~ Gabriel Zech (Sollars Elementary)
~ Pat Davis (Pembroke, NH)
~ Lee Nash (France)
~ Ana Drubot (Bucharest)
Posted in A Poet's Education, Images, Poetry Lessons, The Daily Poems, tagged Asahi Haikuist on January 6, 2019| Leave a Comment »
~ Gabriel Zech (Sollars Elementary)
~ Pat Davis (Pembroke, NH)
~ Lee Nash (France)
~ Ana Drubot (Bucharest)
Posted in A Poet's Education, Images, Poetry Lessons, The Daily Poems, The Reading Journals, tagged haiku, Peggy Willis Lyles on December 15, 2018| Leave a Comment »
winter solstice
our son reads a fairy tale
to his unborn child
for her mother
bluets
roots and all
hazy moon
the nun begins her journey
with a backward glance
an open window
somewhere
a woman’s wordless song
sweet peas
tremble on the trellis
the bride’s “I will”
Posted in A Poet's Education, Images, Observations, Poetry Lessons, The Reading Journals, Uncategorized, tagged Christ, Still Point, T.S. Eliot on February 10, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Posted in A Poet's Education, Images, Poetry Lessons, The Daily Poems, The Reading Journals, tagged Gerard Manly Hopkins, God's Grandeur, Pied Beauty, sketches, The Windover on November 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »
PIED BEAUTY
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Posted in A Poet's Education, Poetry Lessons, The Reading Journals on March 25, 2014| Leave a Comment »
“1. When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people’s work--preferably poems they admire by writers they do not know personally. Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not merely of the featured author’s work.
2. When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.
3. Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications. They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader’s trust by candidly admitting what they don’t like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.
4. Poets who compile anthologies–or even reading lists–should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire. Anthologies are poetry’s gateway to the general culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight, and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse’s property for professional favors.
5. Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry’s future.
6. Finally poets and arts administrators should use radio to expand the art’s audience. Poetry is an aural medium, and thus ideally suited to radio. A little imaginative programming at the hundreds of college and public-supported radio stations could bring poetry to millions of listeners. Some programming exists, but it is stuck mostly in the standard subculture format of living poets’ reading their own work. Mixing poetry with music on classical and jazz stations or creating innovative talk-radio formats could re-establish a direct relationship between poetry and the general audience.
… watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.” ~ Dana Gioia
Posted in Poetry Lessons on February 3, 2012| 2 Comments »
Haiga is a Japanese art form combining haiku, written in calligraphic script, with a painting. The painting may not be an illustration of the poem. Instead, the poem and the painting may be in juxtaposition to one another — so that their contrast may create fuller meaning.
Here is an example by Yosa Buson, an 18th century Japanese poet and painter:
“A little cuckoo
across
a hydrangea”
Buson greatly admired his predecessor in the art of poetry, Matsuo Basho (who made both haiku and haiga, too), and he painted a portrait in his honor.
Buson’s artwork frequently combines poetry and painting. Two years before he died, he painted “Old Pine.” Like so much of his oeuvre, this masterpiece shows his detailed attention to the beauty of Nature.
Contemporary haiga artists continue to combine poetry and image. Somtimes they create word-and-image duets in honor of past poets, as is the case in this picture, which remembers a haiku by Shushiki, a Japanese woman who wrote haiku in the Edo period in the tradition of Basho.
To view some other examples of this creative work, with original poetry and artwork by contemporary poets, visit:
A contemporary haiga by John Hawkhead that I particulary enjoy is this:
“lying together
after the spring thunderstorm
blossom and hailstones”
I encourage you to make your own haiga!