NEW BOOK AVAILABLE: "WHILE DREAMING YOUR DREAMS" BY RÉKA NYITRAI

“There’s magic here.”
—ai li

Editor, the cherita

DEBUT COLLECTION OF HAIKU POEMS BY RÉKA NYITRAI

FOR MORE DETAILS CONTACT MONO YA MONO BOOKS: monoyamono@gmail.com

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PRAISE FOR THE POEMS OF RÉKA AND HER DEBUT COLLECTION
"WHILE DREAMING YOUR DREAMS":

“A distinctive voice—at once lyrical, sensuous, surreal, and wistful.” 

—Clayton Beach

Editor, Heliosparrow Poetry Journal

“Filled with a creeping existentialism that announces itself as a friend and then leaves you heartbroken.” 

—Michael O’Brien

Editor, Weird Laburnum

“Reka’s haiku encourage us to turn to surrealism as a way to embrace uncomfortable truths.”

 —Alan Summers

Founder, Call of the Page

“There is an otherworldliness to this collection that is beautifully disorienting. Hearts and minds will be equally moved by this spellbinding collection of well-crafted haiku.”

  

—Robin Anna Smith
Editor-in-chief, Human/Kind Press

“Reka’s pen is a magic wand.  This is a masterpiece by a brilliant poet whose path I look forward to following.”

—Fay Aoyagi

Associate Editor,The Heron’s Nest

Former President of the Haiku Society of America

“Réka is a rare spirit!”

—Lee Gurga

Author, Haiku: A Poet’s Guide

Former President of the Haiku Society of America


“There’s magic here.”
—ai li

Editor, the cherita

Poem published in IS/LET

crowning spring;

the smell of orange blossoms

and suspicion

IS/LET, April 3, 2020

Haiku of merit in the R. H. Blyth Award 2019

at the wake
your hammock weighed down
by dogs

“ZATSUEI, haiku of merit” : THE  R. H.  Blyth  Award 2019

HAIKU FROM IBERIA AND BEYOND: Buy now through PayPal

Click the PayPal "Buy Now" button to order a copy of my book HAIKU FROM IBERIA AND BEYOND.

An anthology of haiku written in: BASQUE CATALAN GALICIAN PORTUGUESE SPANISH and JAPANESE Poems selected and translated by Danny Blackwell. With extensive notes for each poem and poet, and an afterword on the history of the genre in these languages. Poems from Europe, from the Americas, and beyond... 318 pages (including colour illustrations).

Per Diem. Spanish-language Haiku.

A Spanish-language haiku every day for the month of August on the Haiku Foundation homepage: https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2018/08/01/per-diem-for-august-2018-spanish-language-haiku/

Available as an archive at the end of the month here:https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/per-diem-archive/

Haiku for IS/LET

I 

MOUNTAIN/REVEALED

YOU

https://isletpoetry.wordpress.com/tag/danny-blackwell/

Haiku published in Ginyu #77

http://ginyu-haiku.com/%e6%9c%80%e6%96%b0%e5%8f%b7-latestissue/

after the cremation
curry rice
spoons


the stack of trays:
thumb-cinema
for the bored waitress

under the bridge shine
clandestine eyes
lindy hopping

old sky
buzzard jumps
the sound of a dog

Haiku for Sonic Boom #10

http://sonicboomjournal.wixsite.com/sonicboom/about-c10fk

re:Virals 118: Haiku commentary

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly poem commentary feature on some of the finest haiku ever written in English. This week’s poem was

 
     and now . . . 
     passing through me
     into eaves

          — Robert D. Wilson, A Soldier’s Bones: Hokku and Haiku (2013)

Danny Blackwell is spaced out:

This week we had no comments submitted, so it falls upon me to say something about this haiku.
I have to confess that it wasn’t a poem that really spoke to me and, upon trying to say something about it, I’m not even sure what it is about. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as many haiku defy easy assimilation on the first reading and truly benefit from further philosophizing, so the question is whether the problem is the haiku or the reader—in this case, me. Maybe I’m not up to the challenge?
The first line “and now . . .” doesn’t really give much information, and I find myself asking whether it is redundant to state “now” in a haiku. What gives me pause for further consideration, however, is the use of the word “and.” One cannot help wonder what came before it. Beginning in medias res can be an incredibly effective technique. I’m reminded of the opening to Lorca’s La casada infiel, for example, which intentionally starts on the second line, leaving us with a sense of something unsaid, which could either be a reference to what the narrator is omitting, or it could be taken as a reference to the oral romance tradition that often left us with fragmentary texts. (The epic Song of My Cid, for example, is missing the opening.) In this case, I’m not sure I can unravel the reason behind this “and now,” other than to create an enigmatic ambiguity for its own sake. Again, I reiterate, I may not be living up to my expectation as a critical reader. The first line doesn’t give me anything to work with in order to (re)construct the poem, or the poet’s experience. But maybe that is the intention.
As regards “passing through me/into eaves”, we don’t know what is passing through the narrator. The word eaves might suggest rain but, if that were the case, how does the rain pass through the poet and then into the eaves?
One reader asked me to clarify if I had published the poem with a typo. (The email simply read: “leaves?!”) So maybe I am not alone in feeling at a loss.
I could conjecture a variety of readings but I feel like I would be potentially clutching at straws.
The poet has good credentials and the collection this haiku is taken from features introductory comments by David G. Lanoue and David Landis Barnhill.
“Open your mind and expect the unexpected,” says Lanoue of these “wonderful, jarring, delightful, and provocative discoveries.”
Maybe this week’s selected poem is intentionally jarring or provocative, I don’t know, but I’m left feeling like I didn’t quite get it.
“They are full of the pause of ma,” says Barnhill, and talking about the way in which Wilson “cleaves” his haiku to create juxtapositions (“three periods acting as his kireji or cutting word”) Barnhill says that the poet “creates a space for the reader, not to “fill in” that space but to be filled by it.”
For me personally this poem has too much space—and while I would be able to construct a poem from the materials I have been given, I doubt it would bear much resemblance to the experience that provoked the poet to write it. One has to be honest: one either feels something or they don’t, and this poem left me without any real emotional or literary reaction, although I will say that the words are beautiful enough . . . and maybe they are in the right order. Maybe the problem is also one of genre and I am not reading this, as I should, as an experimental haiku. My failure to be moved is no value judgment on the author’s work, only on one person’s (possibly faulty) reading of one poem.
There is no doubt that the poem is able to provoke something in others because it was selected by a reader last week for commentary, so I will leave the comments section open this week and hopefully others out there can give their belated reactions to Wilson’s haiku. (Those of you that wish to comment on the haiku I have selected this week please use the contact form as mentioned in the submission instructions below.)

Last minute addition:

I was fortunate enough to be able to contact Robert D. Wilson, the author of this week’s poem, and he was kind enough to elucidate with the following:
“The now, the moment, is passing through me into the eaves that represent the past. All is static, all is in a state of becoming, the now is a passersby.”
These comments included a caveat: “How I interpret my hokku (. . .) is unimportant. Each reader subjects it to his or her own interpretation. No two interpretations are alike.”
Wilson also clarified that this poem, taken from his collection of “hokku and haiku,” is not a haiku, as I had referred to it, but a hokku, and went on to define his hokku as “action biased,” as opposed to “object biased.” Wilson has some articles online for those that wish to read more on the subject—just click here.

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/12/15/revirals-118/

re:Virals 114: Haiku commentary

Haiku poem under discussion:

     quietly
     we become
     audience
  
          — Hilary Tann Frogpond 27.1

Danny Blackwell ponders sound and silence:

While preparing this week’s re:Virals I learnt, as did some others who have contributed comments, that the author of the haiku under discussion is a musician, and I just noticed that each line has 3 syllables, and the haiku has the effect of sounding, to my ear at least, as a run of triplets. Even taking into account the possible pauses between lines, the lines still tend to have a feel of triplets because of the natural rhythms and stresses of the English language. This is not, however, something I noticed during the many readings I made of this poem, and only occurred to me when I decided to take on the potentially odious and pedantic task of analyzing it, and it may be that the meter is of negligible import in comparison to the content, and that the rhythm arises accidentally, as it were, from the message the poet wanted to convey. (Passing from musical to poetic terminology, the meter of this poem would be mainly considered as consisting of dactyls, although one might consider line 2 as a molossus or an anapest—meaning, in layman’s terms, that the stress is placed equally on each syllable of “we become,” or with a stress falling on the final syllable.)
But syllable-counting aside, I wonder if the poem speaks to the phenomenon of the musicians, before or after performing a piece, as they listen to the applause of the audience, and therefore become the “audience” of the audience, paying witness to the sound of the public, turned performers with their sonic applause. (The resulting paradox being that the poem could explicitly revolve around the word “quietly,” while implicitly being about the noise of a grateful audience.) Or maybe the musicians become one with the audience in the reverent silence between songs, which unites the musicians and audience as one collective “audience,” all performing a truncated version of John Cage’s 4’33’’.

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/11/17/revirals-114/

re:Virals 109: Haiku commentary

Haiku for discussion:

 pig and i spring rain


          — Marlene Mountain, Frogpond 2:3-4 (1979)

Danny Blackwell wonders if the personal is political:

What a great haiku. It is hard not to feel compassion for the players in the scene. Sadly, it is also hard for me not to think about the pig’s destiny, which is likely one of suffering for the benefit of humans. For the most part pigs are not companions, like dogs or cats. Pigs are, more often than not, destined to be food. In fact, unless we work on a farm or in the countryside, we rarely see a living pig. Like many great haiku it is what isn’t said — what is implicit — that really resonates with us. The pig in this haiku will probably end up on someone’s plate, and one has to reflect on what that means. Upon reading this poem by Marlene Mountain I cannot help but recall an interview that I read not long ago, and which colours my reactions. While not a vegan myself, I recently stumbled across a pamphlet of resistance against speciesism, and I was particularly captivated by the opening interview with an individual named Rob, who served in the military during Desert Storm:
“I was out of the military for some time already, and I was struggling with PTSD (…) you see, when I was in the military I saw the most horrible and ugliest things, I saw innocent people die, and I saw these videos of animals, and noticed there was no difference in how humans and animals die, there was no difference in the bloodshed, the fight for life, and their subsequent death.
My eyes were wide open, and saw that we were the actual terrorists, we were the ones creating chaos and murdering innocent people for their resources, we had no right — as we have no right to take the lives of innocent animals — to invade or enter into those countries. Meanwhile, here at home, we people of color were being terrorized for years by the police. The lies we’ve been told about people in other countries, the environmental destruction humanity takes part in, the unnecessary killing of animals for food, imprisonment in zoos and aquariums, torture and murder in test labs. Why do these things resonate so much with me? Because as a black man, we also suffered these injustices and were marginalized in much the same way animals are . . .”
After reading this interview, I wonder how relevant the following comments by Marlene Mountain are:
“We have been ‘taught’ alienation and it seems imperative now that we seek that which affirms the common ground of all organisms.”
I was hesitant at first to include parts of the interview from the vegan pamphlet, as I don’t wish to misuse this space for political commentary, however, after reading up on Marlene Mountain, I feel that it touches on some issues which the poet has dealt with in her work, and that it gave me a springboard from which to see the poem in a winder context.
(It may also be worth bearing in mind that a great many of the haiku poets who defined the genre were Buddhists, and went to great lengths to not harm other living beings, and this, in turn, greatly influenced haiku culture. Though Marlene Mountain may have issues with such a Nippon-centric take on haiku, as in the essay they don’t shoot horses do they? she states: “those who champion the Japanese Spirit and its complex paraphernalia for North Americans are under considerable delusion.”)
As regards the topic of war, Marlene Mountain also has various haiku that tackle the topic explicitly. Take, for example, the following one-line haiku:

 
a live update the men's war brushes off more 'collateral damage'

Is not the death of a pig for human consumption another example of ‘collateral damage’? In the aforementioned essay the poet is critical of anthropocentrism and authoritarianism, and at one point asks: “Must we continue to be subjected to hierarchical concepts which separate us from all other organisms?”
The comments I selected from the pamphlet, which touch on a variety of political topics, may shed little light on the poem in a strictly textual sense. And, if I’m honest, when I read the haiku I see little more than the image of a person and a pig, sharing in the spring rain. And it moves me. It has a restrained pathos that is representative of the best of haiku. But when I stop and think about the haiku — that is to say, not simply participate in the haiku moment — I cannot help but wonder about my own conduct and how political my personal decisions are.
One thing I know for sure: the spring rain falls on pig and person alike.

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/10/13/revirals-109/

Porad Awards (honorable mention)

https://sites.google.com/site/haikunorthwest/porad-haiku-award/2017-porad-award-winners

Terry Ann Carter, Judge
Richard and Kathleen Tice, Contest Coordinators

Sponsored by Haiku Northwest

Haiku ("mosquito mesh...")

Go here for the poem:
http://tinywords.com/2017/11/02/25842/comment-page-1/#comment-821782

haiga for Otoliths

https://the-otolith.blogspot.com.es/2017/07/danny-blackwell.html

re:Virals commentary 105

This poem under discussion was:

     This autumn
     I’ll be looking at the moon
     With no child on my knee. 

          — Onitsura

(Translation by Donald Keene. Included in Faubion Bowers' 
The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology, 

with the following footnote: 
"Written on the death of his eldest son at age six, in 1700.")

Here are my comments:

Onitsura was a contemporary of Bashō, and is credited as being one of the great creators of haiku. Blyth, for example, said of him: “Onitsura composed the first real haiku.”
Kenneth Yasuda’s book The Japanese Haiku includes various quotes from various sources, which will prove valuable in getting to know about the poet at hand. Onitsura himself expressed his thoughts on haiku with the following words:

“When I think occasionally about an excellent verse, I find no artistic touch in its phrasing, or display of colorfulness in its air; only the verse flows out effortlessly; yet profound is the heart that expressed it.”

The Japanese scholar Asō is cited in Yasuda’s book with the following comment:
“Once an abbot asked Onitsura what the essence of haiku art was, and he replied: ‘In front of a garden a camellia tree blooms with white flowers.’ Since the truth of the universe lies even in a single flower, insight into the universe and into God can be grasped by understanding this truth . . . Onitsura thinks that the true way of haiku art is to discover poetic refinement in the truth of natural phenomena, whether in the snow, the moon, or flowers, with a selfless attitude.”

We find this mission statement evident in the poem under discussion: In front of the moon a father’s heart blooms with the loss represented by a childless knee. It is a simple description. Unadorned. Unpoetic even. And yet it resonates because of its sincerity, something Onitsura spoke of at great length, using the Japanese word makoto, which we will touch on in a moment. But first I’d like to present two very similar flower poems by Onitsura that speak to the “truth of natural phenomena,” and which I will try my best to translate:

桜咲くころ鳥足二本馬四本

when blossoms bloom
bird feet: two
horse: four

The following haiku is similar, in the way it reveals the almost shocking isness of nature, offering an epiphany in which things-as-they-are become somehow absurdly real, usually by virtue of some natural phenomena which awakes in us a new way of looking at the world, which is little more than looking at the world in its essential nature.

目は横に鼻は竪なり春の花

eyes horizontal, nose vertical: spring blossoms

In the case of these two poems the epiphanies (that birds have 2 feet and horses have 4, or that eyes are of a horizontal nature, while the nose is vertical) are caused by blooming flowers, while in the poem about the loss of his child it would seem the moon has played a part in awakening him to a simple realization. The realization here, however, (that the moon-viewing this autumn is without his son on his knee) inspires far more pathos in the reader, and seems to go beyond the “whimsical humour” that critic Henderson spoke of when discussing Onitsura. Henderson criticized Onitsura’s haiku as being too philosophical, saying that they were more like epigrams than haiku (something we often hear said of many modern English-language haiku), and while that opinion may seem valid to a degree in reference to these two flower poems, I don’t think that criticism would hold with the poem we have been looking at this week.

I’d like to offer one final quote from Asō, also included in Yasuda’s book, which we can reflect on as we try to unravel this enigmatic genre known as haiku: a genre that evolved radically through the influence of Onitsura and Bashō and continues to challenge us to this day:

“At the center of Onitsura’s haiku theory is his statement about truth. Everywhere in his writing he uses the word makoto. This term is used in various ways and its meaning is not fixed. However, he uses this term in the sense of sincerity. In his writing a Soliloquy, he said, ‘When one composes a verse and exerts his attention only to rhetoric or phraseology, the sincerity is diminished.’
The fact that no artistic effort in the form or no decorative expression in the context [should be present] is Onitsura’s ideal, which is the way of sincerity.”

Our commentators this week have all remarked on the everyday nature of the elements in this poem that make it so easy to relate to, and of its ability to awake great compassion in us, while at the same time being composed with a lack of poetic decoration.

In Onitsura’s own words:

まことの外に俳諧なし

“Without makoto, there would be no haikai.”

 https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/09/15/revirals-105/

Photo-Haiku from the NHK Gallery

 Featured on NHK Kaiku Master's Gallery for August 2017

Commentary for re:Virals 98

atop the town flagpole
a gob of bubblegum
holds my dead brother’s dime 

          — Nick Virgilio, Selected Haiku of Nicholas Virgilio

In Sean Dougherty’s video Remembering Nick Virgilio we can listen to the poet’s brother, Tony, recall the event that inspired this haiku in honour of Larry Virgilio:

“Before Larry was going off to boot training he was in the square with his buddies, and he shimmied up this enormous flagpole, and he took a piece of chewing gum and a dime, and he stuck it on the top, and he said: ‘When I come back I’m gonna go up and get that dime’.”

The tears that follow make it clear that Larry never came back from Vietnam.
Nick Virgilio described haiku as “a record of a moment of emotion keenly perceived that somehow links human nature to all nature.” And he said that we should aim to “become more conscious of our feelings and to share these with other people.” We constantly find that the more specific narratives are — the more based they are in the minutiae of other people’s lives — the more keenly we relate to them, irrespective of how distant to our own realities those narratives may be. It is a commonly repeated piece of advice among writers to write about what you know, and be as specific as possible because it is precisely this specificity of human life that is so universal. Nick himself says: “You explore this provincial you and you become universal,” you become “a tight little package of humanity,” and this poem is without doubt a tight little package of provincial humanity that is universal.
In the video, Nick talks about his belief that we all have haiku experiences, and that we should try to express them in “the least number of words possible,” starting with “the big scene first, then the little parts of the big scene” in order to create an effective “word painting.” (We could also consider haiku in cinematic terms. For example, the technique of this poem is akin to a zoom, or a series of cuts with each cut honing closer in on the key object of the scene.)
Nick definitely practiced what he preached — well-ordered, concise poems that detail very personal moments in honour of some universal humanity — and his command of the form was the result of a notoriously strict, almost monastic, work ethic. I have long been one of those poets that admittedly feels a bit snobbish about 5-7-5 haiku, and yet Nick’s 5-7-5 are sublime, and show no evidence of being in any way forced or contrived. He was also not afraid to use rhyme, which is often considered bad form in haiku. Here are two more haiku (both in the 5-7-5 metric and one of them rhyming) about his dead brother:

sixteenth autumn since:
barely visible grease marks
where he parked his car
on the darkened wall
of my dead brother’s bedroom:
the dates and how tall

The flagpole poem uses neither rhyme nor a 5-7-5 syllable count, but what is interesting is it’s syllabic symmetry: all three lines are of 6 syllables. I doubt that he went in with the intention of writing a 3-line poem of 6-syllable lines, but I’m fairly sure that he would have been aware of the syllable count, and that he would have been conscious of the poetic effect of every word, sound, and rhythm. Haiku can often be quite anemic because writers are striving for some Zen simplicity, or intentionally un-poetic declaration (in keeping with the generally held belief that haiku is a non-poetic form, or at the very least a genre that eschews unnecessary poetics in favour of presenting things in their essential unadorned is-ness). This is true to a degree: overly poetic haiku often do suffer as a result, but that doesn’t mean that a good haiku shouldn’t have poetry. The cadence of this poem, the alliteration, the order and presentation of its constituent images, are all masterfully presented. The images may be of inanimate objects, and this still-life poem has no direct human subject acting in the poem (except retrospectively), but the result could not be more human . . . could not be more emotive.
Here’s one more haiku by Nick, who says it all better than I ever could.

adding father’s name
to the family tombstone
with room for my own

For your service, Nick, we thank you.

Commentary for re:Virals 97

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly poem commentary feature on some of the finest haiku ever written in English. This week’s poem was

     first frost
     keeping pace
     with a stranger’s cane 

          — Alexy Andreev, Bones 

And Danny Blackwell once again had a lot to say about his own choice:

It is generally considered good practice in haiku to avoid, where possible, any explicit reference to the poet (the first-person “I”) who is narrating and, to a certain degree, to avoid personal pronouns in general. This stems from a linguistic trait in Japanese, in which people are loathe to name themselves or others directly, as a matter of courtesy and good manners. Of course there are exceptions, both in ordinary conversation and in haiku poetry — Kobayashi Issa, for instance, frequently refers to himself, in both 1st and 3rd person. In English, however, the omission of the personal pronoun is generally more problematic — primarily for linguistic reasons — and, as a result, we are not trained in the kind of ambiguity so common in Japanese. A good example of this tolerance for ambiguity is the fact that Japanese tend not to distinguish between singular and plural, although they have the linguistic tools to do so, should they want to be explicit. The famous poem by Basho about an old pond and a frog, for example, makes no specific reference that allows us to know with any certainty whether there is a single frog jumping or numerous frogs jumping.
(If I’m not mistaken some haiku poets didn’t even decide themselves whether they were writing in plural or singular! Sadly, I cannot recall the details of the poem but I distinctly recall reading about the haiga of a particular poet — I have a sneaking suspicion it was Buson’s poem about crows perching on withered branches at dusk — where the poet illustrated the poem in two different versions: one with a single crow and another with various.)
In regards to the use or omission of personal pronouns in English haiku, I believe the practice of striving to achieve some kind of equivalency with Japanese haiku has been fruitful and has allowed us room for manoeuvre as readers. I mention all of this because this particular poem allows us plenty of ambiguous space. The haiku follows a traditional format. It begins with a seasonal reference (“first frost”) followed by a line-break, which functions, to all intents and purposes, as a kireji. (It should also be noted that the “first” this or that — 初in Japanese — is very much a trope of traditional haiku).
The second half of the poem juxtaposes this seasonal phenomenon of first frost with an image of two people, one who is using a cane and the other who has slowed their pace, possibly as a result of the icy ground. What is masterful about this poem is the way that neither of the subjects is explicitly referenced — they are merely implied (by the cane, and the person “keeping pace” with the cane). The absence of personal pronouns not only adds to the haiku concision we have come to value, in lieu of any hard-and-fast syllable count, but also creates doubt around the very idea of Subjects themselves, and of individual identity. This blurring of the line between subject and object is undoubtedly linked with the eastern philosophies that so influenced Japan, and it is here where the art of the poem lies because it is precisely a poem about empathy, and about the blurring of lines between “You” and “I”. We can, furthermore, consider the first line as personifying the frost, as if it was The First Frost itself that accompanied the person with the cane. (A person we instinctively perceive as a vulnerable figure, possibly an old man or woman.) Add to this our metaphorical instinct to personify Winter as an old man and we are left in no doubt that this “first frost” is a harbinger of the winter to come for the narrator, and the “winter” age of a person being represented by the slow pace of the cane (a great example of the power of objects to signify something way beyond the object itself.)
I should add that the element of personification of the first frost is much more a possible reading than a direct result of the text, and the poem functions perfectly without this extra layer. Nevertheless, it is clear that in haiku there is generally something more what we are presented with and that, as a rule, we tend to go beyond the poem in order to discover a profound sense of connectedness, be it with nature or with the products of nature, such as people and plants, and so on.
But it is not only in recognition of hardships and suffering that we are united, the same also occurs in moments of shared beauty. A counterpoint to the poem under discussion would be the following haiku by Issa:

花の陰赤の他人はなりけり

Which Blyth translates thus:

Under the cherry blossoms
None are
Utter strangers.

In summary, this poem — for me at least — is that of a poet-narrator, who is keeping pace with an old man or woman on a frosty day, and enters into an empathetic relationship with the “other”, and is consequently awake to the realization that we all grow old. Further to this, the poet enters into an empathetic relation with the season itself, and by extension with the universe as a whole.
And if that isn’t what a good haiku is all about then I don’t know what is.

As this week’s winner, Danny gets to select the next poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be as long or short, academic or spontaneous, serious or silly, public or personal as you like. We will select out-takes from the best of these. And the very best will be reproduced in its entirety and take its place as part of the THF Archives. Best of all, the winning commentator gets to choose the next poem for commentary.
Anyone can participate. A new poem will appear each Friday morning. Simply put your commentary in the Contact box by the following Tuesday midnight (Eastern US Time Zone). Please use the subject header “re:Virals” so we know what we’re looking at. We look forward to seeing some of your favorite poems — and finding out why!

     atop the town flagpole
     a gob of bubblegum
     holds my dead brother’s dime 

          — Nick Virgilio, Selected Haiku of Nicholas Virgilio 

"fallen leaves..." (haiku for asahi haikuist network)

falling leaves — the busker trades his boleros for a shot of mistela


 http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201611180012.html

haiku "green fields..."

Link to webpage: http://tinywords.com/2017/06/21/23849/

monoku:

green fields flooded the train passing a station without stopping