The 2019 Turtle Light Press HAIKU CHAPBOOK CONTEST

Long awaited manuscript competition from the brilliant 
Turtle Light Press! 

For submission details go to:
http://www.turtlelightpress.com/2019-haiku-chapbook-competition-guidelines/

Great publisher, great judge, great opportunity!
Highly recommended, even without having met Rick Black in person, and knowing that Susan Antolin will be fantastic as the contest judge!

Alan


Alan Summers
President, United Haiku and Tanka Society
co-founder, Call of the Page
www.callofthepage.org

Call of the Page founded by Karen Hoy & Alan Summers runs regular group online courses, and one-to-one email and/or Skype sessions:

https://www.callofthepage.org/learning/

All That Remains - A Book Review by Alan Summers

back cover of award-winning haiku collection

All That Remains
By Catherine J.S. Lee

http://www.turtlelightpress.com/2012-haiku-chapbook-competition-guidelines/2010-tlp-haiku-chapbook-competition-winner/ 

A book review by Alan Summers

“…a tightly spun web of Maine haiku that do not lose their joint narrative and lyrical threads…if you want to reward yourself as a reader of good poetry, you can go no further than Lee’s book.” Alan Summers

All That Remains is both the title and the dominant theme of this book. After all, everything is in transition, and this collection captures intriguing aspects which we often neglect at our peril.

The book captures a bygone era, both in landscape on a broad visual scale, as well as on an intimate aural scale.  Lee tackles landscape in original ways and deals with exterior/external and internal sub-themes.

The opening haiku works well as an introduction for the attentive reader on many levels, and is a clue for those readers who enjoy losing themselves into a good book.

hometown visit

no trespassing signs

where we used to play

There is the surface meaning of adults revisiting childhood haunts, and finding them changed; then delving deeper, there are layers of interior landscape as well as the physical geography of the countryside.  We find how it affects the individual who almost always takes a personal geography of their upbringing to new places.

Do we allow trespassers into our own private interior landscape(s), and can we as a writer, even if we are actually willing to do so?

Lee attempts this.

Sense of place and identity are enduring and vital themes for writing in any genre, and perfectly suitable for haiku, the shortest of poems. One continuous theme is always a challenge whether for the writer or the reader.  The writer still has to look for variety, especially in such a short poem choice as haiku.

Often haiku are composed with one very short first line called a fragment, followed by a phrase of two more short lines.  Both sections usually create a juxtaposition of different, almost opposing images, jolting and jostling each other to create friction, tension, and resonance, for the reader to enjoy and interpret.

If the fragment is flat in textural meaning, and looks merely thrown in to start a haiku off, there is no frisson for the reader to get hold of, and shake, to see what comes out for them.  There has to be a reward for a reader willing to enter into a contract with a writer.  A flat fragment that doesn’t kick-start results in mundane formulaic layouts and templates, that are ultimately frustrating to the discerning reader, especially if they have paid good money on trust as part of that writer/reader relationship.

family secrets–

the shore ledge covered

by rock weed

Here the fragment pulls us into the haiku, and the phrase apparently goes away from the subject.  But does it really?

Remember the opening haiku, no trespassing?  

Do you want to be covered in rock weed, eventually to be choked.  The subtle choice of reading this as a metaphor is offered, whether by design or not.  I tend to think Lee writes direct observational haiku with a constant subtext to reward her readers. There are as many layers to a well-delivered haiku as there are labyrinthine layers to family secrets themselves.

hard frost

she remembers

how he lied

grandmother’s albums

the missing names

of all those faces

tri-folded coffin flag –

dry leaves in a corner

of the empty pool

Do we need coffin and empty, are they not redundant due to the clear diction derived from the other words?  As soon I read ‘tri-folded’ I knew it would be the American flag on a coffin, possibly for a military ceremony.  Dry leaves would obviously be in an empty pool, not a filled one. But sometimes, even though haiku need not repeat the obvious, it can be a useful device when deployed thoughtfully, and when the author isn’t really, merely, repeating themselves, and the obvious.

“By the repetition of words the reader is encouraged to shift them around and consider various possible interpretations of the scene…It goes without saying that in order to work it must be done with considerable skill, or sensitivity.”

"Repetition - For Meaning and Melody"  Florence Vilen (Sweden July 2001)

This haiku is both a time-honoured shasei model where direct observation is utilised: where the power and echoes of an instant’s sentient experience of a moment is carried forward and plunged into the editing process of a draft verse to emerge as haiku. 

Shasei is often the technique borrowed for film-making, where a particular object (e.g. coffin) is zoomed in, then panned out, or away, to be zoomed into another area (e.g. leaves in a pool corner) leaving layers to be excised by the reader/viewer.

Death is the natural and only definite part of life, and we should never be surprised by that fact, and eventuality. Generations of families can disappear if death is not replaced by birth and an ongoing gene pool.

Is this what the author is implying?

Perhaps the tightly crafted openness and accessibility is a gift for the reader to take more from the poem if they wish to go beyond the surface meaning. Lee’s poems are rarely one-dimensional, if ever, and most proficient writers respect their readers too much to cop out in such a manner when composing haiku. A successful haiku is multi-dimensional, and there are many in this collection worth re-reading and exploring further.

My only criticism is that although there are many haiku directly or indirectly using sound, there are scarce mentions of taste and smell.

Is this a problem?  I don’t think so, it just makes me want to embrace a companion volume from this author.  I would love to give Lee an excuse, and reason, to capture the smells of home-cooking, at the house, and out on a (possibly rare) picnic, and packed meals for those tilling the land.

pasture cairn

the old farmer’s

bent spine

Good haiku can often work on metaphorical levels as we’ve discussed.  Not every haiku needs to have a poet looking for a metaphor of course, as a reader or as the author.  Well crafted haiku work on other levels for their readers, and it’s the layers of meaning, beyond the presentation of words first delivered to the reader, that make it a haiku worth reading, and re-reading again and again.

A haiku needs an audience, and that audience should be rewarded if they use diligence in their reading.  This is the case with Lee’s work: a tightly spun web of haiku that do not lose their joint narrative and lyrical threads that delightfully entrap the most discerning of readers.

If you want to reward yourself as a reader of good poetry, you can go no further than Lee’s book.

Alan Summers, With Words

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