untuck her lush.

Mary Meriam

stealing nothing from death

---for Shuku

---let the world say 'his most wise
---music stole nothing from death'
----------------E. E. Cummings

There will be a time
my soul smells bad enough
to kill
the canaries.

Live well &
die fast ------------that
is all that I ask. ----For there

will come an instance
when knowledge is dead -&
all that is is all
that is
remembered. ---------There

will be a moment
when the sky is black
& the play of children
is just -------------too
elusive.

a room

where the music
is just

too much

to bare.

normal

Poem for Miss Ross

After I get home from driving my taxi
for twelve or fourteen hours
I lay down on my bed but it all
keeps spinning back from me:
every face in the mirror,
every street under construction,
every near missed accident,
every stranger's horror story,
every time there were sobs in the back seat,
every time I laughed
to make someone feel better
about being a prick,
every time I got to the pick up
and found no one there,
every time I took a stupid route
or got stuck in traffic
where the silences are long,
every time I looked at poor Miss Ross
as I drove her to her cancer treatment,
white and tiny as an angel
with candy cigarette bones.

Mather Schneider

Noodles in the Backyard

What I remember
of my stray, jet black
part-poodle
is how he'd pause
at a flower,
place his snoot
between the petals
and drink it all in:
The tulip, the grass,
the afternoon.
Ten billion lifetimes
culminating in one
perfect scent.

Robert L. Penick

Southside Janet

her scars precede
the wounds
that cause them

Don Winter

There is fine work here also by Antler, David Chorlton, and Richard Kostelanetz, as well as two autobiographical essays by Lyn Lifshin and an interesting piece by the always perceptive Michael Kriesel about a "new" sub-genre he defines as the "Wisconsin Justified Poem": you'll have to read this one yourself and be the judge.

CR costs $7 per issue, a year/4 issues for $17. It's one of a handful of magazines I read cover to cover and thoroughly enjoy. Don't get me wrong, though; I don't like everything here. I just appreciate the exposure to the variety and quality of work that is consistently featured in Chiron Review. I recommend it highly. If you miss Chiron Review, you will be missing one of the genuine small press magazines that carries on a long standing tradition of literary excellence only fleetingly encountered in the bigs.

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I received email this week from Elzy Cogswell of the Austin Poetry Society in which he mentions the possibility of naming a grove of trees across from City Hall in Austin after the poet Albert Huffsticker. I asked and received permission to quote the relevant portion of his email for this post and it follows.

For those of you who were fortunate enough to know the poetry of Albert Huffstickler or have came upon his work, here or in many other small press venues, you know how very unique, poignant and insightful it is. Here is the announcement of the nomination process:

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Alfred,
Lord Tennyson, who served as England’s Poet Laureate
for 42 years. We observe such things, and it’s good for
poetry.

Albert Huffstickler was not the Poet Laureate of the
United States, although he was recognized as the Poet
Laureate of Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He had
won the Austin Book Award for his collection, Walking
Wounded (1989), but he was not even the Poet Laureate
of Texas. He never won a Nobel Prize, or even a Pulitzer.
He wrote poetry every day all his life, and he was published
almost as frequently. Although he won his share of honors,
I feel closer to the Huffstickler who didn't get rich on poetry.
I share that with him and with all the other poets who are
friends of mine. Huff lived for poetry every day until his
death on Feb. 25, 2002. We who have remembered him
annually in memorial readings also live for poetry, and with
him, we know that beautiful language is for the sake of
people who are ready to benefit from it.

A year or more ago, the Austin Poetry Society Board of
Directors began working toward planting a tree in a public
park to be called the Poetree. Then recently, an opportunity
arose for something better. The city has a very small park
area and wants a name for it. It’s a triangular piece of land
with about eight large oaks, many of them with double-trunks.
It already has a supply of limestone benches in the shade of
the trees. The place is directly across from City Hall in the
middle of the intersection of Cesar Chavez and South First
Street, just north of Ladybird Lake.

The Board of Directors asked me to nominate Huff’s name
for the park. I have therefore submitted this name: Albert
Huffstickler Poetrees Grove. The place to submit names is
online:

http://www.cityofaustin.org/parks/namingform.htm.

If you knew Huff (or if you love poetry), perhaps you would
like to join me in this nomination by asking the Parks
Department to name the park for Huff. If we were successful,
this little jewel of a park could become a focal point for all the
Austin poetry organizations, all the people who come for
special events like Austin International Poetry Festival, and
perhaps most importantly, for individual poets who just
want to sit down and think.

The process is a civic one, so you will see that the link leads to a form. Though it may primarily be for Austin citizens, it might indeed impress the City leaders if some nominations came from outside the community. The form has boxes for your personal info (address etc.), the suggested name for the grove (Albert Huffstickler Poetrees Grove), biographical info, the extent of Huff's civic involvement, his connection to the facility, and the reason for the nomination. Relevant biographical and civic material may be found at Huff's website at:

http://www.geocities.com/albert_huffstickler/biography.html

His connection to the facility (i. e. a grove of trees) is the connection between poetry and nature; Huff's work was always grounded in the natural world. The reason for the nomination you already know if you know Huff's work. This all will probably take 10 minutes of your time but if Huff has touched you with his work in anyway, it is a fitting tribute.



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I've perused the 1st ten issues of Lilliput Review and featured a number of poems from them recently on both the Twitter page and in the Issa's Sunday Service count up. They've given about all they have to give, so I'm going to call this round of featuring poems from back issues of Lillie done.

So, I'm not entirely sure what direction I'll be heading in terms of highlighting work from past issues. I can tell you that a great deal of my time over the last few months has been spent in working on two manuscripts, one an anthology of the first 20 years of Lilliput Review and the other a manuscript of my own work. I've been going full bore for quite some time now, on these projects, this blog, Lilliput, the Twitter poem-a-day , and Facebook and need to think through how to proceed. In the interim, I noticed that I hadn't featured any work from some of the issues published since the archive feature began back in July of 2007 on the old Beneath Cherry Blossoms blog. So here's some highlights from #168, from March 2009.

Flash forward 20 years: enjoy.





salmon
nose upriver:
I walk away

Mike Dillon

another friend has slipped
into the long and crowded
history of us–
the fish market's
thousands of open eyes

George Swede

i stumble
the pebble shows
its darker side

Natalia L. Rudychev

Rented Rooms

There was a city in her moans
and I resided
in every room
on every block.

Jonathan Treadway

the outer shoals

looking down upon the ocean and the seashore
from my room at the daytona beach hotel,
i felt for the first time like an aging
naturalist writer or painter,
like dr. johnson sick-a-bed by the strand,
separated from both nature's solitude and
the madding of the vacationing crowd,
the subjects of one's art, so near and yet
no more to be embraced.

Gerald Locklin

--–LIQUOR
the I and the U
--–flickering

Shawn Bowman

my dead mother--
every time I see the ocean
every time...

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Ichigyoshi and Falling Off The Mountain

Been dragging a bit on this end of things with the cold that everyone seems to have. Actually lost the entire weekend's work to bed rest, soup, Thomas Hardy, and Conan the Barbarian.

I've had worse weekends; unfortunately, contributor copies of the new issues, #165 and 166, were slated to go out and, so will be delayed a week.

A. Scott Britton of Ichigyoshi has asked me to post his call for submissions, which I'm happy to do. Here it is:



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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Ichigyoshi is a web-based journal designed to foster a

discourse that is both academic and colloquial in nature.

In addition to essays, manifestos, and the general writer's

statement, Ichigyoshi will pursue this goal through the

publication of three types of literature: 1. experimental

literature, 2. translation, and 3. [very] short poetry.

To see what we're all about and to find out how to submit

your work, please make your way to the Ichigyoshi website:

http://ichigyoshi.blogspot.com

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Speaking of the very short poem, one of the best kept secrets around (ed markowski knows!) is Grant Hackett and his simply marvelous Falling Off the Mountain blog. Grant is a purveyor of what he calls the monostitch, the one-line poem. He is, to put it simply, tapped directly into the source; his work is magical nearly beyond measure, which is saying something considering it never goes beyond one-line (define infinity now). Grant's work will be appearing in future issues of Lilliput (in fact, he'll be in one of the two new issues), but I felt it was time to let the cat out of the bag and share his work with those who find brevity a guiding principle.

Read a dozen. See if you don't get hooked.

Finally, head on over to f/k/a where David recounts the growing tragedy of SBS (Shaken Baby Syndrome). His informative post is accompanied by some heartrending verse by Issa, George Swede and Michael Dylan Welch.

Michael's recent comments on Issa's Untidy Hut re: the e. e. cummings vs. E. E. Cummings controversy will be covered in Thursday's regular post.

best,
Don

Robert Hass Reads Issa, Thoreau Grinds Away & Damned Baseball Haiku

Cover by John Bennett

Ran across a number of interesting pieces this week, including a video of Robert Hass reading Issa haiku at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival. This short reading (less than 2 minutes) of 9 poems perfectly captures the playfulness and humor that endears Issa to so many. In addition, it a a model of how to perform haiku, no easy task. It misses the immense sadness of Issa, the other dimension that contributes to his immortality, but that was not the point of this reading as may be readily seen. This reading is part of a larger series entitled Poetry Everywhere, which includes such poets as Charles Simic, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, and Robert Frost.

Fine, fine stuff. I've made it a permanent link in the Issa section of the sidebar.

In Monday's post, I mentioned The Blog of Henry David Thoreau; here is another gem from that journal, entitled Grinding Away.

Mary Karr has recently taken over the Poet's Choice column in the Washington Post and it has taken me a little time to warm up to her style and tastes. A recent post in which she began by admitting she never liked Emily Dickinson did the trick; she mentioned the anecdote that has long been making the rounds that you can sing almost any Dickinson poem to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Try it with Because I could not stop for Death.

Hmn.

Her latest column takes on something I just can 't abide: baseball haiku. It's not the fault of the haiku; I can't stand baseball fiction, baseball short stories etc. (n.b.: I am a big baseball fan). However, in her column covering the recent publication of Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryu on Baseball, she quotes the work of George Swede, among others. Congratulations to George, one of our finest purveyors of the haiku form. He ably proves why in the two poems quoted in the article:


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empty baseball field
a dandelion seed floats through
the strike zone

video ball game
through knotholes in the old fence
evening sunbeams

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Now, there are a couple of baseball haiku that even I like. The first is simply perfect and the use of the single word "evening" in the second has me on my back waiting for my tummy to be scratched (and you thought you could never really please an editor).

This week's selection of poems from a past issue of Lilliput Review takes us back to #89, July 1997. As the summer season begins, here are a couple of seasonal works from back then:


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Tentative Summation

A poem is ocean -
without shore.

Tim Scannell

in my hand--
the rock smoothed
by part of the Pacific Ocean

Gary Hotham

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And two by the late Joseph Semenovich:


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narcissi

i present
whoever i am
both subject and object

and just like narcissus
how unlucky can you get
the pond became

the verb
he drowned
himself in

my step-father's paintings

the black rocks
the green frothy water breaking over them
the sky pulled apart like the innards of a pillow
one screaming gull

outside
the heavy trucks/the grinding
gears/the chug-a-lug
the way the world

is

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best,
Don


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