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Showing posts from October, 2017

Haiku Rebellion Studio

Plan your writing time for Spring 2018 with The Poetry School's new list of courses. I'll be leading Haiku Rebellion Studio again, an online course that runs over three to four weeks next April with lots of opportunity to practice and receive feedback on your own haiku. It sold out last time so book early! In the meantime, here's some background to my haiku practice and the course . Small is the New Big I started this blogpost with the question, How do you write a poem like a haiku? And then really wished I hadn’t. Because the next question that popped out of my brain was, How do you catch a moment on the page? No? Nothing? I’ll give you a clue: ¯¯ How do you solve a problem like Maria ? ¯¯ Apologies for the Sound of Music  ear-worm. Our minds are full of patterns. Habits, even. And while habits and repeated actions can be comforting, like reading the Sunday papers in bed or summer sunsets, the unconscious repetition of habits in our writing, a continu...

haiku commentary ~ Paul Miller

spring foghorn . . .  cormorants spilling  from an over-crowded ledge   Paul Miller, Called Home (2006) Sound, sight and movement, and texture. These are the explicit physical senses through which the haiku speaks to me. But there must be more haunting the images and the spaces between the lines to produce an element of unease in me. There’s warning in the sound of the foghorn. Spring tides (despite the natural response of ‘joy’ that we have to the idea of Spring) can be dangerous and have stronger than usual rip currents. The company of black birds spills into the air like a ragged cloak of wing and cry. There’s a sense of danger, or risk, implicit in an overcrowded ledge.  The ellipsis at the end of line 1 indicates hesitation and uncertainty. spilling/ at the end of line 2 also allows the reader to experience that sense of falling into the white space on the page. Line 3 ends gruffly with the definite thump of a single syllable: ledge, Twi...

Review ~ Paul Chambers

This Single Thread Paul Chambers £10 available   from the author   and   Alba Publishing   things I have witnessed/ but failed to notice until/ this moment, here, now I have seen them in the orchard’s long grass – contour, flight, down – from magpies or wood pigeons, and once, the tawny remains of a buzzard. I have slipped them in my pocket or frozen them in a photograph. But now I am watching them move in my memory as dusk begins to shift towards night: evening wind a feather trembles in the grass  (p.11) And on those late train journeys home from London, lights from the back windows of terraced houses glittering past, wafers of smoky clouds shifting across the night sky:  overnight train a handprint smears the moon (p.68) Paul Chambers talks about haiku as ‘the art of noticing’ and each haiku in this collection is a quiet and precise record of the small moments that are common to us all. Or, if not common...