A Poet's Roving Thoughts: Haiku Invitational Interview with Chen-ou Liu

           Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live... something honest.

           --  Dionne Brand

 

           It is not success or failure that matters but the struggle itself. The purpose of a 

           writing life is the struggle of choosing the right words, and a haiku poet’s salvation

           is based upon how well he or she handles this struggle.

           -- Chen-ou Liu

 

(This online interview was conducted by Haiku Invitational committee member, Michael Dylan Welch)

blossom wind
my sick wife holds my hand
tighter

Top Winner, Canada, Haiku Invitational Winner 2020

MDW: Congratulations on having your haiku selected as the top winner in the Canada category in the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival’s 2020 Haiku Invitational contest. How did you first learn about haiku, and how much writing of haiku or other poetry have you done?
 

COL: In 2009, with the aid of a newly acquainted poet friend, Brian Zimmer, I was exposed to the Japanese haiku, gendai [modern] haiku, and monostiches. Since then, I’ve studied and written haiku and related genres on a daily basis, and my poems have been published in print and online journals. In 2013, I started an English–Chinese haiku and tanka blog, editing, translating and publishing haiku, its related genres, reviews, and essays.
 
MDW: What was the inspiration for your winning poem?
 

COL: My haiku was inspired by an old Taiwanese movie scene. In it, a young couple walked out of a doctor’s office on a chilly morning. On their way home, they walked side by side, slowly and quietly. The background music of this poignant scene was their favorite song about cherry blossoms blooming on Mt. Yangming, Taipei.
 
MDW: Describe the moment when you first learned you had won.
 

COL: The moment when I first learned that my haiku had been chosen for the Best Canada category, I immediately phoned my mother, who lives in Taiwan.  She was happy for me, but her first question was, do you have enough face masks? The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted my March travel plans. My health and safety-related issues had been occupying my mother’s mind since the WHO pandemic declaration.
 
MDW: Do you have favourite books or websites relating to haiku that others might benefit from in order to learn haiku as a literary art and to share one’s haiku?

COL:Burton Watson’s Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems gives me a glimpse into the suffering soul and prolific life of an innovative poet. Shiki’s three poetic principles—shasei (“sketching from life”), makoto (“truthfulness”), and everyday language—help me set my feet firmly on the ground. Haruo Shirane’s Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō, establishes the ground for critical discussion and reading of Bashō’s poetry in the context of broader socio-cultural change. It helps me look beyond the haiku moment and debunk some modern haiku myths. Richard Gilbert’s Poems of Consciousness: Contemporary Japanese & English-language Haiku in Cross-cultural Perspectives creates a new poetic vocabulary for the haiku community to employ in analyzing how and why haiku work effectively, and it gives analytical categories and explanations for some innovative haiku that fall outside the juxtaposition/shasei realm.
 
MDW: Please tell us more about yourself.
 

COL: After more than ten years of struggling towards a new life vision and preparing for a major change in my field of study (computer science to cultural studies), in the summer of 2002 I emigrated to Canada to pursue a PhD and settled in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto. After arriving in Canada, I was frustrated by the lack of in-depth and wide-ranging classroom discussions, and most importantly, I was stressed by financial burden. I quit my studies and started to write essays in an adopted language, English. After two years of striving, I published three essays but got little attention from the scholars in those fields. Furthermore, I was disappointed by my inability to master English quickly. My pent-up emotions began spilling over onto pieces of scrap paper in the form of short poetry. The more I wrote, the more I thought about becoming a poet. Now, I’m a published poet and the editor and translator of NeverEnding Story
 

I write
at the gun-mouth
of time’s barrel . . .
I live for myself
by myself
 

MDW: How does where you live and what you enjoy doing affect the way you write haiku?
 

COL: I lives in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto. It’s just a five-minute drive to Lake Ontario where I spend most of my leisure time reflecting upon and responding to books, films, and socio-cultural events I’ve read, watched, or experienced. I resonate with this quotation from tanka poet Ishikawa Takuboku: “My mind, which was yearning after some indescribable thing from morning to night, could find an outlet to some extent only by making poems.” Like my favorite Canadian novelist and activist, Dionne Brand, I believe that “Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live . . . something honest.” And I think that it is not success or failure that matters but the struggle itself. The purpose of a writing life is the struggle, and a haiku poet’s salvation is based upon how well he or she handles the struggle.

A Poet's Roving Thoughts: An Interview with Naomi Beth Wakan by Robert Epstein

(First published here by kind permission from NeverEnding Story contributors, Naomi Beth Wakan and Robert Epstein )

Naomi Beth Wakan is an eighty-eight year old haiku, senryu, and tanka poet who has been writing for many years. She is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Nanaimo, BC, and the Inaugural Honorary Ambassador for the Federation of BC Writers. Naomi has published over 50 books, including the ALA selection, Haiku -- One Breath Poetry (Heian International). Her trilogy, The Way of Haiku, The Way of Tanka, and Poetry That Heals (Shanti Arts) was completed in 2019. She is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, Haiku Canada and Tanka Canada. She lives on Gabriola Island, British Columbia, with her husband, the sculptor, Elias Wakan.

Before we talk about aging and your interest in it, I am wondering if you could briefly recount for readers how you found your way to haiku and its related forms all those years ago?

When I was teaching English in Japan (in my sixties), I came across haiku and such a condensed form of poetry interested me. When I returned to Canada and was teaching about Japan in the schools around Vancouver, I could see that the students were interested in writing haiku. I knew little about the subject and so started reading any book on Japanese poetry forms that I could find. I could see that the often stated 5,7,5syllable lines wasn't really the essence of haiku and wanted to know what was. I decided to write an introduction to haiku for myself, as a beginner; one that would also help my students. Thus Haiku -- One Breath Poetry came to be. It sold surprisingly well and was chosen by the American Library Association in their poetry for teenagers section. Nothing like going where angels fear to tread.

How has your haiku, senryu, and tanka changed or evolved over the years?

In Poetry That Heals, I describe how writing those forms intensely over a number of years changed me. I began with writing only haiku (as well as my free form poetry). Writing only what my senses recorded (although emotions and ideas were somewhere behind the words) required I become more aware of my body cycles, the rise and fall of the day and the passing of the seasons. This awareness kept me firmly grounded. After some years, I yearned to be able to introduce my feelings and ideas overtly and so moved to tanka. Luckily the scholar of Japanese classical literature, Professor Sonja Arntzen, lived on Gabriola, the little island to which I and my husband had moved, and she became my tanka guide. I had joined Haiku Canada as a way of linking up with other haijin and found myself volunteered as the West Coast representative. I had no idea what a representative's function was and so decided I would initiate an annual gathering of haijin on my island. This began as a one-day event and, over the years, grew to three days as we opened the event to outsiders on the third day. Thus we spread the good news that haiku (and tanka) were wonderful ways of recording the moment (haiku) and telling of the past and our hopes for the future. Some of the finest haiku and tanka writers in the world, such as Jim Kacian, Michael Dylan Welch, Carole MacRury, and Amelia Fielden shared their expertise at this annual gathering, and thus, like a s poilt child, I brought my teachers to me.

You are adept at writing tanka as well as haiku and senryu. Do you decide which form of poetry to use or does the poetic insight determine the mode of expression?

As I came to accept my aging, I started to explore my past, draw up some ledgers in order to see what yet needed to be done before I kicked the bucket. Tanka is the perfect form for nostalgia as it seems to be always like an old sepia photo, yearning for times that never were. Tanka was a form used for corresponding in the Heian period and so Professor Arntzen and I decided to write a book of tanka where we responded to each other's words, Double Take (Modern Tanka Press). We enjoyed the process so much that we followed up with another book of response tanka, Reflections (Pacific-Rim Publishers). I had become more centered in my years of writing haiku and now I wallowed in the freedom to present my ideas and allow my emotions full expression in my writing of tanka.

I have the impression that Buddhism and Taoism occupy a special place in your philosophy of life. I am wondering if they inform your poetry in any way and, if so, how?

As a former Buddhist, of course my years of meditation are reflected in my poetry writing. I think that the idea of the middle way, allowing many sides of any issue to be explored has strongly influenced my writing. Sometimes I seem to allow the pause in haiku, or the move in tanka from outer to inner to give me the space to modify anything that has gone before. I have become a .'maybe' poet, always questioning and full of doubt that the whole picture can ever be presented.

In the process of editing a haiku anthology on aging, I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance. Not only have you written a good many poems on aging, but a few years ago you published your own nonfiction book on the subject, A Roller-Coaster Ride: Thoughts on Aging (Polar Press, 2012). I am wondering what prompted you to write this book?

My publisher prompted me, as publishers always seem to be asking for the next book, before the previous one has gone to press. Although I often write about things I know little of in order to learn more myself, I also thought I should write about something that I did know something about and that was aging. I had had a mastectomy and was slowing down from my usual frenetic pace and I needed to explore what was next on my plate – aging and dying, so why not write a book about it?

I greatly appreciated your genuineness and emotional honesty in A Roller-Coaster Ride as well as your sense of humor, which is sometimes irreverent. You do not seem like someone content to simply fade away on the margins of life. Why is it important to live your life out loud (to quote Émile Zola)?

I was a second twin (two hours delay between us). I must have thought I was forgotten as I lay alone in my mother’s womb, enjoying the large space I now had since my twin had been born, but, at the same time missing her terribly. When I was eventually dragged out by forceps, I barely whimpered. So always there has been a need to be noticed, yet, at the same, time, not noticed too much. I have enjoyed such success as I have had in the writing world, but also have felt terribly shy in any limelight that has flashed on me. My stumbling birth, the only real trauma of my life, has marked me with an urgent need to make my mark, however faint it may have been.

If you could distill in a few words or reflections what you have learned about aging through self-observation and experience, what might you say?

If you don't bend, you break. If you persist in needing to be thought young and glamorous, you're in for a sad old age. I embraced my early grey hair, accepted the occasional hair on my chin, and loved the branding I got by accident as “that lovely old biddy from Gabriola.” This came to me when my printer in Nanaimo had to send one of my jobs down to Victoria for perfect binding. He had started his e-mail to the other printer with “I have this lovely old biddy from Gabriola . . .” and, by mistake he sent thee-mail to me. I laughed a lot and sent it on to my publisher who was delighted and asked if she could use it in promoting me. I agreed. It wasn't demeaning as some of my friends thought, for I knew my space as a middle-of-the-road writer and was content with it and could easily afford to laugh at myself and all the posturing I might have done to even get that far in a writing career. When I became the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Nanaimo and the Inaugural Honorary Ambassador for the BC federation of Writers, of course, my branding became a little more dignified. Being able to make the best of whatever comes your way, dealing with it creatively, has always been my modus operandi, and that, of course, also means considering the restrictions that old age is putting on me. For example, as I'm more and more restricted to the domestic hearth (I no longer drive, or fly) I have decided to make an art of domesticity and so wrote an essay promoting this art form and got it accepted by a magazine, thus publicly giving an example of how difficult times can become positive ones. Of course there are terrible situations that can never be transmuted in this way, so I am not making light of what is often an impossible task. In Buddhism such transformation is the essence of Vajrayana, the practice of transformation.

Is there anything else on the theme of aging––or dying, for that matter––that you might like to share?

As my little island of Gabriola is a .retirement' island, I check out the obituaries in the local paper every week. “If they can do it, I can” I tell myself and go about weeding and messing in the kitchen calmly. Other times I freak out with the realization that I am soon to disappear. It's a roller-coaster sort of thing. I was brought up in the Coney-Island kind of town of Blackpool, in North-west England, where the roller coaster was a dominant sight. Maybe that's why it has seemed a good metaphor for my life.

I would like to invite you to share with readers some of your own haiku, senryu, and tanka on aging that you have written.

at this age

when I have the urge

to try something new

I pause and realize

I have already done it

Emerson said

“After thirty a man wakes up

sad every morning.”

I am taken aback . . .

how did he know my secret?

how we want

to encapsulate life

dip it in formaldehyde

pin it in a box so it will stay

as we want it forever

my life’s theme

“I’m going to die”

played in tremolo

first variation in fortissimo

“Tomorrow, not today”

past images cling . . .

a schooner painting hung

over a distant fireplace

a friend's death . . .

the maple leaves are falling

too early this year

saying "sorry" before bed

I remember my mother

advised this

looking back,

all I see through

past mists

are two young girls

swinging dangerously high

the day after he died

she wore his woolen sweater

the edges unravelling

I don't know if you care to answer this question, but I would be interested to know how you wish to be remembered.

I have dilettanted through a number of creative outlets in my lifetime, but the only one I have half succeeded at was my ability to encourage others in their creativity. So, I would like to be remembered for all those successful artists and writers that I have helped on their way either with a small pat on the back, or a more vigorous kick in the pants.

Thank you very much, Naomi, for taking time to share your love of English-language haiku and related forms.

Cool Announcement: Robert Hass Interview and The Essential Haiku

RR: How and to what extent has haiku influenced your poetic thought and poetry?

 

RH: I don't think anybody can ever answer this question— either the how or the how much— very accurately. One would have to have a great deal of detachment about one's own work. How? The power of the image, the power of simplicity, the power of discrimination, the implicit idea that anything can contain everything, something about negotiating nothingness in the sense of not ultimately having a place to stand (or sit) in our observation of the world. How much? I don't know. A lot. At least it seems to me that my debt is great to the poets I've most studied, Basho, Buson, Issa.

 

RR: Haiku are generally taken to be a poetics of nature, and often take aspects of the natural world as a focus or topic; could you discuss the question of haiku and nature, poetry and nature, in light of recent revelations of global warming and as Bill McKibben put it, "the end of nature?"

 

RH: One of the arguments for the cultivation of haiku, I suppose, is that attention to nature has become a moral imperative. McKibben is good on this subject and the great text is still the essay, "The Land Ethic" in Aldo Leopold's Sand Country Almanac. That book, especially the essays "Thinking Like a Mountain" and "Good Oak" and "Song of the Gavilan" are also useful texts for thinking about how to naturalize an imagination of nature in North American poetry. In so much of poetry and thinking about poetry right now, there is a good deal of appropriate skepticism about the assumptions behind realism as a literary mode and therefore about the whole question of what we do when we think to represent nature. It might be useful to let this tradition— and the range of anti-realist practices from surrealism to language poetics— enter the practice of haiku, if only to take away the sort of easy wow! poem that tends to be the first stage of our attempts to appropriate the form. Allen Ginsberg's notion that the blues lyric is the American version of haiku might also be helpful in this connection. See his effort at what he called "American sentences."

 

-- "The Essential Hass: A Short Interview with Robert Hass," Roadrunner, 7:4, November 2007

 

 

. . . the spirit of haiku required that the language be kept plain. "’The function of Haik[u],’" Basho once said, "’is to rectify common speech.’" It also demanded accurate and original images, drawn mostly from common life . . .

The insistence on time and place was crucial for writers of haiku. The seasonal reference was called a kigo and a haiku was thought to be incomplete without it . . . The practice was sufficiently codified and there was even a rule that the seasonal reference should always appear either in the first or third unit of the three phrase poem . . .

If the first level of a haiku is its location in nature, itse second is almost always some implicit Buddhist reflection on nature . . . At the core of Buddhist metaphysics are three ideas about natural things: that they are transient; that they are contingent; and that they suffer . . .

They [Basho’s, Busson’s, and Issa’s Haiku] have a quality of actuality, of the moment seized on and rendered purely, and because of this they seem to elude being either traditional images of nature or ideas about it. The formal reason for this mysteriousness is that they don’t usually generalize their images . . . what was left was the irreducible mysteriousness of the images themselves. The French writer Roland Barthes speaks of this . . . as the haiku’s "breach of meaning" and is able to make a post-modern case for them as deconstructions and subverters of cultural certainties. This case can be made, but the silence of haiku, its wordlessness, also has its roots in Buddhist culture, especially in Zen . . .

Zen provided people training in how to stand aside and leave the meaning-making activity of the ego to its own devices. Not resisting it, but seeing it as another phenomenal thing . . .

Perhaps the best way [to read Haiku] . . . after one has familiarized oneself with the symbolism of the seasons and the Japanese habit of mind, is to read them as plainly and literally as possible.

-- Robert Hass, "Introduction," The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, xii-xvi.

Selected haiku translated by Robert Hass

 

Even in Kyoto --

hearing the cuckoo's cry --

I long for Kyoto.

Basho

Escaped the ropes,

escaped the nets --

moon on the water.

Buson

I go

you stay;

two autumns.

Buson

Climb Mount Fuji,

O snail,

but slowly, slowly.

Issa

Don't kill that fly!

 Look--it's wringing its hands,

 wringing its feet.

Issa

Dark Wings of the Night: Jack Kerouac's "Blues and Haikus" and His View of Haiku Composition

A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing

-- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, p.59

In the spring of 1958, Jack Kerouac was invited by Bob Thiele to make a poetry album for the Beat Generation. Accompanied by his friends, tenor saxmen Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, Kerouac made Blues and Haikus, a mixture of jazz and poetry. According to Bruce Eder, it was a “stunning duet between speaker and saxmen, working spontaneously in this peculiar mix of jazz and voice, in which the saxmen [did] get their solo spots around Kerouac's work”.

The opening number is a 10-minute piece called “American Haikus.” It features Kerouac’s “expressive recitation of a series of poems punctuated by the improvisational saxophone playing of Cohn and Sims.”

The most amazing thing about Jack Kerouac is his magic voice, which sounds exactly like his works. It is capable of the most astounding and disconcerting changes in no time flat. It dictates everything.

-- Ted Berrigan, poet and staff writer at the Paris Review

Now, Listen to Jack kerouac reading "American Haikus"

Below are some of his haiku I like:

In my medicine cabinet
the winter fly
has died of old age

Evening coming --

the office girl

unloosing her scarf

The summer chair

rocking by itself

In the blizzard

Missing a kick

at the icebox door

It closed anyway.

Useless, useless,

the heavy rain

Driving into the sea.

The windmills of

Oklahoma look

in every direction

Straining at the padlock

the garage doors

At noon

And the following haiku is my favorite:

Empty baseball field --
A robin,
Hops along the bench

L1 sets the context, seasonal, thematic and emotive, while allusive Ls 2 &3 make a shift in theme and imagery, thus establishing a contrasting relationship with their preceding line through Kerouac’s skillful use of the zoom-in technique. This contrasting relationship fully embodies the “principle of internal comparison,” which is well articulated by Harold G. Henderson in his study of Japanese haiku (p. 18); therefore, it  gains added poignancy. On the contrary, without establishing any sort of comparisons/contrasts, Shiki’s haiku below is a merely factual description of a scene.

The sparrow hops

Along the verandah,

With wet feet

Kerouac’s two-axis, cinematic haiku is beautifully crafted and serves well as a starting point for many thoughts and emotions (for more information about Shiki's haiku and Kerouac’s view of it, see my "To the lighthouse" post, titled "The Model for All Haiku!?").

Reading Japanese haiku through the lens of R. H. Blyth, Jack Kerouac familiarized himself with the form, but in "Explanatory Note to Some Western Haikus," he also proposed a way to write haiku in Western languages:

The "Haiku" was invented and developed over hundreds of years in Japan to be a complete poem in seventeen syllables and to pack in a whole vision of life in three short lines. A "Western Haiku" need not concern itself with the seventeen syllables since Western languages cannot adapt themselves to the fluid syllabic Japanese. I propose that "Western Haiku" simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language.... Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.

Below is a relevant excerpt from Jack Kerouac’s Paris Review Interview about his view of haiku composition:

INTERVIEWER (Ted Berrigan)

You have said that haiku is not written spontaneously but is reworked and revised. Is this true of all your poetry? Why must the method for writing poetry differ from that of prose?

KEROUAC

No, first; haiku is best reworked and revised. I know, I tried. It has to be completely economical, no foliage and flowers and language rhythm, it has to be a simple little picture in three little lines. At least that's the way the old masters did it, spending months on three little lines and coming up, say, with:

In the abandoned boat,

The hail

Bounces about.

That's Shiki. But as for my regular English verse, I knocked it off fast like the prose, using, get this, the size of the notebook page for the form and length of the poem, just as a musician has to get out, a jazz musician, his statement within a certain number of bars, within one chorus, which spills over into the next, but he has to stop where the chorus page stops. And finally, too, in poetry you can be completely free to say anything you want, you don't have to tell a story, you can use secret puns, that's why I always say, when writing prose, “No time for poetry now, get your plain tale.”

INTERVIEWER

How do you write haiku?

KEROUAC

Haiku? You want to hear haiku? You see you got to compress into three short lines a great big story. First you start with a haiku situation—so you see a leaf, as I told her the other night, falling on the back of a sparrow during a great big October wind storm. A big leaf falls on the back of a little sparrow. How you going to compress that into three lines? Now in Japanese you got to compress it into seventeen syllables. We don't have to do that in American—or English—because we don't have the same syllabic bullshit that your Japanese language has. So you say: “Little sparrow”—you don't have to say little—everybody knows a sparrow is little because they fall so you say”

Sparrow

with big leaf on its back—

windstorm

No good, don't work, I reject it.

A little sparrow

when an autumn leaf suddenly sticks to its back

from the wind.

Hah, that does it. No, it's a little bit too long. See? It's already a little bit too long, Berrigan, you know what I mean?

INTERVIEWER

Seems like there's an extra word or something, like when. How about leaving out when? Say:

A sparrow

an autumn leaf suddenly sticks to its back --

from the wind!

KEROUAC

Hey, that's all right. I think when was the extra word. You got the right idea there, O'Hara! “A sparrow, an autumn leaf suddenly”—we don't have to say suddenly do we?

A sparrow

an autumn leaf sticks to its back --

from the wind!

[Kerouac writes final version into a spiral notebook.]

INTERVIEWER

Suddenly is absolutely the kind of word we don't need there. When you publish that will you give me a footnote saying you asked me a couple of questions?

KEROUAC

[writes] Berrigan noticed. Right?

INTERVIEWER

Do you write poetry very much? Do you write other poetry besides haiku?

KEROUAC

It's hard to write haiku. I write long silly Indian poems. You want to hear my long silly Indian poem?

INTERVIEWER

How has Zen influenced your work?

KEROUAC

What's really influenced my work is the Mahayana Buddhism, the original Buddhism of Gautama ´Sàkyamuni, the Buddha himself, of the India of old . . . Zen is what's left of his Buddhism, or Bodhi, after its passing into China and then into Japan. The part of Zen that's influenced my writing is the Zen contained in the haiku, like I said, the three-line, seventeen-syllable poems written hundreds of years ago by guys like Basho[WITH FLAT LINE ON TOP PLEASE!!], Issa, Shiki, and there've been recent masters. A sentence that's short and sweet with a sudden jump of thought in it is a kind of haiku, and there's a lot of freedom and fun in surprising yourself with that, let the mind willy-nilly jump from the branch to the bird. But my serious Buddhism, that of ancient India, has influenced that part in my writing that you might call religious, or fervent, or pious, almost as much as Catholicism has. Original Buddhism referred to continual conscious compassion, brotherhood, the dana paramita (meaning the perfection of charity), don't step on the bug, all that, humility, mendicancy, the sweet sorrowful face of the Buddha (who was of Aryan origin by the way, I mean of Persian warrior caste, and not Oriental as pictured) . . . in original Buddhism no young kid coming to a monastery was warned that “Here we bury them alive.” He was simply given soft encouragement to meditate and be kind. The beginning of Zen was when Buddha, however, assembled all the monks together to announce a sermon and choose the first patriarch of the Mahayana church: instead of speaking, he simply held up a flower. Everybody was flabbergasted except Ka´syapiya [FLAT THINGIES OVER FIRST A AND I], who smiled. Kásyapiya [DITTO!!] was appointed the first patriarch. This idea appealed to the Chinese, like the sixth patriarch Hui-Neng who said, “From the beginning nothing ever was,” and wanted to tear up the records of Buddha's sayings as kept in the sutras; sutras are “threads of discourse.” In a way, then, Zen is a gentle but goofy form of heresy, though there must be some real kindly old monks somewhere and we've heard about the nutty ones. I haven't been to Japan. Your Maha Roshi Yoshi is simply a disciple of all this and not the founder of anything new at all, of course. On The Johnny Carson Show he didn't even mention Buddha's name. Maybe his Buddha is Mia.

Cool Announcement: Jack Galmitz Interview

My Dear Dellow Poets/Readers:

I got permission from Jack Galmitz to publish his audio interview about his view of haiku aesthetics (kigo, the role of "nature," shasei approach, ...)  He was interviewed by Laurence Stacey, Haiku News editor. The interview begins with reciting one of Laurence's favorite haiku by Jack and Jack's different take on his published haiku.

Published Version

turning away

the soldier’s face

deformed

Haiku News, February 13, 2012

Original Version

turning away

the deformed face

of a soldier

Now, listen to the Jack Galmitz Interview  (After opening the link in a new window, first click  Download,  and then you'll see the listing show up in the new tab with an "Open" option. Click Open)

Enjoy the interview

Chen-ou