an open field

November: a month that begins with a syllable of prohibition then slowly denies us colour and warmth. My father's brother has died at 91. This morning’s frost refuses to melt. I watch a day moon swallowed by smoky clouds; leaves shroud the bare earth beneath the apple trees. But tonight, as if his age and health are no more than a random number, a misconception, my father's voice on the phone so clear, so bright. And the sky beyond the orchard fired by sunset. Yes. Oh yes. fall I try not to First published in CHO July 2017

I'll be running the following online course in October 2016 with The Poetry School , suitable for UK and international students.   Book here. Three lines, syllable counting, nature, Zen. Now we’ve got those crusty preconceptions and outdated rules out of the way we can take a fresh look at English language haiku in the light of contemporary Western practice. On this intensive 3 week writing course we will re-visit the most misunderstood of all the poetic forms – the haiku – looking at work by experienced practitioners in the UK and USA. We will then practice some techniques that contribute towards making the ordinary extraordinary, writing our own small epiphanies, tiny elegies and snapshots from our daily lives that are charged with clarity, emotion and humour. We will also be setting both our pens and as well as our bodies in motion, as we follow in the footsteps of Basho and compose our haiku while walking, taking advantage of the dramatic changes of the autumn season...

Harriot West,  Into the Light , Mountains & Rivers Press , 2014, 48 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2, perfect bound, $15.00 Let’s start with ‘scrapple, cornmeal mush with … sausage’, follow it with Thanksgiving turkey with ‘cranberry jelly and the sweetness of honey-flavoured yams’, then ‘raspberries … with clotted cream’. Except these dishes fail in their intrinsic capability to feed or nourish, laced as they are with conflict, anger and grief in the early haibun of Harriot West’s collection  Into the Light . The ‘scrapple’ becomes a battleground for a child’s love in 'Empty Spaces'. The turkey cannot mask an almost unbearable despair in ‘Abundant Blessings’. The raspberries, ‘the seeds cracking’, foreshadow the death of a grandmother and the failure of adults in a child’s life to explain and comfort (‘The Day Grandma Died’). Into the Light  is divided into three sections. The 17 haibun in ‘Sepia Shadows’ explore, in a compressed chronology, the narrator’s chi...

a tray of eggs homesick now for middle age Modern Haiku 46.3 Autumn 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...

The following paper was presented at the PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association) 2015 Conference at Canterbury University, Kent, UK on 16th July 2015.  Abstract: HAIKU: A POETRY OF ABSENCE OR AN ABSENCE OF POETRY? Minimalism in Contemporary English Language Haiku The popular perception of haiku as three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables persists in the mainstream poetry world and beyond as if nothing has changed since the first Western translators counted the onji, or sounds, in traditional Japanese haiku and created that misconstrued but enduring template fleshy enough to support a traditional English syntax. And while putting flesh on bones might be a useful metaphor for the construction of formal and free verse, contemporary English language haiku practice is often more akin to the trimming and polishing of bones to create a form where point of view, adjectives and even verbs may be dispensed with entirely.  This 30 minute presentation will analyse exampl...