Writers and Lovers Café arrived in my mailbox all the way from
Taiwan, full of haiku, haiga, senryu, haibun, tanka, and tanka classics (edited
by Tad Wojnicki--I wrote about his work earlier in Lemonade Stands and Writers and Lovers Café). In this slim and lovely debut volume you’ll find the usual favorite haiku suspects (moons and
roses) but you will also find a wilder array of volunteers in the book’s word
cloud from Ferraris to fruit, AA to sirloin, Auschwitz to flea
markets, garlic to spiders, and castles to children’s handprints.
And it features a haibun by yours truly, Reunion, which attempts to capture the
emotional fray of trying to right the disparate
needs of a family of five reconciling after three years of weekend marriage. No
slender lover pining under cherry blossoms—think peevish wife and preteen
daughter on shore, and loose in the sea: the surfing husband and sons. An
entirely different kind of pining. Or pinning. Some kind of defeat and
attempted triumph. I have now written a description longer than the haibun, so I'll stop here. Except to say my husband is singing in the shower..Yes, honey, I wrote this one about you. As I've mentioned on this blog before, whenever I get a poem rejection, he's famous for admonishing, "Was it a poem about me?!....No?...So write one about me and I promise it'll get taken..." There you go, I concede, more poems in his future. About him.
Here’s the back cover of this edition of Lovers and
Writers Cafe listing an upcoming call for submissions just in case you have taken up a
haiku challenge--for instance there’s a wildish group of AROHO women committing
to writing a haiku a day starting in January; if you join me in that
challenge, by Tad’s haiku deadline here
of March 1, 2014, you should have at last 60 new haiku. And what better thing
to do with a series of haiku than to submit them to someone who will actually read and cherish them?
Additional Notes:
This edition runs $6 a copy plus $4 for international
shipping; here’s the link should you wish to give Writers and Lovers Café to
the haiku fanatic in your life. There you'll also find submission guidelines in a larger font.
Another amazing site celebrating these forms and
more with beautiful galleries and video collage, with thanks to Liz Brennan for pointing me to their site:
Haiga Online; up this October, “Same Moon"
Book Giveaway:I am teaching Poetry of Motherhood online starting January 6-January 31, cost is $125; in an attempt to entice you to register, I promise to send a copy of the anthology, Labor Pains and Birth Stories (Catalyst Book Press, 2009, ed. Jessica Powers) to the first two students who enroll (an $18 value). The anthology features an Introduction by Tina Cassidy, Afterword by Jessica Powers, essays by Ariel Gore, Amy Parker, Ann Angel, Ashini J. Desai, yours truly, and 24 more writing mothers.
The cover art features a block-print I drew, carved, and rolled out three weeks before my first child was born...you'll notice the ecstatic depiction of the mother despite crowning child...a giveaway of another nature that I had no reference yet for the serious work of labor. On the other hand, it rightly intuits the absolute joy of holding one's infant for the first time.
I hope to have the chance to work with you in January. Writers of all genres welcome as we use Fertile Source poems for inspiration but the form our writing takes varies by writer.
