Skip to main content

Remembering Ken Jones 1930 - 2015



Startling and pleasing to come across the blessed genre so unexpectedly in Planet! 

They were the first words Ken Jones said to me, by email in 2007, after he'd read two of my early haibun in Planet, the Welsh based journal of literature, history and contemporary journalism. I was writing haibun in a vacuum at that time, unaware of the network of other haibun writers in the UK in general, and in Wales in particular, but I'd already taken Ken's advice, from one of his articles published in CHO, about writing the haiku before writing the prose part of the haibun. This approach was working well for me so I was glad to have the opportunity to thank him personally.

Startling, pleasing, blessed. Those words conjure him for me now he's no longer at the other end of an email, or at a reading we've both been invited to or at a workshop we've been asked to lead. He was always, in different degrees, enthusiastic, confrontational, mischievous even. We didn't always agree about haiku writing but always found a middle ground of compromise born out of respect: a ground that enabled us to edit another country, haiku poetry from Wales (Gomer 2011) together.

I last spoke with him at a haibun evening at the Poetry Society Café, London in March this year. I really didn't expect him to be there: his health was frail and he'd moved, with his wife Noragh, from their mountain home in North West Wales to more suitable accommodation in nearby Aberystwyth. But there he was, thinner than I remembered, but still, and this was the only way I felt I could describe him, full of light. His voice trailed away when he stood to read his haibun about terminal cancer and his impending death but that really didn't matter. It was the closest I've ever come to witnessing, and feeling, what the Zen Buddhist idea of acceptance really means: he was a man living and enjoying the moment, acknowledging the reality of his life without fighting it or trying to change it. He was a receptacle of peace.

Because of our shared Welshness Ken used to close his emails with Pob hwyl or Hwyl fawr. Pob means 'every' in Welsh. Fawr means 'big'. Hwyl is trickier. It can mean 'the sail of a ship' and also 'fun'. But it also refers to how people are, their 'feeling' or 'mood'. You can sing with hwyl, with emotional fervour. And you can ask people how they're feeling: Sut hwyl sydd arnat ti? Literally, 'what feeling is on you?'

I like Hwyl fawr. Big feeling. What Ken sent to me. What he embodied in his life and his writing. What I will always remember about him. In the way he both lived and died.

This fine evening
stacking firewood
how simple death feels
logo
From The Parsley Bed: Haiku Stories, Ken Jones, Pilgrim Press 2006

First published in Contemporary Haibun Online, September 2015, vol 11 no 3

Comments

  1. Rosemary Nissen-Wade23 November 2015 at 05:46

    Only just came across this. What a beautiful tribute.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Lynne Rees23 November 2015 at 08:59

      Thank you, Rosemary. He had his own place in the world.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Consolidation & Simplification

Since January 2020 all my work - haiku writing, poetry, prose, imaginative and non-fiction writing - has been posted on my website   Lynne Rees .  Please feel free to share anything from this archive, or my main site, but I'd be grateful if you could credit me as the writer and link back to the source.  Thank you 🙏 Lynne 
Post a Comment
Read more

haibun ~ Playing Lego Minecraft with Morgan

There’s only a portal of black obsidian between the zombies and lava in The Dimension of The Nether and The Overworld where Steve is standing and I am counting his sheep, cows and pigs. But we really shouldn’t be hanging around when night is about to fall and mob attacks are imminent: Blazes and Creepers, Spiders from The Cave, all ready to descend on The Farm.  autism spectrum my nephew names all the monsters It’s time to lock up the animals, he says, time to close doors and windows, so I turn Steve around and notice he’s clutching a tiny baguette, something that fills me with unaccountable joy: that in this world of sharp edges and danger a boy has placed Bread in a man’s hands and they are carrying it home.  Presence 63,  March 2019
Post a Comment
Read more

haiku commentary

deeper shadows where the walls meet... autumn rain – Mark E. Brager, The Heron's Nest, Volume XXI, Number 3 (2019) I imagine a corner, two walls meeting at right angles. I can see the depth of shadow there. If I reach out, I am sure the surface – rough brick or smooth masonry – will be cooler; perhaps because the autumn rain I now notice has started to fall. The places where people meet are more emotionally complex, stepping, as we may have to, from the comfort of the familiar to the challenge of the unfamiliar. Those “deeper shadows” may be rich with empathy and gratitude. Eshadows in corners Photograph by Steven Castledinequally, they may be fraught with conflict and umbrage. Brager’s haiku shifts me from inanimate objects to human experience. I sense loss through the image of “autumn rain,” or at least an understanding, or acceptance, of inevitable change that results in something being left behind. Perhaps change, even for the better, always leaves a
2 comments
Read more