Raamesh Gowri Raghaven & Rehn Kovacic:Wednesday Haiku, #189

Photo by Benoy

unfenced:
songs from
the tea garden

     Raamesh Gowri Raghavan

 

Artwork by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

clouded mind
      the scent
    of sweet rain

      Rehn Kovacic

Artwork by J. F. Nauman

the nightingale, too
has a merry song...
tea pickers

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

PS  Click to learn how to contribute to Wednesday Haiku

Albert Huffstickler Poem in New Arianna Huffington Book

Page 173 from Thrive: The Third Metric for Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Wisdom, Well-Being, and Wonder by Arianna Huffington

Anyone who reads this blog regularly or has been a subscriber to Lilliput Review from way back knows how much I love the work of Albert Huffstickler. A few months back I was contacted by a representative of Arianna Huffington about reprinting a poem by Huff that I had published in Lilliput Review #117 and, subsequently, in a blog post (scroll to end) for Lilliput's previous blog, Beneath Cherry Blossoms, where Ms. Huffington evidently encountered the poem. 

I, of course, had no objections, but needed to help find out who held the rights to the poem in the Huffstickler family. After a number of contacts, I was able to direct Ms. Huffington's representative to a member of the family who was able to grant permission. 

This is quite a journey by this brief, powerful poem by a small press poet who touched so many souls while he was alive and the decade plus since he's death. I don't know the print run for Thrive, but its a New York Times Bestseller, so 6 figures is not out of the question, possibly more considering the Internet dominance of her site, The Huffington Post.

And then, there is that poem that touched her like so many have been touched by Huff's work:

We forget we're

mostly water

till the rain falls

and every atom

in our body

starts to go home.

    Albert Huffstickler

I'm not sure what Huff would make of all this but I'm betting that he'd think, well, if a hundred thousand or so people read this one poem and if a it grabs a handful, I've done my job well.

Huff, 13 years after you've gone and you've still got it. Now that would bring a quick smile before returning to the next cup of coffee, the next cigarette, and the next blank sheet of paper beckoning for your whole heart and soul.

Thanks again, Huff. And thanks to Arianna Huffington, for passing a gift on to so many who would otherwise not known.

------------------

a day for wandering
a day for haiku...
spring rain

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

Wonderful video on Huff by Matthew Listiak

best,

Don

PS If anyone would like a copy of Lilliput Review #117 with the Huff poem, drop me a line. It's still available.  

William Killen - Winter: Small Press Friday

William Killen is a fine, traditional haiku poet in the best sense of the phrase, whose work has been featured here previously. The small, self-produced volume at hand, Haiku VI: Winter, is a lesson in the form and the life.

The collection itself is less about the individual impact of particular poems as it is about the sum of its parts, and the sum of its parts is winter. How things sound in winter; winter, the domain of the predator; winter, a world of contemplation and seclusion. 

Just how deeply perceptive this work is I only began to realize on  second and third readings. The word evocative comes to mind, the smells, the sights, sounds (and their silences), even the land and its creatures, including ourselves.

There is a spell cast here and its name is winter. Like Killen's beautifully rendered art that grace its pages, we feel its tone and mood.

It is a book which, like a deep meditation, forces you to slow down. 

If I was forced to choose, I have to say that it is nigh impossible to select a few poems that might be representative of what I'm trying so feebly to capture. That being said (when has impossible truly stopped anyone who was determined to try), here are 3 poems whose virtue is that they stand out, which is probably antithetical to the very point I'm trying to make.

more winter rain
the river is filled
with haiku

This is as about close as the poet gets to inserting personality into a poem and, for me, it is a fine, if slightly post-modern, exception.

After all, exception proves the rule, right?

first light
cock crows on and on
foggy morning

This poem is more typical of the overall tone - there is a fine mixture here of three senses: sight, sound, and touch. With dawn we begin to see, yet it is foggy, and cock's muted crowing conveys with sound (and, in a very real sense, tactility) what the sun does with sight.

first raindrops
warm midnight —
dead of winter

Here is solitude, season and mood, all captured in a tone, almost flattish, that is reminiscent of classical haiku. As with previous examples, the poet's closeness to nature is paramount - inside the home or hut, the poet feels and hears a particular mid-winter mood, what in the Eastern US is sometimes categorized as the January thaw. 

It is what the poet/narrator is thinking here that concerns us. Not necessarily the specifics, but what is thought, or might have been thought, or felt, or experienced under similar circumstances, not just by the narrator but by the reader, too.

In this case, as with "first light," a feeling is perfectly captured. 

Currently, I am reading a book entitled The Poetics of Space by Gaston Blanchard and, utilizing the image of the house, it explores creativity, the imagination, and the archetypal experiences of human beings. 

Haiku, particularly of the quality and tone of such a poet as William Killen, fits perfectly within Blanchard's thesis.

A true merging of East and West.

Killen's work is available directly from him. It contains 55 haiku, 14 fine pieces of art (in a variety of mediums: acrylic on paper, acrylic on canvas, ink, pen & color pencil, traditional ink brush, felt tip & color pencil, mixed media on paper, and ink & acrylic on paper), and a phenomenological approach to existence that might prompt the most jaded modern philosopher into a sense of wonder. The book is $10, plus $2 shipping, and can be acquired directly from the poet. Email him at wdkillen AT yahoo dot com (where the spaces are removed and read @ for AT and . for dot) for details. 

Alternately he may be contacted at his art website:

http://william-killen.artistwebsites.com/

or via the good ol' US Postal Service at 90 Tennessee St., Suite B, Murphy, NC  28906.

Artwork by William Killen

--------

Night Rain at Oyama by Toyokuni II

on me, on the mountain
we take our turns...
winter rain

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

PS. Get 2 free issues. Get 2 more free issues

Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 175 songs

Before Music: Philip Rowland - Small Press Friday

Before Music by Philip Rowland does not give up its secrets easily and that, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing. It might even be thought of as a bit of a mystery wrapped in a conundrum, not unlike one of my favorite poems gathered in this new collection

inside an envelope
inside an envelope:
   funeral money

If you have never witnessed something like this, either at a funeral or a wedding, trust me, it does happen. The poem itself captures Rowland's core approach, an approach shared in spirit with the best classic haiku. Show, don't tell. 

Why?

Because, if poetry is going to do what it needs to do, you, the reader, need to occasionally do some of the heavy lifting. When you start from this premise, the secrets begin to gradually evince themselves (though you might want to sleep in late the next day).

The collection is divided into 5 sections, each taking its name from a poem in that section. A sort of resounding, perhaps? You must make out for yourself what that might mean. I'm still doing some heavy lifting of my own.

One gets the sense of the poet working through some things or, perhaps, some single, overriding thing. The landscape of the work may be thought of as mental, or pre-conscious, or unconscious (I believe it has helped me immensely in reading Rowland that I was simultaneously re-reading Georg Trakl), or, as I'd prefer to think of it, as an attempt to capture with words the prelinguisitc state. 

What state might that be? Well, I can tell you it ain't Jersey.

after
love

prac
ti

sing
speech

less
ness 

This is somewhere we all, hopefully, at one time in our lives or another, have resided.  And, yes, this is modern haiku (if anyone wants to parse definitions, go ahead, I'm listening and I'm also aware) and I like it very much, resonating as it does the state which it describes.

There is much here that has to do with sound, and a lot that touches on music.

Prelude in C -
winter sky 
deep in the piano lid

There is a poem by Mary Oliver that resides somewhere in the neighborhood of Rowland's landscape here, a poem called "Music Lesson." Maybe it is another story altogether, but it surely comes from the same book.  Speaking of which, the poem which follows Prelude:

In the hush before music
the music of who
I am not

Yes, we know this landscape, of Rowland, of Trakl, of Oliver, of other, of not-other.

There is another piece that hits a similar note:

a Bach fugue
hands separately 
trying to make sense of
the rainy season

The landscapes are distinctly interior, but they are most definitely exterior, too. The interiorizing of the exterior, the exterioring of the interior? 

Among the final poems that conclude Before Music, this monostitch fills out the whole lost chord:

what's left of the light the music absorbs 

Much the same could be said of other themes which sound throughout this 50 or so odd poem collection, most notably rain and autumn (even the book's cover, pictured above, is part of the thematic whole). I will illustrate with 2 more, 2 of my favorites, from this fine, provocative collection of new haiku: 

autumn
      leaves . . .
                the
mn    in autumn

Did I mention how very important sound is to Rowland? Yes, I thought so. May I confess, most miserably, how very, very much I wish I'd written this poem ... mmn? I always love "leaves" as both a verb and a noun, especially in a poem of 6 nearly words. And this one, this one:

leaf I leave
on the floor of
my childhood

I would say we need a scholar here to deliver the definitive treatise on time, that is past, present, and future time, in classic haiku, only I'm too busy brushing away the tears.

How about you?

Before Music is published by Red Moon Press, it fits perfectly in the hand, perfectly in the mind. Get it here direct from Red Moon Press.

After all, it is Small Press Friday.


--------------------------- 

Photograph by E. W. Kelley (1908)

deutzia blossoms--
the children play
funeral

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

PS. Get 2 free issues. Get 2 more free issues

Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 158 songs

Gary Hotham & Angele Ellis: Wednesday Haiku #103

Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston

the more things dry off
   the rest of our life
       after the rain

        Gary Hotham

Photograph by Pictoscribe

 


half-ripe tomatoes
lined up on the warm sill--
grandmother

     Angele Ellis

Tramps (photograph) by H. Koppdelaney

the little crow
slips so cleverly...
spring rain

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

 

PS. Get 2 free issues. Get 2 more free issues

Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 158 songs

Cummings, the Romantic

Photograph by László Szalai 

From the wonderful site, moving poems, a little videopoem that captures E. E. Cummings as the true romantic he was. One might think the pace a bit languid, but there is the point, or at least a number of them, which may be re-examined a little more closely as they pirouette in slow motion across the screen of the soul.


somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond 

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

- E. E. Cummings

Rain by Karol Hiller

--------------------

morning's first thing--
on praying hands
the spring rain

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don 

PS.Get 2 free issues. Get 2 more free issues

Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 154 songs