Monthly Archives: June 2022

word thursday reading

17 Friday Jun 2022

Posted by in haiku, Readings, senryu, Tom Clausen biographical info

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WORD THURSDAYS FEATURING TOM CLAUSEN AND CHRISTINA M. RAU

MAY 24, 2018 @ 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Tom Clausen (Ithaca, NY) is a life-long Ithacan living in the same house he grew up in.  He became interested in haiku and related short forms of poetry in the late 1980s after reading an article about naturalist Ruth Yarrow, profiling her haiku. There was instant recognition that haiku was a form that might help with his tendency with wordiness, repetition, and overstatement. He has been reading and trying to write haiku, senryu, tanka, and haibun since then. Tom is the curator of a daily haiku feature, online, at Mann Library, Cornell University where he worked for more than 35 years before retiring in 2013. In 2003, Tom was invited to join the Route 9 Haiku group that formed in 2001. The group publishes a twice-yearly journal, Dim Sum, featuring selected work by members John Stevenson, Hilary Tann, Yu Chang, Tom Clausen and a guest poet as well as a couple of haiga by Romanian artist  and poet Ion Codrescu. Tom has several books published including Growing Late and Homework from Snap Shot Press in UK and most recently Laughing To Myself from Free Food Press. Tom enjoys walking, biking, photography and simply going about observing and documenting moments, beauty and wabi sabi all around us. Website: www.tomclausen.com.

why haiku

17 Friday Jun 2022

Posted by in haiku, Haiku Way of Life

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Some thoughts on Why We Write Haiku ( this list contains a lot of overlapping and was intended just as a consideration of what might be some reasons…)

to express gratitude

to report something real with honesty

to share something directly and concretely

to share and create meaning

to say something meaningful in as few words possible

to communicate

to find a voice

to give a voice to nature and discovery

to celebrate our connection to nature, to all that is non-human

to sharpen and develop our awareness as a witness

to express observable truth

to give praise

to celebrate existence

grounding and centering

transcendence

to express admiration

to identify those primordial forces we love or relate to

to feel a sense of purpose

to express our longing and belonging

love for our being here now

to express joy and happiness in a moment

to show what is lost and found

as a means of catharsis

to show the aha moment and suggest the wonder of existence

the desire to turn words into greater awareness and understanding

in the eternal search for meaning and identity

to maintain a healthy focus and awareness

to attain some levity or lightness to our being

prayer like reverence and respect for what is before us

to achieve some clarity

to reduce confusion

to express insight

to improve and gain relationships and understanding our place in the world

in hope of finding a peace of mind and heart

to have an epiphany

to reaffirm what we know but had forgotten…nostalgia for our child mind

for the practice and routine of forgetting ourselves

an alternative focus and refreshing point of view

alter-identity

as a release from what bothers us or distracts us from the poetic in our lives

as an antidote to anger

to exercise a spiritual communion with our place/world

to commune with the muse

to attain credibility

to fulfill the searching aspect of our being here now

to recognize what is mortal and immortal in us and our world

as a form of satori and connection

because we love poetry and sharing something

because we feel inspiration in moments freely found anyplace, anytime, anywhere

because we are in tune with a universal reality

to get some satisfaction

as a path out of depression

to find ‘the way’

to see and feel light

to report natural ‘news’

to commune with nature

nurture of a spiritual relation

to join a community of people sharing a poetic point of view

to be in the now

because we believe in nature and the poetic relationships small, large and wonderful

as a means of disciplined expression

in recognition of natural nuance

to exercise our senses

to praise the life in the inanimate

to write concisely

to write what is in the heart

to find our-self outside our-self

to respond to a calling

Laughing To Myself

16 Thursday Jun 2022

Posted by in Book reviews, haiku, Laughing To Myself, Published Poems, senryu, Tom Clausen biographical info

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Laughing To Myself

A collection of haiku and senryu by Tom Clausen, a favorite poet of many readers of haiku. Tom has been writing haiku for over twenty years and has enchanted readers with his very personal outlook on family, nature and living in this modern world. Tom opens his heart so that those who read his poems not only feel like they know him, but because his poems touch a universal chord readers also feel like they know themselves a bit better too.

before sleep
 laughing to myself
           at myself

Since 1989, when Tom Clausen first came onto the haiku scene, he has been in the forefront of English language haiku, senryu, haibun and tanka.  Tom was a pioneer in the haiku movement that let haiku not only roam through the natural world, but let it into our cities, homes, and all other aspects of our modern world. No other haiku poet has so openly let the reader into his life and into his heart.  Tom, while retaining his individual voice,  manages to convey the aspiration and angst of all of us who live in this modern world and does so with a wry and whimsical smile. This collection which spans the entire 24 years of Tom’s insightful, honest and often humorous poetry will give those who know Tom’s work a chance to revisit old favorites and find gems they might haves missed and give those less familiar with Tom’s work a chance to see why he is one of the most influential haiku and senryu poets of his generation.

bitter wind-
we circle our candles
for peace


Review by Alan Summers

A Work of Love

16 Thursday Jun 2022

Posted by in A Work of Love, Book reviews, Published Poems, tanka

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A Work of Love by Tom Clausen, Tiny Poems Press Chapbook Winner 1997.The booklets of the winners of the chapbook contest are 5.5 x 4.25 inches, staple bound, and available for $3.00 ppd each, or $10 for the set of four postpaid. Hint: go for the whole series. They are truly worth every cent. Order from Tiny Poems Press, 170 Elm Street, Enfield, CT 06082.Here, an existing language has been chosen by Tom Clausen to enlarge and explain certain spiritual spaces in which a privileged reader can participate. There is, like always, a price for such an experience – the reader somehow has to give up conventional linear thinking and instead has to give into physical and psychic areas where Clausen is not only at home but through several years of hard work also developed his own way of composing 5-liners.Tom Clausen has the advantage to work as a librarian, which means, he enjoys having constant access to world-literature. With this far reaching education he paved his way into the haiku/tanka/haibun-scene. Now, with Lynx also on-line, his work occurs in circles spreading into another body of resonance. With this latest composition of forty tanka, A Work of Love, Clausen offers new ways to refer to daily life at a level where the poetical language meets and surpasses the demanding situations we all often would like to stay away from. Well, with his booklet in a small pocket you may sit in a rowboat at dawn. You are on a trip while already having in mind to go diving; the element you’ll chose is the fluid one. Preparing yourself, there is some spare time ahead of you to be filled with something important, right? What’s available to be read? Perhaps Clausen’s tanka? Here are only three of the works of love: 


the envelope to me
sealed carefully with tape
on every seam
when opened, reveals
absolutely nothing




for over a decade
we’ve talked –
still you want our talk
as much as I want
the silences between




tolerably melancholy
to sit here while the kids play
and be lost in myself –
on a path nearby
she walks in the sun




Books Review Copyright © Jane Reichhold 1997.

haibun

16 Thursday Jun 2022

Posted by in haibun, Tom Clausen biographical info

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about haibun :

“Whether we think of our life as special or not, in the flow of experience come special moments that punctuate our sensibility and memory. Haibun are records and renderings of our passage through life, and an attempt to distill the highlights of our very diverse experiences. The poem that typically concludes the haibun ought to reflect the heart of our inner understanding of outward experience.”



Tom Clausen was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1951 and continues to be a resident of this isolated finger lakes college town. Today, Tom shares the same house he grew up in with Berta and their two children, Casey and Emma. Tom has worked for more than twenty years at Cornell University in the Mann Library where he coordinates the staff and student assistants in the document services–circulation department. Tom graduated from Cornell in 1973 and after several years of bicycle trip adventures, he settled back where he started. His books include Autumn Wind in the Cracks, Unraked Leaves, and Standing Here (1994, 1995, 1998; all self-published) and A Work of Love (Tiny Poems Press, 1997).

in the woods

16 Thursday Jun 2022

Posted by in American Haibun & Haiga, haibun, haiku, Published Poems, spring

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In the Woods

In 1962 when I was eleven I fancied myself to be a Last of the Mohicans, Huckleberry Finn, outback wilderness child, and had chosen the name “Wonapsa” to inspire and fulfill the fantasies I played out in the woods and gorges behind our house. The woods contained the world I loved, both real and imaginary. I would spy on rabbits, chipmunks, and woodpeckers. Sometimes I would sit as still as I could to see what being a ghost was all about. I laid on the ground, smelling the dirt and embracing a patch of earth just my size. I would climb trees listening to the wind sigh in the boughs and learn the creak that comes from deep in trees. The woods were filled with secrets I wanted to know.

sun after rain–
the garter snake fresh
from its skin

In the spring it was momentous to find mayapples and hepaticas and know new life arises from the litter and wreckage of winters’ leaving. One day while scampering up and down steep slopes in random search for tiny skulls, feathers, fossils, or a special perch to sit awhile, I peeked over a ridge top to see a man and a woman lying out on a ledge a way below me. What they were doing I had roughly heard about but never seen. The trees between me and them were few but a bit of guilt kept me from a steady stare. I became aware of the unlikeliness of what I was witnessing and felt an exhilaration of discovery. To see their flesh while they kept some clothes on filled me with curiosity. I do not re- member a distinct conclusion, my memory choosing to focus on the unison of their movements.

That night my heart and mind recreated it all over and over. What images I had seen. How purely animal and natural they were. How unexpected and free a view I had.

Years go by and that ledge is still there. My walks in the woods these days sometimes pass that place. I always look a little and remember. I’ve never seen anyone else there.

barren woods–
a clump of wild onion
scents the air

American Haibun & Haiga Volume 1

pencils

16 Thursday Jun 2022

Posted by in American Haibun & Haiga, haibun, Published Poems, senryu

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Pencils

To this day I keep many more pencils than I need or use. Beside the computer at home and at work, beside the bed I keep them as practical artifacts of a former self and simpler time. In elementary school I began a pencil collection and by middle school I had become known as the pencil kid. I studied the various brands enough to recognize the unique patterns in the little metal tops that hold the eraser. Friends would approach me and hold out a pencil with just the head visible for me to guess the brand name. Some of my favorites were Venus Medalists, Ticonderogas, Eberhard Faber Mongols, Herald Square Mallards and Mohicans by Empire. My collection grew with a certain idiosyncratic reputation. The days of Bic pens, fountain pens and then keyboards came yet I’ve never been able to view any pencil as anything but a link to those days then and that special meaning in my heart.

high school bully—
holding the pencil out at arms length
before snapping it



American Haibun & Haiga Volume 4