Category Archives: haiku

A Plan is Born

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Plans for next year include writing more, writing better, managing my time and, most importantly, finding new markets. I’ve done over 80 articles on coins and related subjects but they have all been published in the lower levels of society journals.  I don’t want to be rude about them, but it’s not really a challenge getting into something where you are one of two regular contributors and they are read by about six people.

The situation with the articles is that I am either going to have to up my game or stop writing them and use the time for something else. In my first stint as a poet I wrote for new magazines and those known to be easier to get into. It produced results, but when I restarted a few years ago I aimed for the better quality magazines. It has gone quite well and I feel like I have produced something worth doing.

Next year, instead of producing 85+ articles for society Facebook pages and the like, I want to appear at least 12 times in magazines which pay and the journals of the more serious  kind. I think 12 is realistic, just as 50 (again) is realistic for poetry.  That’s why the target is now set at 60 and 15 – there’s no point in sitting back and feeling complacent. At the same time, I still want to support the societies I’m in but I’m going to reduce my output to around 50. I’ve asked other people to help but they haven’t responded, or have made excuses, and they can’t complain if I do other things.

Photo by Roman Koval on Pexels.com

That, of course, is the easy bit. I now have to work out how I’m going to manage my time and actually achieve the targets. That’s the trouble with planning to write more – the first day or two will be taken up with planning. And I just remembered that one of the regular magazines has pulled out.  That will be six fewer slots to aim for.

I will, to be honest, simply send more poetry out and develop a new range of work. I’ve never done a haiga, for instance, which is a photograph with a haiku. Nor have I ever tried any of the linked forms where you put haiku or tanka together to form longer poems. It also feels like time to get back into free verse. And there you go – a plan is born.

Orange Parker Pen

Using the pen pictures reminds me once again that my efforts at product placement have not met with much success. Either that or my complimentary Parker pen has been lost in the post.

Next year I may lower my sights a bit and use pictures of snack food.

 

Thirty! Forty six!

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Something strange happened this afternoon. The day, having started as Friday (I even wrote about it being Friday) but by lunchtime it had become Saturday. I even started planning for “tomorrow” thinking it was Sunday. This has never happened before. I have sometimes struggled with what day it is, and have needed to gather my thoughts, but I do not remember changing days in mid flow.

This would be just another amusing anecdote, but after the cabbage episode I am beginning to have some serious doubts regarding my mental capacity. The advantage is that after having one “Saturday” I am now able to have an extra day at the weekend. The disadvantage is that, being retired, the concepts of “weekend” and “extra day” now have little meaning.

On a more fun note, I tried a pickled egg today. They have been in the fridge for two weeks now, which is the minimum time suggested by the Hairy Bikers in the recipe. They are OK. I will check again in two more weeks, as they did say a month was better. The vinegar is diluted with water in the recipe, and has some sugar in it. Currently, the taste is slightly sweet and the vinegar lacks bite. I will do another lot without water or sugar and see how they go. After that I may need to look at the quality of vinegar. I’m currently using the cheapest, and it may be false economy. However, it does cut the grease effectively when wiping down the hob.

I’ve had two acceptances today, so I’m quite cheerful. One needed a minor edit and a discussion on quotation marks. I was cheery and cooperative and pretended to care about punctuation. This brings the number of acceptances up to 46 for the year and I’m happy that I will probably make it to 50. In artistic terms this doesn’t matter. Forty nine or 51 are much of a muchness, but 60 has a psychological value. Total submissions are 70 so far with another 10 planned. It is significantly short of my  target of 100 submissions. There are several reasons for this, including a patchy work rate, a number of magazines cutting back on publication frequency and the fact that I haven’t written any non-Japanese style poetry this year. I may not make it next year either, as I am doing more numismatic writing. If you take them into consideration I’m on target to do about 70 more, but as they are all for societies there is actually no quality threshold and I have a 100% acceptance rate – that’s not really proper writing.

Finally – food. I made a mushroom biriyani tonight. Well, I used a spice kit for biriyani. The actual ingredients and outcome were non-traditional. However, I used sweet potato, onions, peas, rice and mushrooms, so it was healthy. Of those, the red onions, sweet potato and peas were making their first appearance this week. That makes 30. I have the veg prepared for tomorrow, with swede and cabbage, so look likely to manage 32, possibly more if I eat some nuts.  I am happy with that, and happy I was able to source over 30 plant-based ingredients in the house without doing any special shopping.

And that is that for today. Pictures will be from October 2018. Many are from Clumber park in the days when they weren’t charging fro entry and I could actually walk.

 

It’s a Haibun

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Here’s a poem for you. It was first published in The Haibun Journal in April 2025. I could say it’s a comment on art and the people who think that four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence is music. If I had a Masters Degree, as many poets seem to have, I could probably get away with that.

But I don’t. I have a City & Guilds in Poultry Production, so I settled for writing a piece about being desperate for inspiration. I’m told that writing poems about writing poetry is almost guaranteed to get you turned down because editors see so much of it, so I got lucky here. Well, I got lucky the third time I submitted it, which would make a good case study on persistence.

Originally it was a tanka prose but it became a haibun, removing the tanka and using a haiku that I’d previously had rejected when it was sent to a haiku magazine. “Three Minutes Thirty Three” was originally “Six Minutes Sixteen”, I added the bit about alliteration making it poetry and substituted “watching birds” for “watching daytime TV”. Whether those qualify as improvements I’m sure. There are probably a couple of tweaks I would make if I ever get round to that poetry book, but otherwise I’m happy with it, which is not something I say about all my published poems.

Anyway, this is the finished version. For now . . .

Two Hours Twenty Two

An hour and forty eight minutes pass before I dredge inspiration from the depths. I know this because I set a timer to put myself under pressure to produce. If John Cage can do 4′ 33”, I thought, I can do Two Hours Twenty Two. It’s not accurate, but it is alliterative, which makes it poetry. If I’d set off with Cage’s piece in mind, I would have settled for Three Minutes Thirty Three and passed the rest of the morning drinking tea and watching birds feed in the garden.

a blackcap
sings from tangled thorns
—the stalking cat

 

 

 

 

Poetry and Robins

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Robin - singing

Robin – singing

a robin
sings to its mate
when was the last time
I sang
for you?

That is my latest publication. It was a surprise, because I hadn’t ben told it was accepted. Fortunately I always check before sending things again, as editors don’t like simultaneous submissions. It’s in a German publication called Chrysanthemum. After waiting a while, I went to check on the website, assuming I’d been rejected but wanting to double check, and found the magazine had already been published and I am on pages 226 and 227.. It was a pleasant surprise. They also translated it into German. I knew this was going to happen, but hadn’t anticipated the different look (using capital letters) or the different dynamic that would come from what seemed to be a reordering of words.

Here’s the German translation.

ein Rotkehlchen
singt für seine Gefährtin
wann habe ich
das letzte Mal
für dich gesungen?

Robin, Arnot Hill Park

I just fed it into an internet translator and it put it into English in almost exactly my words. This was a surprise, and a superb effort by the human translator. I have to admit I was expecting it to come back seriously scrambled due to the changes in word order I could see and because of previous experience with internet translations.

I also had a haibun published.

Lesson not learned
Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once
a Roman town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then
rose again. So many empires, so many layers of dust telling one and the same story

dreams of
a second chance
— one more grey dawn

I’m not quite sure what happened in the edit as the title and last line have been altered in the published version. Altered but possibly not improved. What do you think? The original version is shown below.

Lessons we have not learned

Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once a Romans town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then rose again. So many layers, so many stories they could tell. So many men forget all empires turn to dust.

dreams of
a second chance
—one more grey dawn

Robin at Rufford Abbey

That means that in the first four months of the year I have made 30 submissions and 22 have resulted in acceptance. However, before congratulating myself, I have to remember that the 30 submissions contained 151 poems. Normally a submission contains three haibun or tanka prose and the submissions of shorter poems at often 10-15 poems. So when I say I made 30 submissions and had 22 acceptances this 77% success record could also be calculated as also only 15%. It all depends on how you look at it.

Robin

 

 

 

 

Cutting It Fine

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It is done. After another mad struggle I finally submitted my last of my ten submissions for the month. A while ago I was happy with my position, then it all slipped away. I lost my focus and my ability to write and it took the prospect of failure to kick-start my brains again.

This morning, having submitted only three lots, I ws seriously thinking about giving up. Then something took over. I got everything done, apart from two submissions to a magazine that hasn’t accepted anything from me since a change of editor  Then I had tea and watched the quizzes on TV. That left me with a couple of hours. So I watched The Yorkshire Auction House for a while.

Then I sang a song to myself and started again.

Every bursted bubble has a glory!
Each abysmal failure makes a point!
Every glowing path that goes astray,
Shows you how to find a better way.
So every time you stumble never grumble.
Next time you’ll bumble even less!
For up from the ashes, up from the ashes, grow the roses of success!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses of success!

Yes, it’s the song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It seemed to work, because I managed to write 10 passable haiku, edit a couple of haibun and get it all sent off with four minutes to spare.

Next month I have only one submission in the plan, but will look for some more places to send stuff to. I my also have to start counting those other submissions I make. I know I’m not really competing for publication, and it would have to be pretty bad to get rejected, but it all takes time.

Photos from Julia.

 

 

Shakespeare’s Monkey

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Little Egret

An answer I made to Tootlepedal in the comments about writing a lot and letting blind chance sift through it for the good bits reminded me of this poem.

As I was about to press the Publish button, it struck me that I may have posted it before as it seemed familiar. The trouble is that a lot of them seem familiar because they spent so much time inside my head.

Anyway, it seems I did post it before. Sorry if it seems repetitious. I note from reading the version in the other post that it has a different haiku in each place. The one in the other post was the one it was originally written with, the one here is how I sent it. Sometimes I make last minute alterations, and sometimes I don’t make sure all the versions are consistent.

I now think that the unused haiku is better than the one I eventually submitted. At the time, I obviously thought that the other version was an improvement. It was published, so it must have done the job.

Shakespeare’s Monkey
Another rejection. My words have, again, forked no lightning. This is driven home by the fact that I borrow the words of Dylan Thomas to describe my situation. However, I am convinced that if I write enough, I will eventually produce a sonnet of enduring excellence or a haibun that brings tears to the eyes of an editor. Tears of joy, that is. They like you to be clear about such things.

new poems—
the favourites I have not
yet read

First published Blithe Spirit November 2022

Little Egret at Aldeburgh

The pictures are Egrets because they are quite poetic birds, and I have no pictures of monkeys.

An Answer to a Haibun Question

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For Paol Soren, who asked, and for anyone else who wants to know.

This is an explanation of Haibun.

This is someone else’s explanation of a Haibun.

And this is an example.

Pigs and cornflowers

The Thoughtful Pig

When I tell the pig that my latest scan is clear, it grunts and stretches out a bit more neck
for me to scratch.

My wife, when I gave her the same news, said: “What does that mean?”

How do I know? I’m not medically qualified. I assume it means they can’t find anything of
concern, and apart from regular monitoring, don’t intend doing anything else. When I point
this out, she tells me that being sarcastic, alongside being passive-aggressive, is one of my
major faults. When I point out that this is two faults, she adds pedantry to the list.

It isn’t difficult to kill someone, particularly when you have access to the internet, though
the advice you get is often qualified with reference to the trickiness of modern forensics,
and they all agree that a major difficulty is disposing of the body. Fortunately, I have pigs
and they will eat almost anything.

“One day,” I say, scratching dried flakes of mud from behind the listening ear, “one day . . .”

cornflower
blowing in the breeze
clouds gather overhead

That one was published in drifting sands last month.

This one is a tanka prose. It doesn’t have a Japanese name. It’s a tanka (five line poem) added to a prose section instead of a haiku. This one was published in Contemporary Haibun Online earlier in the year.

Angel with Spear, 1860s. By N H J Westlake or J M Allen. St Michael’s and All Angels, Derby

The Next Funeral

Amazon reviews indicate I am not the only person to have searched for a black tie with next day delivery. I could have sworn it was in the car’s glove compartment, neatly folded from the last time I wore it. My one white shirt hangs, ghostlike, from the bedroom picture rail and my timeless drab tweed jacket hangs next to it. The tie, I suddenly remember, is in my jacket pocket.

Tomorrow, as I nod to cousins, we will remark that we really must try to meet without someone dying. My uncle, who has just turned ninety, tells his brother in law to wrap up warm or he’ll be next. One day, I suppose, I will realise there is no obvious candidate to be next . . .

in church the sun
shines through an angel’s robe
bubbles trapped in blue glass
I wonder whose breath is
captured forever

St Joseph and the Angel c 1920 by Wilhelmina Geddes.

Sixteen Swimming Swans

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Mute Swan – Rufford Abbey

This morning I thought of several poems whilst I was on the way back from dropping Julia off. This is the same time frame where I used to have all my best ideas. My brain is awake but the task of driving on a fairly clear road is not too demanding. At that point thoughts come into my head. I actually had my first idea before we left home, had a second as I dropped her off and had several more on the way home. No pad, no voice recorder, just me repeating things to myself.

When I reached home I noted the ideas down and wrote the prose sections for five haibun. That’s more than I did in the last months – the ones I’ve submitted have all been written for ages and I have merely worked my way through them without originating anything. They have had a few tweaks, and have needed a haiku or a tanka here and there, but generally all my recent acceptances have been written for months. That, of course, is how it is supposed to be. People who know these things advise leaving work to mature.

Mute Swan at Clumber Park

I just looked back and realise that I have had three months this year when I have submitted nothing and that everything I have had accepted since March has been, and been rejected, at least once.

Since this morning I have had two more ideas, though I have not settled to write them yet. Even poets have to wash up and drink tea. One of the ideas is actually about drinking tea.

Swan at National Arboretum

If you’ve ever followed my creative process you will have noticed that things change and I’m more of an artisan than an artist. I don’t really have a creative process, despite what I just wrote. In three months it’s quite likely that the reflections on drinking tea will have become a poem about eating sandwiches. That’s how it goes. That’s how my poem about two swans flying by became a poem about sixteen swans swimming, and was eventually accepted and published as a poem about a cormorant.

If a poet’s studio is a serene place of beauty where words flow and great thoughts are written in flowing calligraphy, mine is more like a backstreet workshop where power tools scream and where things are bolted together roughly and beaten into shape with hammers.

Eventually I will rewrite the one about the two swans flying by.  I liiked it and it contained an idea that didn’t work with cormorants.

Guess what the theme of today’s photos is . . .

 

Ducks and Stuff

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Mandarin Duck – Arnot Hill Park

I’ve just been tidying up my email box. Deleting 100 emails on top of the hundreds that I do as they come in, makes me realise how many I get and how much I have let things get out of hand. Recently I red how part of you can be contained in another person (the example in my case being that without Julia I would lose all memory of family addresses and dates. It’s a bit like that with emails. Much of my life is contained within the email system and if I lost access to that I would find aspects of my personality disappearing too.

But enough philosophical rambling . . .

I’m just about to start writing poetry again (having been derailed by my recent arthritis outbreak), and I was looking up an email from an editor. I wanted information about the next submission period but was hooked by his comments on rejecting my previous submission. I thought I had passed the point of being annoyed by rejection, but it appears I’m not. I don’t want to give too much information because it’s not fair to discuss editorial comments in public, but he editor in question said that the poem didn’t make sense on a literal basis.

Duck – Arnot Hill Park

If I was aiming for writing that made sense on a literal basis i would write travel guides or text books. I’d actually have a chance of making money if I did that. But I write poetry, which is supposed to be full of imagination, allusion and layers of meaning. I don’t recall ever reading that it had to make sense. It’s hard enough to write as it is, without needing it to make sense too.

That email is stored two spaces below another that complains the haiku in one of the haibun I submitted “isn’t a haiku at all”. When I look back at it, I see his point. It was written in haste as I struggled to make a deadline and I wasn’t as sharp at editing as I should have been. This comment I have no problem with, just in case you were thinking I was being unfair to editors. It is, after all, the job of the writer to write poetry of such stunning beauty that an editor cannot resist it.

And with that in mind, I am off to write a poem about ducks. I like ducks and they are fun to feed. They aren’t quite as multi-faceted as swans, but if you are writing limericks they are easier to rhyme.

Floating Feathers – Arnot Hill Park

Tanka & Tanka Prose

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I’ve covered Haiku. I’ve covered Haibun. “Covered” may be over-stating the case – probably safer to say I’ve added a few random thoughts to the thousands of words of serious debate that goes into the subject. I’m now going to do Tanka and Tanka Prose in one go. They are simpler than the others, so I can do that.

A Tanka is a five line poem, originally with lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. It is now, in English, a five line poem of variable syllable count. You are allowed to use poetic devices in writing it and you don’t have all the rules of a haiku. I avoided it for years, because I was having enough trouble with haiku and Haibun, then I realised it was a much more forgiving form.

Tanka means “little song”. It is complete in itself and a lot of them are love poems, because that’s what they were hundreds of years ago. They are still popular today and the royal family traditionally write them at New Year. Love, courtship, nature, impermanence, life, death, and marriage, sadness – that sort of thing.

I have to say that I took to it immediately. I’m now finding it a bit harder because I am, as usual, starting to worry about doing it well. It’s that internal editor again. There are some good articles here and here. Sorry to land you with lots of reading, but they explain it better than I can and, to be honest, Julia is cooking banana bread, which makes my brain close down. You will be getting very little thought from me for a while.

The tanka has the advantage of opening up the world of the Tanka Prose. The Tanka Prose is simply a Haibun that uses a tanka instead of a haiku – there is no Japanese name for it. This is  a shame as Tanka Prose is an inelegant name for an excellent poetic form. There is some discussion whether the prose piece should be written differently to the prose in a Haibun (because poets love complication), but I just write it and nothing bad seems to happen. Editors seem to think you can write in a variety of styles for Haibun, so I can’t see them tightening up on Tanka prose just yet. However, don’t bet on it, anything can happen . . .

However, for now, I love Tanka Prose because, quite simply, you can say what you want to say without the rules getting in the way. Sometimes you need rules, but sometimes you don’t.

Behind the waterfall at Newstead Abbey

I’ll just add a link and an example now, as I have covered most of what I need to say in the preceding two posts.

This is from Cattails October 2023.

There are lots of good poems in Cattails, I quote mine because I am the copyright holder, not because it is the best.

Crepuscular rays at Rufford Park

Crepuscular rays at Rufford Park

Paper Cities

Simon Wilson, UK

My wife’s mother watched American bombers glistening in the sky, saw the bombs fall
and, later helped clear the debris from the dropping of an atom bomb. She told me
stories of what happens when you drop incendiaries on a city of paper houses and
taught me how to fold a paper crane.

On the other side of the world my mother tried her gas mask on and practised hiding
under her school desk. In October 1940, a German bomber flew low across the school
and dropped two bombs. She picked up a piece of bomb casing in the school yard while
it was still warm.

We discuss this with the kids as we fold paper cranes for a school project. It means
more to them, when told in terms of grandmothers, than all the pictures on TV.

familiar folds
I have not made
the thousand yet . . .
one of the children asks
for blue and yellow paper