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Are you interested in a Call of the Page course? We run courses on haiku; tanka; tanka stories/prose; haibun; shahai; and other genres.

Please email Karen or Alan at our joint email address: admin@callofthepage.org
We will let you know more about these courses.

Call of the Page (Alan & Karen)
Showing posts with label library van. Show all posts
Showing posts with label library van. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Herefordshire Haiku: poems on the move



Library van image by Alan Summers; Emma & myself image by Simon Holroyd.

I met Emma Stevens, Library Learning Officer at Hereford Station, and met up with the mobile library van at Fownhope to start my one day library van haiku poet-in-residence. Here are the five places we visited:



Herefordshire's lovely countryside replete with crows & rooks:


carrion crow call
refracted river-ripples
on the horsechestnut


mist haze -
a crow cleans its beak
on a rooftop aerial


2 haiku by Alan Summers

on a leafless branch
a crow comes to nest -
autumn nightfall


Basho (1644 - 1694) trans. Haruo Shirane

harusame no
dobei hi tomaru
karasu


mud wall perch
in the spring rain
a crow


Shiki Masaoka (1890-1902) English version trans Alan Summers.

The people:

picture by Simon Holroyd
Mrs Hulbert, who paid us a visit, (and helps out at Age Concern), is an artist who was interested in the tradition of combining pictures with haiku known as haiga in Japan.


(Please click onto the pictures for a larger image)
Mrs Hulbert deservedly is awarded a haiku detective badge!
photo by Alan Summers (selfie)


Mrs Slade was the second of my home visits to people unable to get out and visit the library van. Mrs Slade will be 100 in June this year. We also visited Mrs Oxley, in her nineties, who was also great fun, despite her fragility.









Simon Holroyd, the library van driver. It was a shame it was a very wet day, but the visitors we did have made it all worthwhile.

I left some of our haiku detective badges to encourage many more haiku being written at local libraries and with Simon Holroyd on his library van so I hope even more haiku get written.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Herefordshire Haiku: poems on the move



I'm going out on Herefordshire's new mobile library this Saturday, 15th March 2008, meeting people in each location. The van visits a variety of countryside and village locations, and we're going to try and capture some of those surroundings in haiku with the people we meet. The haiku can then be shared and displayed around the county. If you are local, please come and find us, and write a haiku or two!



"Sat, 15 Mar 2008: come along and join Haiku poet Alan Summers on the Mobile Library. Using the fabulous scenery of Herefordshire as inspiration, Alan will be on hand to encourage your imagination and enable you to write your own haiku. Feel free to bring along your own Japanese Haiku poetry, or have a go whilst choosing your books as the mobile visits Fownhope, Goodrich, Lea, Whitchurch and Llangrove."

images from sign-rite

weblink: Council brings Japan to Herefordshire this Easter

myherefordshire.com weblink: Herefordshire Haiku: Poems on the Move

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