Haiku ofFarewell to Moristotle & Co.

By Michael H. Brownstein

Moristotle lives
in the glory of its words,
its garden of poems.

Copyright © 2023 by Michael H. Brownstein

Haiku Lichen

By Moristotle

Does lichen like you?
This one does; 
lichen likes you, Haiku.

¿Te gusta el liquen?
Este sí;

a líquen le gustas, Haiku.

Le lichen vous aime-t-il?
Celui-ci le fait;
lichen t'aime, Haïku.

Goines On: Casting out 9s

Click image for more vignettes

In the hours after Goines’ muse reminded him of the “casting out 9s” method of double-checking arithmetic calculations, he remembered where and when he had first heard of the method. Because Goines had been his high school’s “bright boy,” his math teacher (and the schools future principal), Mr. Loren Court, invited him to attend a teachers’ retreat in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas during the summer break of 1959.

Sketches from the Twin Cities Poetic Diversion (or drive version): License Plate Haiku Varié

By Geoffrey Dean 

During the warmer months of 2021, I started considering the possibilities for poetic realization suggested by the automobile license plates of Minnesota. The typical MN plate has six symbols—a series of three letters followed by three numbers, or vice versa. How might the information on an MN plate be interpreted as the structural basis of a haiku-like poem?

From the Alwinac: The UNC Greensboro Cello Collections, in Four Haikus

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

Before the winter break I spent a few days among the Cello Collections at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Although I have visited the collections a number of times over the years, this last visit was especially memorable because I was helping oversee the cataloging of my own collection there.
    When I donated the bulk of the sheet music, books, and recordings that make up the collection, I had thought of it as a Bulgarian cello music collection and proposed naming it along those lines. But Stacey Krim, UNCG professor and curator of manuscripts, insisted that the collection should be under my name. I remember feeling very sheepish about the idea of my name appearing alongside such cello greats as Janos Starker, whom I could scarcely muster the courage to look in the eye as an IU graduate student thirty years ago. During my initial conversations with Prof. Krim, I poured my conflicting emotions into a poem:

Bulgarian bits
Near the Hungarian’s hits—
What Starker contrast?

And this one, a memory of Paul Tortelier’s fall 1989 visit to Bloomington, when I, to my own astonishment, was among the students “in the room where it happened” when he and Starker sightread a two-cello piece Tortelier had composed on the plane from his previous stopover, in Korea....
_______________
Read on….

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

Sketches from the Twin Cities: Apocalyptic Haikus

Series I

By Geoffrey Dean

The guillotine fell,
its severing slice precise –
fine execution

All Over the Place: Three haikus, of fog, flood, & dust

By Michael H. Brownstein

fog...
snowbound piers
a mirage of ghosts

sudden flood
light
leaps into sky

volcanic dust...
the river
skin disease and warts

Copyright © 2019 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

Goines On: Found haiku

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Goines walked home from the gym along the road that led to the Japanese candy manufacturing plant. He guessed that destination explained one item of litter among the many that disrespected the roadsides, its identity a gift for verse:

    crumpled box along the road
    proclaims its contents
    “Hi-Chew”

Copyright © 2019 by Moristotle

All Over the Place: A haiku, from first draft to publication

By Michael H. Brownstein

Haiku, as almost everyone knows, is a very popular type of Japanese poem. Traditionally, it has three lines, the first and last consisting of five syllables and the middle one containing seven. Syllabication in Japanese is much different from in English. For this reason, many English-writing haiku poets keep the three-line framework, but not the syllable count.
    I wrote a haiku for the Human Kind Journal, an online publication of Japanese poetic forms. Here’s my first draft:

Sketches from the Twin Cities: Bloomington Haikus

Morning rounds

By Geoffrey Dean

[Composed in Bloomington, Illinois, this summer.]








bench in graying greens
greets at a corner bus-stop –
moss meets moisture here

Sketches from the Twin Cities: walk along pond’s path

remembering a Fish Lake pond, late summer 2017

By Geoffrey Dean

on a fallen branch
seven turtles in the sun –
blur of water’s edge

twig-snap is the cause
diving turtles the effect –
ripples and bubbles

Haiku (Eleven Years Ago Tomorrow)

By Moristotle



[Originally published on August 19, 2006, with no more words than this, but without the image, found on the Internet.]

Three naked poplars,
. . .silent above russet-leafed
slope of steaming lake.

Copyright © 2017 by Moristotle

Ask Wednesday: What might “experiencing something” be...

if that something isn’t really there?

By Morris Dean

Luminous shadow
spun of mind’s own filaments
enshrouds its temples

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean