Alan Summers — 

Touchstone Award Winner

.

Alan Summers is a recipient of a Touchstone Individual Poem Award for 2016 for his poem

house clearance
room by room by room
my mother disappears

It first appeared in Blithe Spirit 26.1

Blithe Spirit (journal of the British Haiku Society):
http://britishhaikusociety.org.uk/journal/


From the panel of judges:

“When I read haiku, I’m looking for an unexpected view on the well-known. I’m curious to learn about an open secret (after Robert Spiess). I’m looking for a simple (but not banal) and lucid language that expresses something extraordinary within the ordinary, something which I never read before in that way as well as something that is of beauty beyond time. ‘house clearance’ represents the pure power of haiku. Layers of meaning ascending from deeper layers of the mind (‘room by room by room’) in relation to existential truth (‘my mother disappears’). Perhaps one finds a human contradiction: memories can only get preserved vividly after “clearance.”

“An emotional and vivid image that brings sadness at first reading while effectively pointing out that taking away the physical doesn’t remove the memory.”

Alan was one of five winners for the individual haiku category out of a record 660 entries.

More information about the Touchstone Awards: https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/04/30/commentaries-for-the-2016-touchstone-awards/

Haiku for Beginners - Group Online Course

About Karen and Alan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VS36AGVI6s

website: www.callofthepage.org

For more information contact us at: admin@callofthepage.org

We now have a new and brilliant course for beginners!

designed by Karen Hoy

Introducing... Haiku

https://www.callofthepage.org/learning/haiku-courses/introducing-haiku/

We hope to bring another beginners course later in the year.

There is a newsletter (details on the page) if you want to be kept uptodate on Call of the Page courses.

Previous course:

Haiku Beginners - Group Online Course

This is an entry level course, not only for people who are looking specifically to learn about writing haiku, but for those who are inspired to try this short form as a manageable way into starting creative writing.

With this course, we enjoy getting back to basics.

In the first assignment we will use short prose exercises to improve the brevity of our writing - a quality essential to haiku.  We will learn what to watch out for when reading haiku.  

For the second assignment we'll begin to write the brief snippets of words that make up a haiku.  

With the third and final assignment we will be ready to compose complete haiku.  Each assignment will have detailed feedback from the tutor.  The tutor's feedback is shared with all participants, so everybody learns from each other's work.

Participants should have at least three finished haiku by the end of the course, and ideas for continuing their writing.  

The course ends with an optional 20-minute phone or Skype chat with Alan to answer any outstanding questions about haiku in general or the student's work or next steps.

LEVEL:  beginners at haiku, or beginners at creative writing.

GROUP SIZE: up to 6.

START DATE:  Monday 17th October 2016, finishing 8 weeks later. 

FULL COST: £95 or US$125. 

EARLY BIRD COST: £80 or US$105 (if paying by Monday 26th September 2016).

BOOKING: by payment via PayPal to alan@withwords.org.uk
Go to the Paypal website: https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/send-money-online



weblink:
https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/send-money-online

Your payment by Paypal confirms you a place on the course. 

For more information contact us at: admin@callofthepage.org

BIOGRAPHY

Alan Summers MA (Bath Spa University)

Alan Summers, a Japan Times award-winning writer, is London born recently moved to Chippenham, in the South West of England. He has been teaching about haiku internationally, and its related genres, for over twenty years.

His work regularly appears in leading anthologies around the haiku genre:

Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years 

(W. W. Norton 2013)

Haiku 2014; Haiku 2015; and Haiku 2016 

Modern Haiku Press

The Disjunctive Dragonfly, a New Approach to English-Language Haiku 

(Red Moon Press 2012)

A Vast Sky, An Anthology of Contemporary World Haiku (Tancho Press 2015)

Journeys 2015 - An Anthology of International Haibun (prose form with haiku)

NHK World TV of Japan recently featured him in Europe meets Japan - Alan's Haiku Journey, and he has regularly appeared in Japanese newspapers:

http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/europe-meets-japan-alans-haiku-journey.html

Japanese newspaper quotes about Alan:

"Astonishingly moving haiku" 

YOMIURI SHIMBUN (Japan) January 2005

"Widely known haiku poet...as dry as vintage champagne"

YOMIURI SHIMBUN (14 million readers in Japan)

16th September 2002 (chosen while spending my birthday in Tokyo, Japan)

He is regularly asked to be a haiku competition judge:

The IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award:

http://iaforhaikuaward.org/alan-summers-guest-judge

World Monuments Fund Haiku Contest:

http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/extended-judges-report-for-2013-world.html 

2015 World Haiku Competition

http://lyricalpassionpoetry.yolasite.com/2015-world-haiku-competition-open.php

And more recently The International Matsuo Bashō Award for haiku poets worldwide organised by The Italian Haiku Association.

Alan is a co-editor of five haiku-based anthologies, and four collections of haiku, and has been a co-founding editor of two haiku magazines.

He is the author of the forthcoming book

Writing Poetry: the haiku way (2017).

Also do check out our one-to-one individual feedback options too! 
http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/expert-one-to-one-individual-feedback.html

Fay Aoyagi and Beyond the Reach of My Chopsticks - A Haiku Collection Review by Alan Summers

(photo by Garry Gay) 

Fay Aoyagi’s haiku collections are a must for anyone serious about haiku, in my opinion. Fortunately for anyone who has missed out on her earlier work we have the extra bonus that her latest collection also includes a Selected Haiku section showcasing work from both of her previous collections.

David G. Lanoue has this to say about Aoyagi in his featured essay for Modern Haiku:

In recent years San Francisco poet Fay Aoyagi has been exploring what she calls “the inner landscape” with the same keen focus and subtle perception that traditional poets of haiku bring to birds, flowers and the moon.

David G. Lanoue further states:

Personally, I believe that haiku is about discovery: the deeper the feeling of discovery, the better the haiku, in my opinion. In a great haiku we sense the poet finding out something in the process of composition, not reporting on a thing that has been previously mentally digested.

Something with Wings: Fay Aoyagi's Haiku of Inner Landscape by David G. Lanoue, 
Featured Essay, Modern Haiku Volume 40.2 Summer 2009
http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/Lanoue-FayAoyagiHaiku.html


Aoyagi’s first haiku collection was a landmark book when it looked worryingly possible that haiku may finally, at least in English, become dried up like one of those tumbleweeds you often saw in Westerns to show a town had died, become a ghost town. That’s what seemed to be the final logical outcome until books of the refreshing quality as in Chrysanthemum Love appeared.

Tumbleweed:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbleweed 

Aoyagi had this to say about her work, in the introduction to her 2003 collection Chrysanthemum Love: 

If you believe haiku must be about nature, you may be disappointed with my work. There is a lot of "me" in my haiku. I write very subjectively. I am not interested in Zen and the Oriental flavours to which some Western haiku/tanka poets are attracted. I love the shortness and evocativeness of haiku. I don't write haiku to report the weather. I write to tell my stories.

Aoyagi doesn’t do weather report haiku yet she still harnesses kigo in both her Japanese and English-language haiku:

Saijiki are a treasure vault of kigo and sample haiku and I rely heavily on saijiki when I write haiku both in Japanese and English.  
Moon in the Haiku Tradition essay by Fay Aoyagi

Bill Higginson put it very forcefully, and unfortunately I agree with him. I’ve seen all too often that formula has become mistaken with form. Although in recent years, along with Aoyagi, there are promising signs that haiku in English have never been healthier.

Yet, for years now, I have had the feeling that our haiku community was somehow steering off in one or at most two narrow directions. On one road we have the Zen- imbued notion of the haiku as a momentary blip on the screen of our lives. 

On the other, haiku becomes a tool in the hands of the satirist, unfit for serious composition. The yeastiness of that implicit conversation among the formalists, the anti-formalists, the Zennists, the nature writers, the inventors of senryu on our continent, the haiku psychologists, and the damned-if-I-won’t-do-it-my-own-way innovators seemed to have dried up. 

Book after book of same-o-same-o haiku seemed to come pouring from the burgeoning presses of our haiku community, as well as occasionally from some larger press. This is not to demean the numerous collections of fine haiku that have appeared. Just to say that there seemed to be little coming out that was outstandingly fresh or developing a truly world-class richness and variety in our fledgling tradition.

Chrysanthemum Love by Fay Aoyagi reviewed by William J. Higginson 
Modern Haiku Vol. 35.2 (Summer 2004)

There may appear to be a lot of jockeying at present about who will be remembered as a haiku writer, outside of Japan, on a world stage level. I would suggest, whether you are new, or a seasoned reader, to haiku, to search carefully which books you add to your haiku library. If you are a writer of haiku as well, only quality reading will inform your own writing. Bill Higginson touches on this, in his important review of Aoyagi’s first collection.

At the same time, new books on Japanese haiku should have been broadening our view of haiku. It seemed as though Makoto Ueda’s greatest masterpiece, Bashô and His Interpreters (1992), and the eye-opening Chiyo-ni: Woman Haiku Master by Patricia Donegan and Yoshie Ishibashi (1998) had fallen under bushel baskets. Where were the poets taking heed, building into our haiku the new richness and diversity of even older Japanese haiku that these books revealed?

Chrysanthemum Love by Fay Aoyagi reviewed by William J. Higginson 
Modern Haiku Vol. 35.2 (Summer 2004)

There are few haiku writers who can harness, seamlessly, the old and the new, or can break out of a perceived mould of what a haiku should be, and what a haiku writer should be. All I can say is look out for them, and keep their books close to your side, and be particular about which haiku books build and increase your library.

I have my own list of authors who I see as the real thing, and some writers know that I include them, and I am always on the lookout for new exciting writers. I have high expectations after the stop start developments of the 1990s. Although the 21st Century is still new, barely over its first decade, we need more writers of Aoyagi’s qualities to cement haiku in the West as a true tradition, and not as a strange experiment. 

Bill says:

Fay Aoyagi has lassoed and galloped beyond most of what we have learned about how to write American haiku in five decades, and opened the way to a new century. Chrysanthemum Love is a stunningly original book and a whole collection of “my favorite haiku”—I hope you’ll make it one of yours. I guarantee, it’s the real thing.

Chrysanthemum Love by Fay Aoyagi reviewed by William J. Higginson 
Modern Haiku Vol. 35.2 (Summer 2004)

Aoyagi is the real thing, and I urge you to beg, borrow, or steal her earlier collections, and if you are quick, you can even purchase her latest collection.

Just a few of her haiku, but you’ll find youself both reading from cover to cover, and dipping in and out. The book is a pleasure to hold and look at, and is a suitably convenient size and shape to find permanent residence in a coat pocket.

low winter moon 
just beyond the reach 
of my chopsticks

who will write 
my obituary? 
winter persimmon

plum blossoms
a specimen of my dream 
sent to the lab

simmering tofu–
father asks where I intend
to be buried

slow ceiling fan
a town hall meeting
of the pet shop goldfish

pastel-colored day
a password
for the budding willow

_____________________________

Beyond the Reach of My Chopsticks
New and Selected Haiku
Fay Aoyagi
Blue Willow Press

The collection was a winner of both the Touchstone Book Award 2012 (The Haiku Foundation) and Mildred Kanterman Memorial Merit Book Awards 2012 (Haiku Society of America)   

Fay Aoyagi's website:

http://fayaoyagi.wordpress.com/ 


This review was published:

Notes from the Gean Vol. 3, Issue 3 December 2011

A shorter review was published in 

LYNX XXVII:1, February, 2012:

http://www.ahapoetry.com/ahalynx/271bookreviews.html 

Earthlings - A review of the haiku collection by Allan Burns

Earthlings by Allan Burns

Art by Ron C. Moss

a muttering thunder publication (2015)

http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/items/show/1405

PDF will take a while to download:
http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/files/original/f08a7cec8ed10b3a032087ec8333c136.pdf

A statement says: “Earthlings is a thematic chapbook of 40 haiku by Allan Burns with artwork by Ron C. Moss.”    

I would certainly say that a collection of 40 haiku is plenty, and that 70 is a good absolute maximum.  Earthlings is the haiku eBook collection by Allan Burns, and the first individual collection released by Muttering Thunder that released the nature-writing anthology of the same name.  His collection opens with a quote from Henry Beston, author of The Outermost House, and Robert Spiess, the much beloved past editor of Modern Haiku magazine (USA) which place the collection into its theme.

Burns is a nature writer where living (and sometimes dead) natural history become a companion:

prairie dog skull–

the attendant’s jumpsuit

darkened by sweat

All of the haiku have been previously published, and an earlier draft of the collection received an Honorable Mention in the Turtle Light Press Haiku Chapbook Contest.

“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete…they are not underlings; they are other nations…fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Henry Beston

after the owl

an owl-shaped hole

in the cloud

Burns is highly knowledgeable about nature, and knows only too much about the trials, tribulations, and interactions of what we patronisingly call wildlife, or even animals as if we, the humans, are a species outside it.   I personally feel we are just a parallel life-form and one with a penchant for many things good and bad that carry an impact on our fellow travellers. Fortunately Burns carries his impact, on the water planet we mysteriously call Earth, with haiku, where its powder is always dry, and he never tries to shoot, incapacitate, or capture, but shares beyond and ‘outside the common human mindset that we own and control nature’.

How far has the human species travelled on this planet with its words?  Burns’ one line haiku:

far along the desert road a man under his hat

And if that is Burns on the desert road, he thankfully doesn’t keep his haiku under his hat for long.  His “I” subdued haiku reveal the nature around him so that we experience the natural history for ourselves accompanied by the vivid art work of Ron C. Moss.

Burns commences the collection with this poem - a scene I imagine he saw many times, but perhaps always as if for the first time, again:

sun-rimmed mist…

the asters trading

butterflies

This brings me to a feature of some of the best haiku, and that is, if we use verbs are they merely per-functionary vehicles for carrying our concrete imagery?  Haiku has been called the poetry of nouns, and perhaps as a practice verbs are required to be unobtrusive, although poets outside haikai literature thrive on its vivacity, where they share at least equal status with all other words and devices.

Should haiku be informed by verbs and by how much?    Bob Spiess says no, that the verbal function can be taken over by other words, and well, yes, I agree.   I admire haiku using the agent of nouns to present action and elements of our senses from “one to five”, and those senses in and on our peripheral.   Well placed verbs that sit outside the neutrality expected of them within haiku can bring out astounding juxtaposition, revealing what our honed peripheral senses can reward us with:

cumulus bulking…

one of the shrub’s leaves

is a katydid

This is a collection that doesn’t depend on a single trick, and the use of verbs has brought up some startling scenes that inform strong nature writing not limited to a safe and perceived world of wildlife, and a out-of-sightedness of what we do to our fellow citizens:

the caged chimpanzee

injected with hepatitis

signs hello

This collection isn’t about otherness, it’s us recognising that we are part of “them”, that there is no real them and us or them or us; that we are not above or outside the rest of nature, that we can engage with the rest of ‘us’ via small eco-poetic hits like haiku verses:

ill this fall day…

a crow softens peanut shells

in the birdbath

Reporting the news has become a sinister trade embellishing what Joseph Goebbels (Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945) developed from the past, to the demise of one newspaper that was finally exposed as being far from the news of the world. Haiku is such a potent reporting tool: It can connect us to the small snippets that humans are in the bigger picture of things.  Nature may be tooth and claw, but opposable thumbs give us space, just as one of my opposable thumbs creates space by tapping the space bar on my computer.

What will become of us as we wonder less and less about nature, and what stays with me, and resonates, is carried by the verb in this haiku:

what’s to come of us…

long into the night

a fox screams

As at least one U.S. State has outlawed/criminalised the mention of climate change on the planet, we do need to connect with our partner denizens, and haiku is a wondrous and beautiful way for us to consider connecting and re-connecting while we still have time.   

firesky ridge–

the tanager drinks

his own red

We are all earthlings on this spinning floating rock and liquid thing called a planet which is, after all, one very large life-form in its own and collective right:

high-desert wind–

a migrant owl rests

on an earthship

I look forward to further collections from this author, containing such memorable scenes of natural history, where we can consider ourselves proud to be part of the earthship crew.

Alan Summers

Published by the British Haiku Society's journal Blithe Spirit

(Vol. 25 issue 2, 2015)

See also the FREE PDF Muttering Thunder anthologies which have natural history haiku:  http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/items/show/3087

A selection of haiku poems by Alan Summers in American magazine Modern Haiku

                     An Independent Journal of Haiku and Haiku Studies

"you ain't serious about haiku if you don't subscribe to Modern Haiku"
—Small Press Review, December 2004

www.modernhaiku.org/subscriptions.html

One haiku just published this Summer in Modern Haiku, and a selection of others from last year, plus a couple of oldies or mor from the 1990s.

night of small colour
a part of the underworld
becomes one heron

Alan Summers

Publication Credit: Modern Haiku Vol. 45.2  Summer 2014

this small ache and all the rain too robinsong

Alan Summers

Publications credits: Modern Haiku vol. 44.1 winter/spring 2013

ants following invisible trials the children

Alan Summers

Publication Credits: Modern Haiku  issue 44:3 (2013)

mist and dark I hold onto Little Bear

Alan Summers

Publication Credits: Modern Haiku  issue 44:3 (2013)

woodfire

flickering in the silence

corralled horses

Alan Summers

Publications credits: Modern Haiku vol. xxvi  no. 3 (1995); Moonlighting  (Intimations Pamphlet Series British Haiku Society publication, 1996); sundog haiku journal: an australian year  (sunfast press 1997 reprinted 1998); California State Library - 1997; First Australian Haiku online Anthology (1999); First Australian Anthology (Paper Wasp 2000); haiku dreaming australia the best haiku & senryu relevant in and to Australia (2006); The Crow Walk haibun (HAIKU HIKE, World Walks, Crossover UK 'Renewability' project 2006)); Stepping Stones:  a way into haiku  (British Haiku Society 2007); Mann Library, Cornell University Daily Haiku (March 2013)

Far North Queensland

a dingo’s call picked up-

the moonless night 

Alan Summers

Publications credits: Modern Haiku (199-)

web link:

Far North Queensland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_North_Queensland




cool morning
birdsong
    light on a distant cloud

Alan Summers

Publications credits: 
Modern Haiku, (1999); Azami Haiku in English Commemorative Issue  (2000); Birmingham Words Magazine Issue 3 (Autumn 2004); Haiku Friends Vol. 3 ed. Masaharu Hirata (Japan 2009)

Modern Haiku Summer 2014 backcover.JPG

A selection of haiku about rain by Alan Summers (rain haiku)

a selection of haiku about rain

by Alan Summers

rain-soaked wind

the weather-worn notice

peels back more

Alan Summers

Award credit:  Judges’ favorites

Selected Haiku 

6th annual Golden Haiku Competition (The Golden Triangle Business Improvement District, Washington DC, USA) 2019

fairy wasps they exist the tension of rain 

on rain on rain 

Alan Summers

Glint ePamphlet collection by Alan Summers

Proletaria   politics philosophy phenomena  (February 2020)

https://proletaria730964817.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/glint.pdf

the undersong of the light falling rain

Alan Summers

Half A Rainbow 

Haiku Nook: An Anthology ed. Jacob Salzer & The Nook Editorial Staff (2020)

Dedicated to Rachel Sutcliffe (1977-2019) 

https://jsalzer.wixsite.com/halfarainbowhaiku

I start to rain

and into falling leaves

my childhood

Alan Summers

Troutswirl - The Haiku Foundation - 

A Sense of Place: HIKING TRAIL – sight ed. KJMunro

Anthology credit: 

All the Way Home: Aging in Haiku (2019) 

ed. Robert Epstein

Middle Island Press (18 Oct. 2019)

ISBN-10: 173412542 ISBN-13: 978-1734125429

https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Way-Home-Aging-Haiku/dp/173412542X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=All+the+Way+Home%3A+Aging+in+Haiku&qid=1572366673&sr=8-1 

mosaic rain:

the cul de sac

of shadow

after Sylvia Plath

Alan Summers

Human/Kind Journal issue 1.6 (June 2019)

IT’S THE SMALL THINGS . . . haibun monobun

https://www.humankindjournal.org/contrib_alan_summers/issue-16-alan-summers

Collaborative collection:

The Comfort of Crows 

Hifsa Ashraf and Alan Summers 

(Velvet Dusk Publishing, December 2019)

https://tinyurl.com/ComfortOfCrows

nighthawks...

the sodium streets

sizzle in its rain

after Hopper

Alan Summers

Publication Credit: Weird Laburnum (September 2019)

From The After Party haiku sequence

https://weirdlaburnum.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/the-after-party/

ekphrastic haiku

backend rain…

a pair of canvas boots

framed by the door

Note: backend = autumn rain (North of England)

Alan Summers

Publication credit: Weird Laburnum ed. Michael O’Brien (August 2019)

From the haibun: Van Gogh’s combat fatigues

https://weirdlaburnum.wordpress.com/2019/08/11/van-goghs-combat-fatigues/

Published on the morning of the last day of the Tate Britain Van Gogh and British Painters exhibition

THE EY EXHIBITION VAN GOGH AND BRITAIN 27 MARCH – 11 AUGUST 2019: 

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ey-exhibition-van-gogh-and-britain

sidewalk waltz

the aroma of rain

and coffee

Alan Summers

The Haiku Foundation: A Sense of Place: CITY SIDEWALK – smell 

ed. KJMunro (December 2018)

lone crow

rain crosses

the moon

Alan Summers

ASAHI HAIKUIST NETWORK (Japan)

ed. David McMurray (June 2018)

night train
each window carries
its own little rain

Alan Summers
Brass Bell: a haiku journal (September 2017)

the scent of rain

birdsong stretches

as far as Mars

Alan Summers

Yamadera Basho Memorial Museum Selected Haiku Collection (Japan 2017)

Feature:

#AtoZBlogChallenge on Poetry Roundabout and Liz Brownlee 

A TO Z BLOG CHALLENGE 2018 S is for Haiku Poet Alan Summers, #AtoZChallenge #ZtoA 

the rain

almost a friend

this funeral 

Alan Summers
Publication credits: Azami #28 (Japan 1995); Snapshots 4 (1998); First Australian online Anthology (October 1999): Blithe Spirit article On minimalism and other things  DJ Peel Vol 9 No.3 (1999); tempslibre (2001); Cornell University, Mann Library, U.S.A. Poet of the Month (October 2001); The Omnibus Anthology, haiku and senryu  (Hub Editions Hub Haiku series 2001); Hidden (British Haiku Society Anthology 2002); The New Haiku (Snapshot Press, 2002); First Australian Haiku Anthology (2003); Birmingham Words Magazine Issue 3 (Autumn 2004); seven magazine feature: “Three lines of simple beauty”  (2006); tempslibre (2010); Blogging Along Tobacco Road: Alan Summers - Three Questions (2010); Travelogue on World Haiku Festival 2002 , Part 2  (Akita International Haiku Network 2010);  The Temple Bell Stops: Contemporary Poems of Grief, Loss and Change (Modern English Tanka Press 2012); THFhaiku app for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch (2011); The In-Between Season (With Words Pamphlet Series 2012)

Award credit:

Highly Commended, Haiku Collection Competition, (Snapshot Press 1998)

Joint 9^th Best of Issue, Snapshot Five (1999)

long hard rain my compass your true north

Alan Summers
Publication credits: Frogpond 36.1 • 2013

this small ache and all the rain too robinsong

Alan Summers
Publication credits: Modern Haiku vol. 44.1 winter/spring 2013

cabbage butterflies—
a man with an umbrella
when there's no rain


Alan Summers
Publication Credits:  Under the Basho Vol 1.1 Autumn 2013

early morning rain

the sound between

the sound

Alan Summers

Publication Credits: Asahi Shimbun (Japan 2013)

Cloud kigo

a light rain patters across

your nightingale floors

Alan Summers

Publication Credits: Asahi Shimbun (Japan 2013)

“In search of the ultimate season word to associate with clouds, Alan Summers observes how “rain writes its own story across floorboards that sing like a bird.”

David McMurray is professor of intercultural studies at The International University of Kagoshima where he lectures on international haiku. At the Graduate School he supervises students who research haiku. He is a correspondent school teacher of Haiku in English for the Asahi Culture Center in Tokyo.

the scent of rain-
I stretch the truth
into clouds

Alan Summers

Publication Credits: Blithe Spirit 23.2. 2013







blue sky rain
the sunshine leaks
from pavements

from White Dust Ghosts – a series of haiku poems by Alan Summers

Alan Summers
Publication Credits:  (Tribe issue 22,  2013)


 

lullaby of rain

another pinch of saffron

in the pumpkin soup

Alan Summers
Publication credits: Heron’s Nest (Volume XIV, Number 4 2012 December 2012); The Haiku Calendar 2014 (Snapshot Press, 2013)
Anthology: "The Vast Sky, An International Anthology of Contemporary Haiku"
after a quote from Sekito Kisen, "The vast sky is not hindered by the floating clouds." (2013)

Anthology credits:
naad anunaad: an anthology of contemporary international haiku ed. Shloka Shankar, Sanjuktaa Asopa, Kala Ramesh (India, 2016): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Naad-Anunaad-Kala-Ramesh/dp/9385665332/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1532036995&sr=8-1&keywords=naad+anunaad

The Wonder Code ed. Scott Mason (2017) ISBN 978-0-692-93035-9 Girasole Press

Chappaqua NY

http://thewondercode.com

Award Credits: 
Editors' Choices, Heron’s Nest (Volume XIV, Number 4: Dec. 2012)
Runner-up, The Haiku Calendar Competition 2013

velum clouds–

through the small hours

this writing in rain

Alan Summers
Publication credits: Haiku Novine ISSN 1451-3889 (2012)

toy suns

the winter-dark rain

smashes the city

Alan Summers

Publication credits:

Blithe Spirit (vol 23 no. 4 November 2012)
Does Fish-God Know (YTBN Press 2012) ISBN-13: 9781479211043 / ISBN-10: 1479211044

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1479211044/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

rain on the river–

when does white become

its darkest colour

Alan Summers

Publication credits: Haiku News (Vol. 1 No. 38 2012)

drifting rain 

my hundred autumn rooms 

to be alone

Alan Summers

Publication Credits: Mainichi Shimbun (Japan 2012)
Award: Best of Mainichi 2012 (Japan 2013)

does fish-god know?

rain can fall

from clear blue skies

Alan Summers
Award credit: Winner of the Blithe Spirit Cover competition for issue 22/2  (John Parsons cover artwork Autumn 2012)
https://area17.blogspot.com/2012/08/ekphrastic-haiku-alan-summers-wins.html

Publication credits: Blithe Spirit (vol 22 no. 3 2012)
Anthology: Sea Bandits ed. Aubrie Cox (2012)
Collection: Does Fish-God Know  (Yet To Be Named Free Press 2012)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1479211044/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

the names of rain

a blackbird’s subsong

into dusk

Alan Summers

Publication credits: Haiku News Vol. 1 No. 35 (2012)

blackbird sub-song:

https://soundcloud.com/hvrlon/blackbird-sub-song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXVJrrG2gxc

http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk/forums/british-birds/63655-singing-blackbird.html 

hard-blue sky

the ghost touch of rain

on sloe-eyed horses

Alan Summers

Publication credits: Blithe Spirit (Vol 22 No. 3 2012)

rain on the river the jesus star shifting

Alan Summers

Publication credits: Janice M Bostok Haiku Prize 2012 Anthology Evening Breeze

bouncing rain
I force the hotel window
a little wider

Alan Summers

Publication credits:

Blithe Spirit March 2012; Does Fish-God Know (YTBN Press 2012)

the drum of the rain ghosting bare hands 

Alan Summers
Publication Credits:  Under the Basho Vol 1.1 Autumn 2013

rain clouds
conversations shift around
the train carriage

Alan Summers

Publication credits: Mainichi Shimbun (Japan 2011)  

Award Credits: Honourable Mention Best of Mainichi 2011

this delicate rain
the petal makes a typo
of a gravestone date

Alan Summers

Publication credits: tinywords, haiku & other small poems ( 2011)

rain ceases

as I leave the sycamore...

one more kingfisher

Alan Summers
Publication credits: Blithe Spirit vol. 14 no. 4 (2004)

late september rain
cutting through the lane
and the mist

Alan Summers

Publication credits: in a heron’s eye  (Paper Wasp 2000)

the geraniums

flowering again

just before the rain

Note: Queensland (Australia) poem

Alan Summers
Publication credits: Potpourri Publications (USA 1994)
Collection: sundog, an australian year, (sunfast press 1997 reprinted 1998)

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