Tag Archives: Wales Haiku Journal

2,501

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If I’d realised I’d have written this post yesterday, and titled it “2,500”, which would have been neater. Like so much of my life it was a missed opportunity.

We had Cauliflower and Leek Soup tonight. It was not my finest soup, but not my worst either.

It featured all the white bits that were fit to eat (and a few greyish bits if I’m honest) and a couple of failing leeks. It was a definite rescue soup, using bits that had slipped through stock control. Roast the veg, boil it up with a stock cube. Reduce it to a velvety consistency by skilful application of a hand blender, add pepper, allspice and lime juice and it’s done. Allspice and lime juice, I hear you cry . . . The truth is that I wanted nutmeg or cumin and lemon juice, but sometimes you just don’t have the right stuff to hand.

Tomorrow I am going to use the last of the Stilton to make Cauliflower and Stilton soup. I may add kale too. It’s good for you. Later in the week I will produce a green soup using cauliflower leaves and the massive stalk that came with this week’s shopping. If I’d been packing my own shopping I would never have selected one with such a big stem.

Apart from that, I got  my copies of the Haibun Journal today, after lengthy postal delays. Yes, I have one in there, that why I’m mentioning it. IT’s nice to be seen in good company and I always feel better for seeing myself rub shoulders with some of the big names in haibun writing. It’s not on-line so I can’t add  a link. I also have a haiku in Wales Haiku Journal, which is good, but I always feel three lines isn’t as good as a haibun, despite being harder. It is online but I am about 104 poems down, so it’s a bit of a slog.

So, 2,501 posts written, cauliflower soup made and two more pieces published. What more could a man want? Apart from cake, but I’m not allowed cake . . .

I’m fairly sure that’s nettle soup in the picture, but it was the first soup picture I came to.

Volunteer’s Medal 1992 Barcelona Olympics

The final picture is a medal I put on eBay today – as far as I can tell it’s a medal for the volunteers who helped at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. It’s quite big, as you can see and weighs in at 217g (or near enough 7 ounces for those of you who still work the old way. It’s quite impressive. The design is a stylised athlete vaulting the Olympic logo.

Plans and Haiku

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Despite the first part of the day consisting of a mathematically implausible three halves, I did have a plan for the next bit of the day, which I’m going to describe as “bit” because it saves me having to be accurate.

The plan was to go home, write, wash up and make stew for tea. It also included, after my talk with the doctor, eating eggs for lunch and not sleeping in front of daytime TV whilst watching quiz with my lunch. Next time, I’m going to eat lunch at the computer.

It’s has all come to pass, apart from the not sleeping bit, but instead of being 5 o’clock, as planned, it is seven o’clock. As days off go, it has been OK, but not hugely productive. However, I have had another acceptance, this time from Wales Haiku Journal. It will be published in the next two weeks and is a haiku of eleven words. It almost feels like cheating to claim I’m having a poem published when it’s only 11 words long, but as Mark Twain said:

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Brevity can be tricky.

I now have a nine rejected haiku which can be sent out again. Just because they have been rejected doesn’t mean they are bad. I’ve shown that before, with many pieces. As it is, I have ten ready to go to another magazine and if everything goes as it normally does, and they take one, as they often do, I will have 18 haiku looking for a home. It’s amazing how they mount up. That’s how it goes – one day you have nothing, next day you have too many. It’s a shame that the same doesn’t apply to £10 notes.

I’m off to eat stew now, I’ll see you all tomorrow.

The haiku features a robin, so that’s the reason for the picture.

Yet Another Day, Yet Another Post

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Little and Large!

I have now managed to do a few things on yesterday’s list.

I have rung the Pharmacy – got straight through this time – and given them my PORN number. If you wonder what that is (and it probably isn’t what you’re thinking) you can read it in yesterday’s post.

I have also reset my OU password and had a quick look at where I am. Having done the courses What is Poetry? and War Memorials and Commemoration, I am 31% of the way through Approaching Poetry. I haven’t done anything since 16th December, when the great password purge locked me out and ignored me over Christmas, so I’m going to have to redo the 31% to get back up to speed. I may well go through the others too, just to brush up.

As a third thing, which I should have done, but didn’t list, I have sorted out my first published haiku. I needed it for something else and also needed to check submission dates for Wales Haiku Journal. Having done all that, I thought, I may as well give it an airing alongside a couple of almost relevant photos.

I have been working towards deadlines of 25th and 31st January, thinking I had plenty of time. I don’t. It’s 21st today and I am badly prepared for 25th. I have the material, but it needs a final polish. I’m actually better prepared for the 31st, having two of the three submissions to go. Only the third needs work, the main problem being that I haven’t decided which is going to be the third piece.

With that in mind, I had better go and do some work on that instead of messing around with haiku and photos.

 

Publication and Practical Poetry Problems

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I’ve just had a haibun published in Wales Haiku Journal. You can find it here. I have a previous one published here.

I noticed, when re-reading The Duckpond (published about two years earlier) , that I seem to write about ponds a lot. Am I in danger of becoming type-cast, possibly even being known to posterity as The Pond Poet?

It’s another possible problem to add to running out of ideas, losing my ability to write and being found out. Because the problems of writing something good enough for publication aren’t enough, I need more fears to fill the time as I lie awake at night.

With coronavirus I can now fill that time with thoughts of death, losing my job and the collapse of society, but once we have a vaccine I can start worrying about how I will be seen by future generations.

However, this isn’t a post about worry, it’s about haibun. I’m currently in the middle of reorganising my computer files, as they had degenerated into chaos and I have been having difficulty finding things. This led to me submitting four poems to a magazine, then wishing I hadn’t.

One was an accidental double submission (which I think I mentioned before) but fortunately the other editor rejected it. Two of the others were not final versions. When I looked at them again, I realised that one was an incomplete version of a revision and one was a fully revised version but, unfortunately, one that had been further revised and improved.

I’m now waiting to get them back. It’s easier, I think just to get them back and suffer the ignominy of looking unprofessional, rather than try to explain and resubmit.

Hopefully the new system will stop this happening.

Then all I need is a way of filing haiku. Tiny little poems with no titles. I have hundreds of them, and they are refusing to cooperate. It’s like grains of sand pouring out of a hole in a bucket. They are all over the place and I have completely lost track.

They don’t tell you about this in haiku books. They tell you about lightness and simplicity and all that stuff but are completely silent on the subject of indexing, storage and finding them again once you have written them.

The Duckpond

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Several of you have expressed an interest in seeing some of my haiku/haibun. I realise this is a sign of kindness rather than a burning desire to read self-edited poetry of variable quality, but I do appreciate it.

I’m afraid I’m not very forthcoming, because I tend to write for magazine publication and, occasionally, for competition. They generally don’t accept work that has already been seen, and as I never seem to have enough material that’s good enough to submit it makes it hard to find something to show.

It’s a bit of a Catch-22 situation – I can’t show the best ones and I don’t want to show you the second quality ones.

As a compromise, if you follow this link to Wales Haiku Journal and scroll down to The Duckpond, you can read my latest haibun.  If you are a regular reader you may recognise the pond, and the trolley.

Part of the problem is the time they need to mature. I’m currently working on pieces that were written three or four months ago. My last attempt on the blog was written in haste and didn’t quite work.

I’m sure there is a way round it, and will apply myself to searching. Maybe I need a 100 Day Haibun Challenge…

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Looking forward to Spring