2nd Annual Bashō Haiku Challenge

Well, folks, it's that time: this year I will be reading for the 2nd Annual Bashō Haiku Challenge beginning today and continuing through the entire month of October. With a couple of slight adjustments from last year (i.e. a different 1st prize), here are the instructions as outlined last year:

So, here's the deal: for the next four weeks, send along up to
5 haiku to lilliput review at gmail dot com (spelled out
to fend off pesky bots) and the best haiku wins a copy of
Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with
Commentary, edited by Makoto Ueda. Minimally, I will
need your name and email to contact you with the
results. In the subject line of your email, please put
"2nd Annual Bashō Haiku Challenge" so I can easily
differentiate it from the scads of other things that come my
way. The final date for submissions will be October 31st and
the winner will be announced in either November 18th or
December 2nd postings. My definition of haiku is about as
liberal as you can get: I follow no one particular method,
school or theory and there is no seasonal requirement.
Your haiku can be 1, 2, or 3 lines (over 5 would be a bit
much, folks, but I will keep an open mind for
experimenters). The one restriction would be that it be
in the spirit of haiku (I've always liked the definition of
English haiku as lasting the length of one breath, in and
out and pause, but that's just me - and, oh yeah, I'm the
judge, but, again, it's the spirit of the thing that counts)
and that the haiku be previously unpublished in either
paper or electronic form (ok, that's two requirements).

In addition, the winning poet will receive a 15 issue
subscription to Lilliput Review (or have their current
subscription extended by 15 issues), plus two copies of
the 2nd Annual chapbook, to be published sometime in
2010. Other poets whose work is selected for inclusion
will receive 2 copies of the chapbook plus a 6 issue
subscription.

That's it. This is an electronic submission contest only; it is my way of giving back to the online community that has been so vibrant and encouraging since I started actively blogging in July 2007.

Some of you may remember the genesis of this contest, some may have come along since then. In brief, I was contacted last year by Tomoe Sumi of Kodansha America Press, who had been following an ongoing series of posts and discussions about the work Matsuo Bashô. At that time, she offered a reviewer's copy of their fine new volume, Bashō: The Complete Haiku, translated by Jane Reichhold, to throw into the discussion mix. Since I'd already purchased it for myself, I politely declined and she offered to send it anyway, suggesting I give it away. And so the contest was born.

To continue in the tradition of a volume of Bashō as first prize, I've decided this year to purchase and give away the selected work, with critical commentary, as listed above. Again, I own a personal copy; it is a fine selection of Bashō, accompanied with criticism from a wide variety of sources, historical context, and scholarly discussion. For the novice, it may be read as a selected poems. For the more experienced or simply curious, it is a rich rewarding journey into the essence of haiku in general and Bashō in particular. It is a high quality, pricey trade paperback that will make a fine addition to anyone's Eastern poetry collection. Makoto Ueda is one of the finest authorities on the work of Bashō and his 1970 biography (link is to google books and is a perfect illustration of what can go horribly wrong there) is considered essential reading for those delving deep into the work of the haiku master. You can get a glimpse into Bashō and His Interpreters at the link above to google books, where there is nice little preview.

Spread the word and let the games begin!


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This week's featured issue is #160, from November 2007. If you are so inclined, you may literally (after a virtual fashion) flip through the entire issue here. Enjoy.




#213

Only a wisp
Of cloud above,
But like a
Sacred Song
It pointed the way

Yosano Akiko
translated by Dennis Maloney

Autumn wind,
nudging me down the mountain,
quivers a grass seed
that clings to my skirt.

Suzanne Freeman

rail cars
stacked with wood
slowly pass the living-
i whisper to them
kaddish

Donna Fleischer

And a little seasonal thought, from the master:

wildflowers--
all we say or speak about
is autumn wind

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Issa's Sunday Service, #22: "There She Goes, My Beautiful World"

Last week, it was mourning the death of a great poet/rocker, Jim Carroll. It's fitting then that this week we celebrate the birth of another great rocker/poet, Nick Cave. This is Cave's (& the Bad Seeds) second appearance on Issa's Sunday Service and, though I promised myself to keep the repeats to a minimum, at least to start out, my extremely biased opinions are showing.


There She Goes, My Beautiful World

The wintergreen, the juniper
The cornflower and the chicory
All the words you said to me
Still vibrating in the air
The elm, the ash and the linden tree
The dark and deep, enchanted sea
The trembling moon and the stars unfurled
There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

John Wilmot penned his poetry
riddled with the pox
Nabokov wrote on index cards,
at a lectern, in his socks
St. John of the Cross did his best stuff
imprisoned in a box
And Johnny Thunders was half alive
when he wrote Chinese Rocks

Well, me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I'm lying here, for what seems years
I'm just lying on my bed with nothing in my head

Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles
while writing Das Kapital
And Gaugin, he buggered off, man,
and went all tropical
While Philip Larkin stuck it out
in a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas died drunk in
St. Vincent's hospital

I will kneel at your feet
I will lie at your door
I will rock you to sleep
I will roll on the floor
And I'll ask for nothing
Nothing in this life
I'll ask for nothing
Give me ever-lasting life

I just want to move the world
I just want to move the world
I just want to move the world
I just want to move

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet,
brother, and blow it
If you've got a field, that don't yield,
well get up and hoe it
I look at you and you look at me and
deep in our hearts know it
That you weren't much of a muse,
but then I weren't much of a poet

I will be your slave
I will peel you grapes
Up on your pedestal
With your ivory and apes
With your book of ideas
With your alchemy
O Come on
Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send it all around the world
Cause here she comes, my beautiful girl

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

Anybody who name checks Wilmot (and he's not referring to the talented and generous Eddie Anderson of Jack Benny fame), St. John of the Cross, and Philip Larkin, beside numerous others, is an instant inductee into the LitRock Hall of Fame as far as I'm concerned. Here's a video of the song performed during the Abattoir Blues tour.





This week's poem is from Lilliput Review #31, April 1992, to commemorate the passing of blues composer, arranger, consciousness objector, and bass player extraordinaire Willie Dixon, arguably the prime mover of urban blues. Unbelievably, these are just a few of the songs he wrote: Back Door Man, Bring It On Home, Diddy Wah Diddy, Down in the Bottom, Evil, Hoochie Coochie Man, I Ain't Superstitious, I Can't Quit You Baby, I Just Want to Make Love to You, Little Red Rooster, Mellow Down Easy, Pain in My Heart, Seventh Son, The Same Thing, Tollin' Bells, Wang Dang Doodle, You Can't Judge a Book By Its Cover (which has already made an appearance on Issa's Sunday Service), and You Shook Me.

The Death of Willie Dixon

Late January, a handful of
leaves on a single tree -
the wind.

K. Shabee

a corrupt world
in its latter days...
but cherry blossoms!

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

James Wright: A Prayer To The Lord Ramakrishna (II)

A Prayer To The Lord Ramakrishna

I.
The anguish of a naked body is more terrible
To bear than God.
And the rain goes on falling.

2.
When I stand up to cry out,
She laughs.
On the window sill, I lean
My bare elbows.
One blue wing, torn whole out of heaven,
Soaks in the black rain.

3.
Blind, mouth sealed, a face blazes
On my pillow of cold ashes.

4.
No!
I kneel down naked and ask forgiveness.
A cold drizzle blows into the room,
And my shoulders flinch to the bone.
You have nothing to do with us.
Sleep on.

James Wright

I spent the last few days working on this poem and had an entire post ready to go and trashed it. Here's how it started out:

As many of you know, James Wright is one of my favorite poets, as is his son, Franz. One shared element in the work of both is the ambiance of mystery, the element of the unexplainable; this is, for me, the essence of poetic experience, exploring beyond the known. I've read many of James Wright's poems multiple times, but ran across this one recently in one of my periodic revisits to his work. Since one volume or the another (or the complete poems) is always by my bedside, these visitations are quite frequent (yes, I have all the individual volumes as well as the complete work - if I have to explain this to you, chances are you'd never understand).

I really didn't remember reading this piece previously, which is odd since I've an interest in Eastern culture including Hindi religion. Sometimes a creative work "comes to you" only when you are ready for it, and in that sense it seems I've never read this poem before.

Where to start? It is something of a perfect little jewel, no pun intended. It is enigmatic; it dazzles in its depth and brilliance. It is for me nearly inexplicable and yet positively alluring.

What followed was the issue. I began to pry the poem apart as if with a crowbar and I made the kind of mess one would expect to make with a crowbar and a poem. I talked of the poems three characters, of the significance of the "blue" wing, of a profound existential experience, and wondered why the poem was excluded from the Robert Bly and Annie Wright edited Selected Poems. The conundrum presented by the last two lines is positively gripping. Pronouns, and their reference, play a big part. I compared it in tone to one of Edward Hopper's portrayals of solitude and that it provokes a forlorn feeling almost too much to bear. Then I began to puzzle over Krishna versus Lord Ramakrishna and watched as my exegesis just came undone and I realized that there was more thinking to do, indeed.

So, rather than heave the whole overboard, I thought I would send it your way virtually unsmudged. The poem is too good not to share, too good to let go by the boards. Rather than bludgeon it senseless to everyone's profound distress, I thought I'd just let it be.




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This week's feature issue is of Lilliput Review is #161 from March 2008, which may also be viewed in its entirety here. Enjoy.



all along
----these pines
--------showing you how

John Martone

beside the snow bank
wind ruffles the feathers
of the dead sparrow

Jack Watson

#2

Asking poems which among
The wildflowers
Denies its red color?
So why in spring do I feel
Like a sinful girl?

Yosano Akiko
translated by Dennis Maloney

And, of course, last word to the master:







cuckoo--
is this rain falling
only on me?

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Nick Cave: Giving the World Another Spin

It's Nick Cave's birthday today and here is a post I wrote over @ Eleventh Stack, the blog from my daytime job, to celebrate the occasion. It has some interesting videos posted and linked to.

Enjoy.

Oh, what the hey, here's one of my favorites, performed live, that didn't make it into the Eleventh Stack post:

singing insects, too
make music
in this world

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Jim Carroll on Reading Raymond Chandler: Issa's Sunday Service, #21

Sadly, today's edition of Issa's Sunday Service caps off a week of tribute posts for Jim Carroll. Happily, we still have his work, as long as we're alive, to turn to for solace, instruction, and enjoyment. This week's LitRock song is by the Jim Carroll Band: "Three Sisters:"

But she just wants to lay in bed all night
Reading Raymond Chandler.

I've been thinking about another of the song's featured on the blog this week, "It's Too Late." I remember Jim and the band appearing live on one of the nationally syndicated late night television shows, possibly Saturday Night Live, and performing it. He performed an alternative version of these opening lines:

It's too late
To fall in love with Sharon Tate
But it's too soon
To ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb

It's probably hard to imagine today that the reference to Sharon Tate, one the victims slaughtered by the Manson family, was powerful and shocking, but, indeed, it was, particularly in a "pop" song, one being performed before millions of people on television. Here is the alternate opening as I remember it:

It's too late
To fall in love with Sharon Tate
But it's too soon
To trace the path of the bullet in the brain of Reverend Moon

I say "as I remember it" because I can't find any reference to it anywhere. There are some live performance videos of the song from a show called Fridays, but it doesn't have the alternate reading. I wonder if anybody out there remembers that performance because those alternate lines about Reverend Moon dealt in poetic prophecy, not realized, and were every bit as shocking, if not more so, in the context of the place and time than the Tate lines.

This week's featured poem is from Lilliput Review #29, February 1992. As elegy's go, it's a fit way to close:

last will and testament

make a wind chime
from my bones,

hang it
where the poets speak.

let me be a part
of the conversation,
life.

Charlie Mehrhoff

Sumiyoshi's lamps
die out again...
autumn wind

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

PS: ✔ out 21 weeks of LitRock songs @ LitRock From Issa's Sunday Service.

Jim Carroll 5

Here is one of three poems printed and distributed at the funeral for Jim Carroll:

Poem

Alright
Buddha gets
A backstage pass

But his friends have to pay

Jim Carroll

As some of you may have guessed, I'm having a bit of a hard time with the passing of Jim Carroll. I only met him once, briefly, and he was very kind to a book store clerk helping to set up an offsite signing. The reading itself was full of humor, pathos, and an unflinching look into the great maw of Being.

It is a comfort to know that his words and music live on.

Fires
Burn in my heart.
No smoke rises.
No one knows.

Kenneth Rexroth from The Morning Star

my province--
even the smoke
an ancient thing

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Jim Carroll 4

Here's another beauty from Mr. Carroll: "City Drops into the Night."


City Drops into the Night

It's when Billy's whores are workin'
They're workin' with the skeleton crew
It's when the sky over Jersey
That sky starts to drain from view
It's when my woman pawns her voice so
So she can make her old excuses sound new

But I just want one clue

'Cause when the city drops into the night
Before the darkness there's one moment of light
When everything seems clear
The other side, it seems so near
What seemed wrong?
I think it's gonna be just about right
Before the city drops, the city drops
Into the night

It's when the door to the River
That door is like 26 miles
It's when ambitious little girls start
They start to dream about a change in style
It's when the slick boys got their fingers
They got their fingers in the telephone dial

But I think I'll just wait a while

'Cause when the city drops into the night
Before the darkness there's one moment of light
When everything seems clear
The other side, it seems so near
What seemed wrong?
I think it's gonna be just about right
Before the city drops, the city drops
Into the night

It's when the sneak thieves are checkin'
They're checkin the alleys for unlocked doors
And Billy's sister's gettin' frantic 'cause
'Cause Billy's sister's little brother can't score
It's when the woman from the dream is . . .
Oh my God! That's the woman on the floor

Each promise was just one promise more

'Cause when the city drops into the night
Before the darkness there's one moment of light
When everything seems clear
The other side, it seems so near
What seemed wrong?
I think it's gonna be just about right
Before the city drops, the city drops
Into the night

It's when Teddy's ghost is on the roof
Beatin' his drum
And Teddy's best friend is two blocks East
And he's makin' Teddy's ex-girlfriend come
You know, they mistook Teddy's blind trust . . .
Just to prove that Teddy was dumb . . .
But listen, you know, I think they are both just scum

'Cause when the city drops into the night
Before the darkness there's one moment of light
When everything seems clear
The other side, it seems so near
What seemed wrong?
I think it's gonna be just about right
Before the city drops, the city drops
Into the night

It's when the body at the bottom,
That body is my own reflection
But it ain't hip to sink that low
Unless you're gonna make a resurrection
They're always gonna come to your door
They're gonna say, "It's just a routine inspection"
But what you get when you open your door
What you get is just another injection
And there's always gonna be one more
With just a little bit less until the next one
They wait in shadows and steal the light from your eyes
To them vision's just some costly infection
But listen, you should come with me
I'm the fire, I'm the fire's reflection
I'm just a constant warning to take the other direction

Mister, I am your connection

'Cause when the city drops into the night
Before the darkness there's one moment of light
When everything seems clear
The other side, it seems so near
What seemed wrong?
I think it's gonna be just about right
Before the city drops, the city drops
Into the night

best,
Don

Jim Carroll 3

Tom Clark, one of today's finest poets, was a friend of Jim Carroll. Read his extraordinary recollections of Jim @ his fine blog: they are revelatory.

Don

Jim Carroll 2

People Who Died - Jim Carroll

Teddy sniffing glue he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on east two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

G-berg and georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper manhattan
Sly in vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby od'd on drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died / I miss 'em--they died

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And eddie, I miss you more than all the others,
And I salute you brother/ this song is for you my brother

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Herbie pushed tony from the boys' club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But herbie sure gave tony some bitchen proof
"hey," herbie said, "tony, can you fly? "
But tony couldn't fly . . . tony died

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin' on some bikers
He said, hey, I know it's dangerous,
But it sure beats riker's
But the next day he got offed
By the very same bikers

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

RIP, Jim.


Don

People Who Died: Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll: RIP

Jim Carroll, poet, memorist, rocker. He will be missed.

Don

Issa's Sunday Service, #20: Romeo & Juliet

Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:

There are classics and then there are classics. It seems, however, for every generation there is its own unique Romeo and Juliet. Punk was happening and headbands and sweatsuits and big hair was just around the corner when Dire Straits ran a counter, at least for a while, interesting path. It doesn't really get more RockLit than this; song above and video following.





This week's featured poem comes from Lilliput Review #28, February 1992. Enjoy.

Ars Poetica

Forging a poem is
Like nothing so much as
Building a butterfly
Of bronze.

Patricia Higginbotham

will I grow old
like that?
autumn butterfly

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

For 20 weeks of rock songs that are literature infused, see the home of "LitRock from Issa's Sunday Service."

The Other Anne Sexton: It Is A Spring Afternoon

I've spent the summer very slowly reading through the complete poems of Anne Sexton for the 3 Poems By discussion group, which will be meeting this Thursday at my other job. I recently posted about this over at a different blog and, in that post, I talked about one of her lesser known poems, "Young," and how it highlighted an aspect of Sexton that one doesn't often hear about. I continue to slowly read through her work, a poem or two at most per day, because frankly it is all I can absorb.

Last week I ran across this poem, again emphasizing an aspect of Sexton not often discussed:

It Is A Spring Afternoon

Everything here is yellow and green.
Listen to its throat, its earthskin,
the bone dry voices of the peepers
as they throb like advertisements.
The small animals of the woods
are carrying their deathmasks
into a narrow winter cave.
The scarecrow has plucked out
his two eyes like diamonds
and walked into the village.
The general and the postman
have taken off their packs.
This has all happened before
but nothing here is obsolete.
Everything here is possible.

Because of this
perhaps a young girl has laid down
her winter clothes and has casually
placed herself upon a tree limb
that hangs over a pool in the river.
She has been poured out onto the limb,
low above the houses of the fishes
as they swim in and out of her reflection
and up and down the stairs of her legs.
Her body carries clouds all the way home.
She is overlooking her watery face
in the river where blind men
come to bathe at midday.

Because of this
the ground, that winter nightmare,
has cured its sores and burst
with green birds and vitamins.
Because of this
the trees turn in their trenches
and hold up little rain cups
by their slender fingers.
Because of this
a woman stands by her stove
singing and cooking flowers.
Everything here is yellow and green.

Surely spring will allow
a girl without a stitch on
to turn softly in her sunlight
and not be afraid of her bed.
She has already counted seven
blossoms in her green green mirror.
Two rivers combine beneath her.
The face of the child wrinkles
in the water and is gone forever.
The woman is all that can be seen
in her animal loveliness.
Her cherished and obstinate skin
lies deeply under the watery tree.
Everything is altogether possible
and the blind men can also see.

Anne Sexton

I see this poem as a companion piece to "Young," portraying a time in a young woman's life when she is on the cusp between adolescence and adulthood. Though both these poems have slightly portentous undercurrents, both also emphasize a youthful promise the idea of which Sexton obviously cherished.

The loss for her of this innocence and for us of Sexton herself is almost too much to bear.



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This week's featured back issue is #164, from July 2008. And the war drags on ...

turned back & got lost.

John Martone

The Numbers of the Dead

which appear in the headlines
to be perfectly round
like the planets

aren't really round.
They only appear that way
when seen from a great distance.

Up close they bulge.
They are gouged, pocked, frigid,
infinitely lonely numbers

divisible only by themselves and one.

Paul Hostovsky

war$pin
war$oil
war$hip
war$ink
war$end
war$aid
war$hit
war$hot
war$how
war$own
war$old
war$pun

LeRoy Gorman

Muddy ditch water,
& dimples beneath
waterspider's feet–

---------tenuous, this life.

Hosho McCreesh

in the footprints
of the warrior...
poppies

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Issa's Sunday Service, #19: John Berryman Rock

For this week's Issa's Sunday Service, comes a song I heard for the first time yesterday, entitled "Stuck Between Stations." The band is The Hold Steady, sounding an awful lot like early Springsteen, though from the rest of the album it is obvious they've got a lot to offer. I'm down with any band that has lines like

"There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right"

Or

"The devil and john berryman
-took a walk together,
-They ended up on washington
-talking to the river"

And the rest of the lyrics aren't too shabbing either. As a bonus, here's their Late Night performance of "Stuck Between Stations" -




Geek rock for all us geeks. There ya are.


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Here's a poem from Lilliput Review #27, November 1991. Have a great Labor Day.

Untitled Wednesday Poem

Can snake misbehave
in Jungle? Can cougar
error by mountain cedar?
My sad old knees ache in bed
in dream before dawn, but
know their job is to bring
my body to its resting place,
like full bloomed rose
in August, like cherry tree
its trunk absorbing moon's heart.

Pat Andrus

from his hole the snake
glances back...
corrupt world of desire

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

About Last Saturday's Reading

Last Saturday's reading at Modern Formations Gallery went well and any trepidation I had about reading for the first time in over 20 years rapidly evaporated as the poems took over. Because there were so many readers (14), we were limited to 8 minutes apiece, which made things even easier. I had decided early on that I would do a combination of poems from Lilliput, in recognition of this 20th anniversary year, with a few of my own to finish up. This is another instance that working in the short form really paid off.

I thought I'd share the Lilliput poems I read with you in today's post. Selecting the poems for reading really highlighted some differences between the long and short forms. Most poems of 10 lines or less really don't have public presentation as a primary goal; it's no stretch to say the short poem is generally not designed for public readings. There really isn't enough time to pick up a rhythm, get up some steam, and deliver the goods. The poem is over before you know it.

That doesn't mean that poets don't bring considerable talents in matters such as rhythm, meter, word sound, rhyme and more to the short poem to make them amenable to reading aloud. In fact, if a short poem doesn't bring some poetic device(s), it is in real danger of appearing to be an aphorism or even just a wise (or wise ass) remark. So, in going through the Lillie archives I went in search of certain types of short poems and, happily, found them in reasonable abundance. As a result, the poems I selected actually are not representative of the magazine as a whole, just a certain aspect of that magazine.

It didn't make much sense to get up and read work that wasn't designed in a way for reading and wouldn't connect in that type of setting. As a result, what follows was specifically chosen for the reading and, from the response, seemed to go over fairly well. It was a real challenge to present the work of other poets and to do the work justice.





springtime in a city park

look at them all
carrying weight and shoes
and pants,
briefcases and glasses.
a cigarette slowly lifted
to the lips.
sunlight on a youthful book
open.
hope.
look at them all
they're so fucking beautiful.

Charlie Mehrhoff, LR #48

business as usual

money says have a nice day

money says bark like a dog

money says bark like a dog
and roll over

money says blame each other

money says have another biscuit

Don Wleklinski, LR #153

The Arrival

We have arrived without luggage
in a country we don't recognize
among people who distrust us
where the walls have no windows
and the doors open only
for the chosen. Welcome home.

David Chorlton, LR #145

Apple

Sometimes when eating an apple
I bite too far
and open the little room
the lovers have prepared,
and the seeds fall
onto the kitchen floor
and I see
they are tear-shaped.

Jay Leeming, LR #72

I RIP OFF YOU, YOU RIP OFF ME, WE RIP OFF THEM
THAY RIP OFF US, THAY RIP ME OFF, I RIP OFF THEM
YOU RIP OFF THEM, THAY RIP OFF YOU, HE RIPS OFF
ME, I RIP OFF HIM, HE RIPS OFF YOU, YOU RIP OFF
HIM, WE RIP OFF HIM, HE RIPS OFF US, I RIP OFF
HER, SHE RIPS OFF ME, SHE RIPS OFF YOU, YOU RIP
OFF HER, I RIP OFF ME, YOU RIP OFF YOU, THAY RIP
OFF THEMSELVES, I FOLLOW YOU, YOU FOLLOW ME AND
SO ON DOWN THE LINE, THAY HYPNOTIZE US, THAY
HYPNOTIZE US, I HYPNOTIZE YOU

John Harter, LR #106

THE LIBRARIAN ASKED
CAN YOU WAIT
FOR THAT BOOK
ON
FIFTH CENTURY
BUDDHIST STATUARY

John Harter, LR #110

Lost in the Translation

I'm impotent today she
said, closed the book
capped her pen. You can't
be impotent or potent, they
laughed. You have no penis.
She listened, and for a long
time, she believed them

Celeste Bowman, LR #89

He crept in
like mildew.

Suzanne Bowers, #59

We forget
we're mostly water
till the rain falls
and every atom
in our body
starts to go home

Albert Huffstickler, LR #116

Yawn Series of Younger Poets

annual politician of
a first book of
plums by ailing
writer under 40.
Marmosets may be
sulimated only
during February
and must be
accompanied by
a stamped, self
addressed moose

Lyn Lifshin, LR #6

your body

each piece a shining eye
examining
the rest of the explosion

scarecrow, LR #71

2003

Just before spring
--the war begins
-but - ignorant -
the pink blossoms
--keep opening
--their tiny fists

Judith Toler, LR #135

Disaster

Last night the past broke
and there was history
all over the cellar.
You should have seen it -
Rome was here, Greece was there,
Egypt floated near the ceiling -
finally I had to
call an historian:
and you know what they charge
for emergencies.

Gail White, LR #22

One Small Poem

can take you
a long way

think how far
you've come

to find
this one.

Bart Solarcyzk, LR #123

I chose not to use any haiku per se for this particular reading simply because the ones I was considering didn't make the final cut, though I did feature a number among my own poems (since it is the form I most exclusively write in these days). There were a number of great readers that evening, particularly Renée Alberts, Nikki Allen, and Jerome Crooks. I felt very fortunate to be sharing the stage with so many talented artists.

I guess I'm good for another 20 years.

the preacher's
hand gestures too...
summer trees

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don