The Best American Poetry

Hakiu Exchange [by David Shapiro and David Lehman, 1/22/03]

DL to DS

NY Unstuck Exchange (Hi, koo!)

Three drops of blood on
a hill of snow: signal for
rebellion to start.

Two snakes intertwined
around a tree: signal for
couple to have sex.

One touch of Venus
and I will marry the world
with my stiff penis.

I know we knew what
was coming. Of planets who
can resist Venus?

How about a new
school of poetics? OK,
but what to call it?

Do you suppose these
haikus will be published and
read on a glad day? [DL, 1 / 20 / 03]

DS to DL

I have one reader
in mind, but probably she
will be glad elsewhere!

this is my haiku
to the addressee slipped way
beyond the world's wake!

Call Poetry Mind
Call all else stupidity
Call squirrel there squirrel!

To pronounce squirrel squirrel
In last stanza change accents
Squirrel is still same squirrel!

Oh nominalist
Oh Zeno halfway there, let
her read us one day!

Here I am at school
In front of blue computer
Fairly serene Fool—         [DS, 1 / 21 / 03]

DL to DS
Monocle, Mon Oncle

Good afternoon, my
friend. Um, how would you define
nominalism?

To define the word
in one haiku seems a task
worthy of your skill.

What did Stevens mean
by writing the “clashed edges
of two words that kill”?

This is my haiku
to the world that never sent
one to Emily:

In January
I always think of David
Shapiro’s first book.   [DL, 1 / 21 / 03]

DS to DL
Haiku no explanation but a vision of Wally and the Liberty Dime (coldsnap)

Only the word lives
for the nominalist -- words
clash: no cold ideas!

Just two words breaking
in Stevens' cave, no fire --
just words -– fireflies -–

Thanks for the memries --
the buried 15 yr old
now lost in old years —

Near Plato's highway
Wallace walks with his wife, but
only words they say!

They go opposite
each other and are happy
Pigeons stay indoors!

That's what the Times sez!
Pigeons indoors! Spouses! Crimes!
Criminals! Ideas!

Well, David, this is
not the complete Clash or edge
just nominal fee --- !

I know that words kill
Because blind History taught
blind Homer they will----

But haikus could be
little consoled birds inside
warm ferries flying--!      [DS, 1 / 22 / 03]

DL to DS
Time for one more haiku

In my sleep I wrote
haiku of wonder but then
the bird flew away.

Nor raven nor crow
yet that blackbird made circles
in the sky and snow.

No nominalist,
That bird was lordly, a sir,
Yes: Sir Realist.

Stevens and wife walked
to end of street and he turned
left and she turned right.

Two swords that kill do
so with greater skill than two
words that kill, n'est-ce pas?    [DL, 1 / 22 / 03]

Photos: (1) top left David Lehman with Polish poet Piotr Sommer; (2) David Shapiro (3) Lehman (4) Shapiro

"One Plkus One" [haiku by David Shapiro]

    it may be too hard
    to think of me as silence
    like thirsty flowers

    in the Luxembourg
    I paused to cry for hours
    beside patient friends

    I read Thus Spake Z
    in a minute or two and
    saw my life in clouds

    and inside last clouds
    I saw my sister hiding
    behind the grillework

    snakes danced up curtains
    and a miserable pink
    of which Michaux spoke

    Half a century
    later I look at tulips
    try to see glory

    not Lawrence's kind
    but the modest buds in Bronx
    where diners pop up

    thirteen synagogues
    and some are shuls the way Saul
    Bellow preferred them

    Unlike a true Jew
    I like to go alone, weep
    (kills community)

    Today someone writes
    as if anyone around
    Frank froze him with lies

    Generosity
    is not a word for critics
    but Frank hated pricks

    haha the theory
    is he was a dead man and
    this is false theory

    But let's go back to
    say l962 or
    let's pay attention

    involuntary
    memory as in Proust is
    more than I can bear

    in England I smelled
    my mother's glitzy perfume
    and I also heard

    inside myself the
    tune of her blue jewel-box
    I still remember    

    Too tired to forget
    too rebellious to count
    lonely syllables

    well father would say
    what's so lonely about them
    the one equals one

    I want to build that
    with long Icelandic "menhirs"
    one plus one is one

    for the madness of
    my old friend the architect
    One monument one

    You pushed me into
    talking today but really
    the best rest is two

    but I want to build
    one day like white white Legos
    one plus one is one

    -– David Shapiro,
    September 8, 2008

Herb Engelhardt invents the haiku

Greasy Spoon

I watched the owner
pocket a two-dollar tip
left for a waitress.

And I felt sorry
for the guy, knew he would die
hated by his kids.

-- Herbert Engelhardt (1925-2021)

Herbert Engelhardt was born in New Jersey in 1925. He served in the Pacific Theater of World War II from 1943 to 1946 and was awarded the Purple Heart in the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945. He received his BA and MBA from Harvard in 1949 and 1951, respectively. In his late seventies, he began to write poems. He lived in New York City until his death in 2021.

The Haiku Masters of Japan drop in for a visit [by David Lehman]

Thanks to Bob Hass, I'm
reading the haiku masters
of Japan -- Basho,

Buson and Issa --
in one essential book: The
Essential Haiku,

published by Ecco,
with smart intro and useful
notes by Mr. Hass.

Examples follow.
(Translators do not observe
strict syllabic count).

Here is Basho as
rendered by B. Watson in
fifteen syllables:

"It's not like anything
they compare it to --
the summer moon."

And now for Buson,
trans. by Yuki Sawa and
Edith M. Shiffert:

"I go,
you stay;
two autumns."

Issa, the last of
the three, wrote the following
(trans. Robert Huey):

"Children imitating cormorants
are even more wonderful
than cormorants."

This post went up ten
years back and ended with my
three-words-in-three-lines

New York translation
of Basho’s justly famous
haiku of the frog:

Pond.
Frog.
Splash.

-- DL

"Retronym time" from "Time Pieces" [by Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967-2009]

from "Time Pieces" by Rachel Wetzsteon

Cheering: it was done.
But soon the Great War would be
renamed World War One. 

"Time Pieces," a brilliant sequence of haikus, firstappeared in The New Criterion and was selected by Kevin Young forThe Best American Poetry 2011 and by Robert Pinsky for inclusion in The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, which Scribner published in 2013. A Yale alumna, Wetzsteon did her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She taught at Barnard College. A poet of great intelligence and formal ability, she had just been named poetry editor of The New Republic when she died by her own hand on or just before Christmas 2009.

-- sdl (11/11/18)

"Time Pieces," a brilliant sequence of haikus, firstappeared in The New Criterion and was selected by Kevin Young forThe Best American Poetry 2011 and by Robert Pinsky for inclusion in The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, which Scribner published in 2013. A Yale alumna, Wetzsteon did her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She taught at Barnard College. A poet of great intelligence and formal ability, she had just been named poetry editor of The New Republic when she died by her own hand on or just before Christmas 2009.

-- sdl (11/11/18)

"No Day Without Revision" [by David Shapiro]

Date: Sep 15, 2007 9:44 PM

No Day Without Revision

 for DCLehman

How fast do you write
as if that means anything
haiku, slowly crawl

if Zeno's correct
we will never reach Fuji
high views of New York

Braudel said: There's holes
in the heart of this New York
will it heal – Never!

I told Phillip, friend
they have murdered New York now
to make it Lausanne

Phillip said, David
New York is not an old cow
to be tipped over!

He left Manhattan.
My friends moved away--
nostalgic for land--

New York's not Lausanne
thank god but rents leapt, artists
disappeared like smoke

But why speak estates
Well, for a few years artists
spoke of real estate--

***

Meyer Schapiro said:
Art and money are systems
utterly at odds

He hated Berenson
because wealth was secret
plumbing in his life

****

I took a tea hour
if you permit the bubbling
syllable – bitter!

yuck! froth! green gloop! tea!
But the ceremony charmed
me relaxed me Divine

I like one flower
one ritual one sweet note
Internal God – Tea!

the way of flowers
they say the great movie man
went back to flowers

Woman in the Dunes!
but he went back to father's
flowers arranging!

Think of the double!
A man makes a great movie
then.....chrysanthemums!

***

Everything speaks
to me; it bursts my brain when
blossoms speak to me

Her thigh speaks to me
Christ's thigh spoke to Angelo
Cressid's foot has speech

What are we doing
writing haiku in dark age
belated lateness

The critics tone-deaf
the art critics color-blind
all we have's madness

Negative Keats goes
emptied out of moral self
he becomes a....gnat!

and gathering haiku
cluster in the sky pink clouds
Clouds my master loved

Clouds that Kenneth loved
he told me: don't be afraid
of planes – look! torn clouds!

Kenneth said: afraid
of planes! but you'll never see
anything this good!

On earth as it is
I say thanks for not killing
the first-born – myself!

My father's warmest
tones – Judaism attracts
We don't kill first-born

And of my son, said:
There's only one problem – he's
only one – make more!

***

So it turned out you
haiku-lovers that father
did not kill me, died

I say if friends die
I can do it too who's scared
well, apprehensive

If my dear friends die
I can even take coffins
"I die and smile"

****

This chain of haiku
which could be three syllables
is a bit unclear

Am I just mumbling
abstract phobias or does
insight burst wild geese!

In school my son knew
Hamlet’s soliloquies and
school was mad at me!

Inappropriate
my little boy 3 loved Latin
"Good for Jewish pope"

said Kenneth or priest
or cardinal I thought But
Ovid's your favorite!

squooshing syllables
I remember Catullus
hating to love love

I hated loving
I'm so glad to love less, less
then not at all, all

let haiku echo
KO or a season on earth
earthwards where Frost fell

and Crane dived down deep
and raised his hand up to scream
Help, hello. goodbye

He swam strongly then
just as Ray Johnson swam out
Some never think that

Padgett said Never
have I thought of suicide
funny his friends did

Ted killed himself fast
Allen killed himself slowly
fire, ice, speed, coke

I have twenty books
like twenty snowy mountains
still to write Oh snail!

write slowly always
then throw the paint like blossoms
then dry. now, revise

Oh deliberate
sex inside a haiku – yes
fucking is OK

it’s called wild wisdom
Americans so regressed
we can learn bodies

Internal bodies --
are the way to understand
Cezanne, Picasso!

the body felt from
inside not like driving cars
We don't know bodies

Too abstractly haiku
lie down like sodden hosts, guests
all drunk on ideas

I like old haiku
the bee emerging all drunk
from inside the rose

I throw bread, old pond
don't be scared of many sins
Blame it on bodiers

Blame it on clouds, late
in the afternoon of life
almost evening, friend

– David Shapiro

Haiku Exchange, Sept. 9, 2007 [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

Sunday September 9, 2007

David Shapiro to David Lehman

Subject: I had vertigo? Lins says hello to you Why we gone from JA (events kana)

Now I even read
the poor translations
of the wonderful haiku

I even like lines  / like this all stretched out condensed / oh ugly haiku

when I was fifteen
my friend now dead said David
too much in your head

He enjoyed Moby
Dick and said first he read parts
then fell into space

the real space between
the letters – he slapped his sister
with a Tagore book

in jail for stopping
at a green light– He said in
jail he thought up deaths

Varieties of
suicide – he had talent
now dead in a cave

Krishna consciousness
you may find it funny, but
it’s real as his hair

I had lots of friends
become priests – they wrote
lots of poor haiku

Jack Kerouac wrote
his American car strophes
now I'm the old man

they say common joy
is only in rock, sports, sex
But friends say: Haiku!

Oh it’s national
but more like the family
Haiku won't hurt you

My friend's father was
in a group where the copy
was always better

Better than what? Think
better than the original
little objects

I'm against rhyming
haiku because it’s too ruled
I like split insights!

I never could write
the perfect haiku sestina
even a pantoum!

I failed everything
like Du Fu in his exams
or even his tears

What's a haiku? sonnet
condensed to even smaller
nuns than Wordsworth

I don't know if you
don't know what makes a haiku
Spurt up like moon sex

Love Buson, Issa
one has good eyes for music
one loves bugs so much

Kenneth saddened me once
by saying flowers and fish
in haiku are false!

all those cherry trees
were often just poetic
Horrifying, yes?

I find Basho real
So maybe his trees, roads, fields
are true in real ways

Just because Borges
had dream tigers don't think that
those tigers don't bite!

You were a dream once
and you were a dream tiger
Imitate and die

That sounds too extreme
but the death haiku are that
haiku for doctors

– David Shapiro

September 9, 2007

Extending the exchange plus an excursus

From dclehman 
To dajoshap

An exchange with you
of haiku by haiku in
honor of life, death.

Friendship is two old
talkative monks sitting
on top of a mountain.

Two old monks atop
a mountain discuss the gold
standard in Koch’s play.

Is there no room for
cherry blossoms and the white
eye of a brown owl?

Your definition
of haiku (sonnet condensed)
is sweet though untrue.

I, too, love moon sex,
dream tigers, split insights, and
spiritual puns.

Spiritual puns
are coincidences, said
G. K. Chesterton.

Can haiku do the work
of a spiritual pun?
Strangers meet on train.

One kills the other’s
wife and wants his own father
killed by the other.

Or the survivor
sleeps with the victim’s widow
after killing him.

Both Alfred Hitchcock
and Sophocles believe in
spiritual puns.

Rhyme in haiku seems
contrary to the spirit
of the Eastern mind.

That must be why I
do it though of course you’re right
I shouldn’t. And so night

falls as it must on
us all, and to bed must I
go, to sleep, to dream,

and not to die. O
friend it pleases me to write
these haiku with you.

-- David Lehman

 

Haiku Heaven: an exchange [by David Lehman and David Shapiro]

Haiku: Autumn 2007

(1) From: DaJoShap
To: DCLehman

Subject: preface Shapiro / for our haiku.  I'll think / Now why not write yrs

yes you may publish
our haiku but I think
preface needs finish!

for example our
haiku might seem dour:
no seasons, flowers

well, maybe a bug
it landed on us while snug
we counted haiku

Even thinking haiku
I miss writing the haiku
even in haiku

inside the haiku
a bug, a host, a guest, more--
all fits --even you!

We hardly ever meet
we hardly ever greet, yet
poets love the beat

but that's too dry, I
know – the first haiku should fly
like Keene's sharp short dry

in English ice creams
might be important as dreams --
as Kyoto stones

As we joke, we say
don't write every day, write
all day and don't stop

at morning, haiku
in the afternoon, haiku
sleep, baby haiku

how I would like to
write the color of the voice
of the haiku bird!

or disappear like
a prince executed fast
Must it be today?"

Yes it must, Haiku
We must let you end, today
Though you've more to say!

KANA PILLOW
-- David Shapiro

(2) September 8, 2007: 8:25 pm

from: DCLehman
To: DaJoShap

I think we should start
a new series of haiku
before the leaves drift

before the leaves fall
in that one moment when all
of nature stands tall.

"You are the poet,"
C. said to J. "I , the scribe."
Birds build but not I.

Eye of hurricane,
or all-seeing bug on top
of lean apple tree,

look at me and think,
this is life this wait this day
in haiku heaven

with my friend you: why
miss writing the haiku when
we can write new ones

and live within them
as the guest hosts of a late
night talk show you hear

from the room next door
to yours in no-sleep motels
full of books, the books

we want to write, you
and I, alone together
for the first time since

the night of sharp knives
the November night and dawn
on Riverside Drive.

– David Lehman

"Days of Penitence and Awe" [by David Lehman]

The haiku form, whose virtues begin with enforced concision, can function well as a stanza in a poem that tells a story or makes an argument, or so I found in 2007 when, for a month and a half in the early Autumn, David Shapiro and I corresponded daily by haiku. Here is my "Days of Penitence and Awe."

In temple I prayed
and chanted Holy! Holy!
Holy! And was scared.

Father forgive me.
For what? For things done, not done.
The time I wasted.

For “scared,” read “sacred,”
its anagram. I am, said
the Lord. The terror!

The terror! Isaac
knew it. But do we? Faithless
friends exit the scene

after wasting years
playing Falstaff drinking and
praising his own past.

He believed in what?
In Prince Hal, who loved him but
had to reject him.

What do we believe?
Money money money said
Roethke and Lawrence.

We believe that life in
an office is hard work and
a cocktail at five.

We believe in pills.
Chemistry and medicine
can make us young. Vanity

fair as life is not.
We believe there are two outs,
bottom of the ninth.

Bottom of the night.
Vulgarity supreme, a
loud new century

of madmen in robes.
People have asked me what is
my favorite word.

I say “you.” Sometimes
I think the most potent word
in English is Jew.

O could I absent
myself from my daily rounds!
I would return as

the count of Monte
Cristo or Joseph revealed.
So I fondly dream.

Just so my mind roams
while the rest of me sits here
in temple and prays.

from Yeshiva Boys by David Lehman (Scribner, 2009).

-- DL

"Summer Afternoon" [by David Shapiro]

For DCLehman just feeling happy James’s words you love

Today was unbear-
ably beautiful like a
bear walking thru school!

Today was amaz-
ingly cool and calm like fish
rushing to the knife!

today the sun hit
the bricks as if a painter
added more yellow!

today supremely
lucid and blue like bluejays
imitating sky!

today was better
than many days but don't say
that just love today!

today today like
a kitsch garden on TV
or sudden color

at five forty in
the afternoon no one
was dead bullfighting

Today exactly
at 5:42 the myth
I live by shattered!

today close to 5
43 the pop of depth
and Rabbi Nachman

I heard the grass sing
Walt was not disappointing
the bear ate the kid

the palm leaf had moved
what is more a monument
smiled like pigeons

Scholem said Whitman
was his religion--did that
disappoint you now?

the rose in Scholem's
yard we plucked it was so big
it wagged its stem soul

I can't use that word
beautiful and not normal
making green ones red

Throw a diamond
on the rusty steel table
just three randomly

That was my today
yell yellow yellow yellow
stain of a blue day!

sing yellow yellow
yellow shall be my garden
Desdemona day

Kawabata saw
the beautiful in glasses
on Hawaiian glass

He loved the repeats
Oh dim moon oh dim dim dim
no he said Bright Moon!

Beautiful poem
As ugly as beautiful
as pornography

All is horrible
said my friend all wonderful
circumcized cirque size

Like an artifice
like an artificial lake
oh bright bright bright day!

seeing through difference
he called it but I might say
loving difference!

oh penumbra oh
and Van Gogh thinking he had
painted stars too large!

well maybe he had
when I take my glasses off
tear-shaped breasts appear

Futurists, beware
my eyes are stained with stars you
might find archaic!

as a sculptor said
nice to practise archaic
crafts! not that he did!

beautiful spacious
the end of sullen empire(s)
one day beats them all!

beautiful summer
on a bed all afternoon
don’t say beautiful

summer in autumn
beautiful as  bugs to friends
sunlight on your hands

-- David Shapiro

Ed. note: David wrote this poem in response to my endorsement of Henry James's view that "summer afternoon" is the happiest phrase in the language. From the archive; first posted July 12, 2018. -- DL

As January Bites the Dust of Snow [Lehman & Shapiro haiku exchange, 2003]

 

An Old Dispute; I agree (and disagree)
Date:    1/27/2003 8:25:35 PM Eastern Standard Time   
   
Well, David Lehman,
it's an old dispute between
Li Po -- Tu Fu--  Scene:

O Tu Fu says Li
you're suffering poetry--
My kind just flies high--

Ben Jonson wanted Bard
to blot more. Now you know I'm
not hair on his beard--

Dave, I'm just playing...
Some think it close to praying.
It's all just saying...

No one hates typos
More than I do, but we'll clean
Them later (and schmooze).

--  [DS, 1 / 27 / 03]

 

I muse and am dis
-abused but now I'm back from
Detroit, Michigan.

Detroit's a riot --
or was in '67.
What were you doing?

I was waking at
six and carrying mail in
Harlem and the Heights.

Days of ‘67.
What changed was the rate of change.
You said: read Rimbaud.

I joined the Poem
Team. You were on it, as were
Mitch, Les, Chuck, Hilton.

We gave readings at
women's colleges such as
Sadie Lou and Vassar.

Mitch Sisskind read "A
Mean Teacher" and re-met his
wife of the future.

Enough of those days.
I wish not for the snows of
yesterday but now.

The snow is coming
fast and white, covering the
balsams and cedars.  

-- DL, 1 / 27 / 03

and furthermore I muse and ignore the news but can’t elude the weather

Maybe all teachers
are mean, I thought, but now you
know I snow so slow.

Just one thing is real.
Snow. The sooner you know this,
The easier life.

And by snow I mean
snow. So much pain in your mind
or mine: we need snow.

Ah, my friend, may this
day bring you an hour of clear
vision and no thought. 

–- DL, 1 / 29 / 03

    Each month a fatal new form? Thanks, etc. Thanks

DS to DL
Date:    1/29/2003 5:20:44 PM Eastern Standard Time

My best lecture was
"Snow in Art and Litera-
ture" post real snow-storm!

Maybe we should write
each month in new forms: couplets
for Feb in droplets!

ahorisms: March
villanelle for long April
May is all prose (lit)

June for happy songs;
letters during summer's wrongs;
and for spoon and tongs?

all Fall prose Rimbauds;
while some desire more "Sri Lankas"*          *new form where you ferment nouns in names
we’d return from maps                                   

of three continents
with tankas (haiku plus two
seven-syllables lines.)

Christmas ices streams –
(sweet permissive month of dreams--)
we'll do ANYTHING!    

-- DS, 1 / 29 / 03

Haiku Exchange 1/22/03 [David Lehman and David Shapiro]

DL to DS
NY Unstuck Exchange (Hi, koo!)

Three drops of blood on
a hill of snow: signal for
rebellion to start.

Two snakes intertwined
around a tree: signal for
couple to have sex.

One touch of Venus
and I will marry the world
with my stiff penis.

I know you knew that
was coming. Of planets I
can’t resist Venus.

How about a new
school of poetics? OK,
but what to call it?

Do you suppose these
haikus will be published and
read on a glad day? [DL, 1 / 20 / 03]

DS to DL

I have one reader
in mind, but probably she
will be glad elsewhere!

this is my haiku
to the addressee slipped way
beyond the world's wake!

Call Poetry Mind
Call all else stupidity
Call squirrel there squirrel!

To pronounce squirrel squirrel
In last stanza change accents
Squirrel is still same squirrel!

Oh nominalist
Oh Zeno halfway there, let
her read us one day!

Here I am at school
In front of blue computer
Fairly serene Fool—         [DS, 1 / 21 / 03]

DL to DS
Monocle, Mon Oncle

Good afternoon, my
friend. Um, how would you define
nominalism?

To define the word
in one haiku seems a task
worthy of your skill.

What did Stevens mean
by writing the “clashed edges
of two words that kill”?

This is my haiku
to the world that never sent
one to Emily:

In January
I always think of David
Shapiro’s first book.   [DL, 1 / 21 / 03]

DS to DL
Haiku no explanation but a vision of Wally and the Liberty Dime (coldsnap)

Only the word lives
for the nominalist -- words
clash: no cold ideas!

Just two words breaking
in Stevens' cave, no fire --
just words -– fireflies -–

Thanks for the memries --
the buried 15 yr old
now lost in old years —

Near Plato's highway
Wallace walks with his wife, but
only words they say!

They go opposite
each other and are happy
Pigeons stay indoors!

That's what the Times sez!
Pigeons indoors! Spouses! Crimes!
Criminals! Ideas!

Well, David, this is
not the complete Clash or edge
just nominal fee --- !

I know that words kill
Because blind History taught
blind Homer they will----

But haikus could be
little consoled birds inside
warm ferries flying--!      [DS, 1 / 22 / 03]

DL to DS
Time for one more haiku

In my sleep I wrote
haiku of wonder but then
the bird flew away.

Nor raven nor crow
yet that blackbird made circles
in the sky and snow.

No nominalist,
That bird was lordly, a sir,
Yes: Sir Realist.

Stevens and wife walked
to end of street and he turned
left and she turned right.

Two swords that kill do
so with greater skill than two
words that kill, n'est-ce pas?    [DL, 1 / 22 / 03]

Photos: (1) top left David Lehman in Washington Square park / photo credit Brian Adams  (2) David Shapiro beside poem beginning "I have one reader."

"Links of Snow" [haiku exchange by David Lehman & Shapiro, Jan 13-19, 2003]

Subj:    Re: A little group to compensate for senior miscounting; more on KK
Date:    1/13/03 9:42:35 AM Eastern Standard Time
From:    DaJoShap
To:    DCLEHMAN

Let the breeze of So What
Blow through you, said the masters:
Now it does: And so?

Kenneth liked the Rules:
But preferred smashing them Smash!
Why count? Huh? Go Fish!

If I could love all
The way I worshiped Her once
I'd be a Saint Paul!

If I loved each Thing
The way I adored that Girl:
Spinoza would sing!

That's my Father---there!
No, just a butterfly re-
turning to its branch!

Op illusions
Are not haiku? What say you?
Everything's haiku

Black holes, flat screens:
Is a new word poetry?
Old snow falls slowly--

Don't tease me, young Dave!
Let's plop like Ken into pond
Make happy sound wave!     

-- DS, 1 / 13 / 03

Haiku Heaven

Date: 1/13/03 7:15:47 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: DCLEHMAN
To: DaJoShap

Even the master
of So What has off days, days
off, days of fire.

O for a muse of
fire on this green lake of
snow in the mountains.

We no can count but
why keep account of our
haiku transgressions?

A bird's eye disturbs
this winter landscape of hills
like white short stories.

On the other hand,
one thing's left to do, to say:
I've forgotten what.

[DL, 1 / 13 / 03]

Links of Snow

from David Shapiro to David Lehman

Snow to me, I say,
Is what bananas are to
Gabriel Marquez!

I thought snow useless
Until I saw a book sez:
Economic Snow.

A physicist cried:
Wake up, David, you never
Thought snow was useful!?

No, no, no., never
Have I ever thought that snow
Was useful! To skis

trees, warming flowers,
giving symbolists white hours--
SNOW IS NOT MONEY!

A snowman blinks, War.
Time of the empire, fat whore!
On the lawn, new snow!

*****
As if pardoned from
death by the Czar of all Rus:
he received her note!

Swifter than haiku,
deeper than Prospero's book,
E-mail like snow...Look!

--DS, 1 / 17 / 03

Music of Poetry, and Ginsberg’s Box Remembered

Violin on floor --
Haven't practiced in months now--
Hear planes in the air!

Mute violin there--
No more sound than Al's squeeze-box--
Practice haiku more-!

-- DS, 1 / 18 / 03

Breakfast at Noon

from David Lehman to David Shapiro

Greetings from my hut
in Manhattan where I slept
late this cold morning.

Breakfast at noon, no
strings but a piano plays
"Shall We Dance" (Rodgers).

Yes, I still live back
in the fifties in Brooklyn
cheering the Dodgers.

-- (DL, 1/ 18 / 03]

Borges: Baseball is a metaphysical game because it need never conclude

And I in NJ
I make the snowy commute
Over the nude bridge!

How I've ended there!
Baseball metaphysical--
It may never end!

I walked Weequahic Park ("wekwak”)
Now my family is gone---
Let's take mental walk! 

-- DS, 1 / 19 / 03

Haiku Exchange between two Davids on Jan 11, 2003 [Shapiro and Lehman]

Ed. note:  An exchange of e-mails on January 2, 2003, prompted David Shapiro to suggest to David Lehman that the two Davids "link haiku" for a year. They more modestly sustained their haiku exchange through the month of January 2003. In February of that year they traded couplets, and in March aphorisms. Here is haiku exchange #4 dated January 11, 2003. On left, a photo of David Shapiro between two portraits of him.

DL to DS

your mystifying silence is the answer to all haikus
Date:    1/11/03 1:33:45 PM Eastern Standard Time

Let's face it: it has
always been snowing, it has
never stopped snowing.

Do you ski? No, I
snow. I don't know why but I
do. Do you know why?

Why have I not heard
from you I wonder. It's strange
for you to miss a turn.               [DL, 1 / 11 / 03]

DS to DL

Re:  silence due to lack of access; also an elegy for Rudy B.,etc.
Date:    1/11/03 7:41:34 PM Eastern Standard Time

My son controls screens:
The computer, memory,
And other green scenes.

That's why I missed turns:
The turning fire that burns:
Those that father bairns.

The boy has grown up:
Knows the secrets of poems:
Grown girls he'll phone up--

Everything speaks:
Your lost voice, found computer,
The space between words.

Dead photographer:
He saw it all, spoke to it:
The space between clouds.

My son said: Are there
Words for everything, Dad?
For sky between clouds?

Poetry's secrets:
I taught you on walks to school:
Now I am your Fool--

Because of him I lose
A turn in haiku---because
Of him I see saws--!        [ DS, 1 / 11 / 03]

DL to DS

  Quick rejoinder
Date:    1/11/03 11:43:45 PM Eastern Standard Time

Because of love too
you lost count of syllables
on yon abacus

which happens to me
frequently though less frequent
now than dark blue snow.

What Kenneth poem
will you read at the tribute
at Columbia?

I'd opt for "Proverb"
or maybe "At Extremes" from
"A Possible World."

Brueghel painted it:
my window: hunters in snow,
skaters on green ice.       [DL, 1 / 11 / 03]

See also the first of their haiku exchanges
https://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/01/haiku-exchange.html
and this one devoted to Kenneth Koch
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/01/haiku.html

"Homage to Bashō" [7 Haiku by David Lehman]

Leaves that left the trees
are litter now on the ground
in orange and yellow.

This, and six other haiku, are in the November 2020 issue of The Atlantic under the title "Homage to Bashō." Please click and read the poems and, if so inclined, leave a comment.

Kundiman Celebrates 10 Years [by January Gill O'Neil]

Since our grad school days at NYU, no one has inspired or supported me more than Joseph O. Legaspi.

He’s the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press) and two chapbooks: Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts), winner of the David Blair Memorial Prize, and Subways (Thrush Press).  These days, he inspires me as a co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving Asian American literature. This month, Kundiman will celebrate 10 years as an organization.

Kundiman is the classic form of Filipino love song—or so it seemed to colonialist forces in the Philippines. In fact, in Kundiman, the singer who expresses undying love for his beloved is actually singing for love of country. For an organization dedicated to providing a nurturing space for Asian American writers, the name is an inspiration to create and support artistic expression. 

 

JGO: Congratulations on celebrating 10 years of poetry with Kundiman. How are you commemorating this milestone?

JOL: Thank you. Where has the time gone? It has flown by, yet so much has happened, often leaving myself and Sarah Gambito (Kundiman's co-founder) dizzy with amazement. I'm tremendously proud of Kundiman, how we endured for this long through sheer passion, hard work, volunteerism, partnerships, and determination. To commemorate we are throwing a party: our 10th Anniversary Kundiman Gala on Oct. 15 in New York City. It'll be an elegant, fun evening with open bar, chocolates, and dessert tasting. Moreover, we are honoring Vijay Seshadri, the first Asian American to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Come join us and support Asian American literature. Tickets are available at http://kundiman.org/gala.

 

JGO: What has been your biggest joy with Kundiman? 
JOL: Hands down, the Kundiman fellows. They are the most talented, generous, kind-hearted, intelligent and courageous souls I've ever encountered. They have taught me so much.

JGO: What's the value of an organization such as yours in today's current poetry climate? 

JOL: I view Kundiman's initial value in assisting and supporting its primary constituents: Asian American writers. We serve and build this community, which, in turn, branches out to other communities and into the general sphere. By empowering writers, they give voice to our Asian American stories, cataloging our cultural significance, signifying and validating our presence, chronicling our histories. By providing mentorship, workshops and other resources, Kundiman fellows are better at navigating the literary landscape. They are publishing books (35 by the end of 2014, with more slated for publication in the next two years), chapbooks (33 and counting), and in journals; winning awards; doing activist and grassroots work; pursuing graduate degrees; and holding academic posts.

JGO: What's Kundiman's biggest challenge? 
JOL: As with most nonprofits, literary and otherwise, Kundiman's biggest challenge is funding, and with that, sustainability. It angers and frustrates me when celebrities pay thousands of dollars for a pair of shoes, while that amount of money can fund a Kundiman summer retreat and nurture twenty-four emerging writers. So, yes, funding and tied in with that is manpower/personnel, and organizational bandwidth and resources. We know our programs work, our mission is strong. But we're often trying to figure out ways to sustain the organization--beyond grants and fundraising events.

JGO: Flip side of the same question. What's in store for the future of Kundiman? 
JOL: Kundiman hopes to implement a summer fiction retreat for emerging Asian American writers. Proceeds from the 10th Anniversary Gala would go toward that goal. Of course, we will continue with our usual programming: the poetry retreat, the book prize, national readings, and the KAVAD oral history project. We hope to be around serving and championing Asian American literature in the next decade. And the next.

The Kundiman 10th Anniversary Gala

Wednesday, October 15
8 p.m.
The East Wing 
306 E. 76th Street (at 2nd Avenue)
New York, NY 10021

I hope you can make it. 

You can find Joseph’s fine, fine poetry at Poets.org, jubilat, The Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, BLOOM, and the anthology Coming Close (Prairie Lights/University of Iowa Press), among other publications.

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Fall Haiku by Stacey Harwood

Saturday market
In Union Square: Cantaloupes
Alongside apples.

Confused by weather
The woman on the subway
Wears socks and sandals.

Turning a corner,
Into Sixth Avenue wind,
The man holds his hat.

At Gonzo cafe
On Thirteenth, outdoor tables
Are empty by eight.

Looking up, nothing.
On the horizon, two lights
Grow brighter, then dim.

(from the New York Times, October 4, 2004)

Next Line, Please: This Week’s Haiku, Next Week’s Tanka by David Lehman

Last week the American Scholar continued its Next Line, Please contest with an invitation to readers to submit their best haiku. Here's what David Lehman has to say about this week's winning haiku and the rules for next week's tanka contest. Remember, if you want to enter, please do so at the American Scholar's page:

Wow. I love writing haiku and am not surprised that others find the form appealing. Still, I didn’t expect to see 236 entries, some of them containing as many as five haiku, not to mention others that came in over the transom. And the quality was so high that any of 20 could take the laurels. After much hemming and hawing, I picked Paul Breslin’s haiku:

August

The sickle, asleep

In its shed all year, begins

To dream of ripe grain.

 

Farm implements—W. C. Williams’s red wheelbarrow, for instance—have a distinguished history in American poetry. I like the personification of the sickle in Breslin’s “August” and the way the poem captures the fleeting instant between summer and fall. The sickle is still asleep, but day is about to break, and during this period of intense rapid eye movement, when dreams are at their most vivid, what else would the sickle dream of (and wish for) but “ripe grain”? The alliteration (“sickle, asleep,” “ripe grain”) and the line-breaks are deft.

Continue reading here.

Midnight Deadline: Haiku by David Lehman

Deadline tomorrow
Midnight in contest for best
Haiku of August.

-- David Lehman

(Enter your haiku at the American Scholar.)

A Portfolio of Shorts by Newer Writers [selected by Alan Ziegler]

Nora Brooks

SOUP OF GLASS AND CHALK-STAINED SKIES

1. Maybe you own a crockpot. Meals made in them are supposed to be nourishing. Chalky edges of plaster gape open around the hole in the wall next to ours. Crockpots are things mothers give to men newly divorced. Dad can’t feed us pizza and Campbell’s ready-to-serve with mini-sirloin patties anymore. We’ll be yanked back to Auburn, California or wherever Mom’s moving. The new boyfriend’s name is Dick.
   
   
2. Cleave 2-3 lbs. of discount beef into stew chunks. Use a good knife. Dad says his problem with cooking is he’s never had to do it before. Top ramen with lunch meat doesn’t count. My eyes are fixed on his flimsy blade severing tendon and miniature arteries, soaking the cutting board with blood like bruises blooming. There’s another hole in the hallway and one in my bedroom. I don’t understand why we have to wait until we move to patch them.
   
   
3. Quarter 4 medium potatoes and chop an onion roughly. Fish a pound of peas out of the freezer and hope they’re not frost-burnt. He slams the meat chunks into the pot with the vegetables. He sets down his sixth beer. He adds water. It’s supposed to be that easy.
   
   
4. Add seasonings to your taste. Dad has a memory of Mom’s soups, hearty and simple, with a little love nip of pepper. He tosses in a handful from a pre-ground jar like he’s sowing a field. Take it easy, I tell him. It sits for the time it takes him to go on a beer run. Miracle, it’s done. He walked to get the beer. The last thing we need in this family is a DUI, he tells us sisters, slouched over our stools at the dining bar. It’s so full of pepper that it hurts. It’s like swallowing glass. Eat it, he tells us, I don’t want people thinking I can’t take care of you.

 

Nora Brooks is a writer whose work has been published in Poets & Writers, PopMatters, Monkeybicycle, Redactions, Alimentum, and The Best American Poetry blog and is forthcoming from H.O.W. Journal. She is an MFA candidate at The New School and lives in the East Village. This piece originally appeared in Redactions. Nora can be found online at norabrooks.org.

  ^^^ 

Scott Dievendorf

GHOST PLAYER

Before I learned to play, I knew the harp was the only instrument fit for God. I had seen paintings of angels and saints strumming it atop clouds. They deigned lift a trumpet for the people of earth.

            During our first lesson my brother told me the strings were made of catgut—the internal parts of an animal we weren’t to eat.

My father carted us out during his parties and quieted his guests and told them to listen as his cherubim played. My brother sat in the chair and plucked the chords, just as he was told, and when he finished, I followed. My father always wanted his little girl to play last.

Neither of us learned it very well. Our teacher would admonish us. Remind us to practice. Tell us to pluck more gently. Keep our fingernails short.

My brother quit before I did.

The last we heard of him was a resounding note before I took my turn in front of our bay windows. All he and I had in common, really, was that neither of us understood how such a delicate sound could echo from something so vulgar as catgut. But he left before he could come to know our father.

Scott Dievendorf grew up in California and now resides in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Columbia University. His work has appeared in Epiphany. He currently serves as fiction editor of Apogee Journal and is polishing his novel on a Charlie Chaplin impersonator.

 ^^^

Sasha Fletcher

SOME FACTS ABOUT WHALES

Whales are difficult to trust because they are large and because they will not tell you about their blowholes or ever offer you the option of subtitles for their conversations, which are often called songs. Whales can travel vast distances. Whales reproduce one at a time, and very slowly. Whales have a lot of love to give. Whales will make a house for you inside of their bellies for all of your days. They will ask that you not light a fire, as it tickles them. Tickles is a whale word for the ways in which they will kill you. My mother once told me about being swallowed by a whale but then I realized she was talking about Pinocchio, who was a puppet made out of wood. Floorboards are made out of wood. Chairs are made out of wood. The cabinets in the kitchen are made out of wood and the burners on the stove are ringed by fire. This is a sure sign whales are not around as I go to sleep. As I go to sleep I am bathed by streetlights and surrounded, on all sides, by darkness.

Sasha Fletcher is the author ofit is going to be a good year(Big Lucks Books, 2015), one novella, and several chapbooks of poetry.

^^^

 

Writing the Same Poem, Over and Over [by Luke Hankins]

I find it very difficult to understand the thinking of poets who spend a lifetime writing and publishing the same kinds of poems, over and over and over. I don’t mean poets whose work simply bears certain hallmark stylistic or thematic elements—that’s the mark of many a genius whose bodies of work are varied and exploratory. I also don’t mean poets who always write in traditional form, or who always write in the freest of verse—these poets often achieve great variety of effect within similar structures. What I mean are poets who write poems in the same voice, tone, and mood, with identical stylistic techniques, and which have the same aesthetic effects on the reader in book after book after book. Living poets that spring to mind are Kay Ryan, James Tate, Mary Oliver, Charles Wright, and Billy Collins (who, to his credit, has published a book of haiku with Modern Haiku Press—the Billy Collins book you've never read, but should).

Don’t get me wrong—I like the work of each of these poets. But it does trouble me on some level that the reasons I like the poems in Book A are the same reasons I like the poems in Books B, C, D, and E. The poems look the same, sound the same, taste, feel, smell the same! What mundane activity will be the subject of Collins’ melancholy humor today? Which animal or plant will be the source of wisdom in Oliver this week? I wonder what Ryan’s line breaks will be like in this new book . . .

Are these poets so essentially un-creative that the work they create is homogeneous? Or have they simply found a style at which they can achieve mastery? Are poets who employ various styles, forms, and voices diluting their abilities, Jills and Jacks of all trades and masters of none?

And then one thinks of Emily Dickinson, whose mastery is so undeniable and her achievement so towering that one begins to think that her work alone is sufficient reason for any poet to attempt to build a body of work made of bricks of the same color, size, and shape . . . One thinks of the haiku masters, whose bodies of work are contained in tiny syllabic packages of often astonishing beauty and power . . .

Dear reader, I seek your input.