Raymond Roseliep Biography by Donna Bauerly
23 Tuesday Apr 2024
Posted americana, Book reviews, Favorite Haiku, haiku
in23 Tuesday Apr 2024
Posted americana, Book reviews, Favorite Haiku, haiku
in15 Tuesday Aug 2023
another day
the gifts
of each one
–
Happy to present a look at my new book , One Day- Thirty Years of Little Poems that was published on my birthday, August 1st by Larry Kimmel of Stark Mountain Press. It is a set of poems that I gathered to create a little poem cycle from morning to night by selecting poems from across 30 plus years of writing. I was invited to give a reading at Haiku Circle last summer June 2022 and it was after that reading that two friends suggested I make a little book collection from the reading. I liked the idea and even though it took a whole year to get it together I am grateful that it has now arrived and for anyone who might like a copy or wish to give a friend a copy you can find it on Amazon for $6. You can search for it in Amazon under books and just type in ” One Day” by Tom Clausen and it should appear. I will post the link in the comments. You can read my foreword and afterword of this 77 page book that features a few of my photos on the front and back covers. 8-14-23.
21 Tuesday Jun 2022
Posted Book reviews, haiku, Laughing To Myself, Published Poems, senryu
inLaughing To Myself, by Tom Clausen, Michael Ketchek Publisher, 125 High St., Rochester, New York, 14609, mketchek@frontier.com, 2013. 8.5 X 5.5 inch paperback, 25 pages.
Review by Dennis (chibi) Holmes
I’ve known Tom online for a few years. He has written in the short poem venue based upon the Japanese haiku, senryu, haibun, and tanka since 1989. His book, Laughing To Myself, spans then until now with poems plucked from publications such as Bottle Rockets, Brussels Sprouts, Empty Ring of Stones, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and Upstate Dim Sum, to mention a few.
Laughing To Myself, is strewn mostly with three line poems together with a two and few one line poems. The poems are personable, mostly, containing a “nature” theme. The poems are easy to read and resonate with an inner calm, offering a polite “ah” with a thoughtful yet enjoyable “ha.”
A good three line example from Tom’s book:
riverbank swallows
my beer label
peels easily
(It’s probably my penchant for puns, but, I read “swallows” as word play, although, I do not know if that Tom’s intent.)
A two line poems:
losing control of my son
—and myself
(I’ve been there and do/did that!)
A one line example:
in the theater spotlight dust falls
(the imagery quite fetching)
I would hope to see more of Tom’s poems in future publications. I’ve smiled at his poems in, Laughing To Myself.
review by Dennis (chibi) Holmes in Lynx XXVIII: no. 3- October , 2013
16 Thursday Jun 2022
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
16 Thursday Jun 2022
Posted A Work of Love, Book reviews, Published Poems, tanka
inTags
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.
07 Tuesday Jun 2022
Posted Book reviews, Frogpond, haiku
inTags
Nick Virgilio, My Haiku Hero by Tom Clausen, Ithaca, New York ( book review -Frogpond v.35 no.2 2012 )
This essay as book review records how the haiku and life of Nick Virgilio helped me to see the way in which haiku could be a manner of relating and sharing with others my love of life and this world. By happy serendipity Rick Black, publisher of Turtle Light Press, learned at the 2009 Haiku North America conference that a large archive of Nick Virgilio’s unpublished haiku had been left with the English department of Rutgers University in Camden, N.J. His admiration of Virgilio’s work, combined with editor Raffael de Gruttola’s review of some 3,000 unpublished haiku, has fortuitously resulted in Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku. 1 Dedicated to Virgilio’s brother Tony, the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association members and all those who have helped keep the poetry alive, Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku is aptly described on the cover as “a collection of newly discovered haiku gems by one of America’s most beloved haiku poets (with a handful of old favorites, some essays, an interview and some photos thrown in, too).” It contains an introduction by de Gruttola, a selection of newly discovered, previously unpublished haiku mixed with well-known haiku (124 all together), Kathleen O’Toole’s “Afterword: An Echo in Time,” Marty Moss Coane’s “An Interview With Nick,” Michael Doyle’s “A Tribute to Nick,” as well as essays by Virgilio himself, including “A Journey to a Haiku, On Haiku in English” and “A Note to Young Writers.” The book rounds out with photos, acknowledgments and an appendix of original manuscript pages. Virgilio and his many wonderful haiku held a prominent place in the haiku community from the 1960s until his death and this new book is a wonderful chance for anyone who has more recently embraced the form to recognize the brilliance of his work and his life.
Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku offers exceptionally poignant information and insight about the man’s passion for poetry and how hard he worked to perfect his own haiku as a “way of life.” Virgilio was born in Camden, N.J. on June 28, 1928 and, tragically, died of a heart attack in Washington D.C. on January 3, 1989 while taping a CBS-TV Nightwatch segment that was to feature his love of haiku. In his beautiful tribute to Virgilio, Father Michael Doyle of Camden’s Sacred Heart Church shares the incredible story of how they met through a special Mass he led to commemorate 300 soldiers from South Jersey who had been killed in Vietnam. Father Doyle handed out an index card for each soldier so that, as he called out the names of the dead, whoever held the card might rise. The card Father Doyle ended up with bore the name Lawrence J. Virgilio, Nick’s younger brother. Four years later Virgilio’s parents requested that Father Doyle conduct a Mass for their son. Father Doyle remembered the name from his card and eventually met Virgilio through this meeting with his parents. The rest of the story details how Virgilio found a welcoming community at Sacred Heart and how he devoted himself to a daily practice of haiku and the enthusiastic sharing of what he wrote with friends and family—and now, us.
This book is simply and absolutely indispensable reading for anyone interested in the life and work of a genuine haiku visionary. We learn in these pages about Virgilio’s daily round of experience and how he took the tragic loss of his brother and his own personal losses in work and love and forged them into a lasting body of powerful haiku. Absorbing what has been collected in Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku is also to recognize how haiku can become a way of life. As a poet and a man, Virgilio is an inspiration for all of us who, too, would find meaning and enhanced living with a haiku focus. When I discovered haiku in the late 1980s and fell in love with it, it was impossible to know that 25 years later the haiku and the poets that enchanted me then would continue to speak to me the most today. “The first cut is the deepest” (from a song by Cat Stevens) is an entirely apt expression for how I feel about the poets and haiku that moved me then to internally vow that I’d be reading and trying to write haiku for the rest of my life. Selected Haiku of Nicholas Virgilio, published by Black Moss Press in 1988 and edited by Rod Willmot, was one of the first haiku books I purchased after dipping my toe in the haiku pond way back when. Looking back on that purchase I am so grateful for the wonderful examples that came to me then and continue to be an inspiration and touchstone to the possibilities that haiku still offer today.
In his substantial introduction to A Life in Haiku, de Gruttola pinpoints the source of Virgilio’s masterful sensitivity as occurring around the time his family “went from hope to despair in confronting [his brother] Larry’s loss . . . it was devastating to them to deal with the ultimate sacrifice. It was about this time that Virgilio’s haiku became solemn and elegiac. He attempted to deal with this tragedy by writing haiku as a healing process.” De Gruttola further writes, “The pathos, if you will, becomes a constant reminder for Nick that one’s life can be transformed if there is a will to believe in yourself and in your art. It’s through this search and belief that Nick became the great haiku poet that we know today. As we read his haiku today in this first American edition of his work, we find an almost monk-like approach in pursuit of the deepest moments of his life. His unique haiku written in 1963:
lily:
out of the water . . .
out of itself
captured a subtle awareness that the great Japanese haiku poets, from Bashō to Santōka, knew all along. It was possible to say more with less.”2 Perhaps the haiku that first hit me with the real power of Virgilio’s profound simplicity was this:
into the blinding sun . . .
the funeral procession’s
glaring headlights
I remember reading this and not knowing what exactly to “think” about it, but feeling some type of mesmerized fascination with “seeing” that procession and those headlights and that sun and realizing that as it is with death there was something “beyond” in what this haiku was suggesting. I continue to be mesmerized by this and almost all of Virgilio’s haiku. There are the many lasting tributes to his younger brother Lawrence:
telegram in hand,
the shadow of the marine
darkens our screen door
summer nightfall:
dazed, all I heard from the Major
“. . . killed in Vietnam . . .”
sixteenth autumn since:
barely visible grease marks
where he parked his car
There are the poems that sear the mind, like this indelible one written in 1967:
the sack of kittens
sinking in the icy creek
increases the cold
In the WHYY-Philadelphia interview included in this book, Virgilio commented extensively on this haiku: Emotion is expressed on the sensory level—this is the essence of haiku . . . one form of existence passes into another, warmth into cold, living into non-living, the organic returns to the inorganic. We too, are involved in this eternal transition; we too are in the sack sinking in the icy creek. The doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism holds that life and the individual are merely temporary manifestations of being I can remember the instant shock I felt when I first read this haiku. I love cats and kittens and this elicits such a challenging visceral reaction that to this day the poem remains for me uncomfortably sad. Death in life is a much-repeated theme in Virgilio’s haiku. His life was weighted not only by personal losses, but by the losses he saw in his day-to-day walks around Camden and in the daily news.
On the cardboard box
holding the frozen wino:
Fragile: Do Not Crush
at the mine entrance,
on time cards beneath the clock:
the names of the dead
on the petition
condemning Agent Orange:
the names of the dead
Given how memorable are Virgilio’s haiku related to loss and death it is rewarding to see as well how he chose to express his love of life. Many life affirming and beautiful tributes to nature, celebrating its eternal cycles, may also be found in this collection:
above the cloud peak
below the summer moon—
a flight of snow geese
rising and falling . . .
a blanket of blackbirds
feeds on the snowy slope
a bittern booms—
the harsh cry of a marsh hawk,
the crescent moon
after the spring storm . . .
the farm girl washes her hair
in the rain barrel
a skylark’s song
and a billowing cloud
fills my emptiness
Virgilio’s vast collection of haiku holds room enough and more for readers of many kinds and persuasions—each picking and choosing not only among the very great poems, but among the lesser known as well. Of Virgilio’s haiku that I have related to the most there are a few that I just love— among these,
autumn twilight:
the wreath on the door
lifts in the wind
for its beautiful and subtle sense that allows the reader to imagine being quietly at this door witnessing this moment alone and touching on a feeling for something that exists within us and beyond us at once. The poem captures the eternal in a brief yet clear moment. I have also loved “over spatterdocks” for the one word that has resonated and appealed to me since the day I first read it:
over spatterdocks,
turning at corners of air:
dragonfly
I must admit I had never heard of spatterdocks before reading this haiku and yet intuitively the idea of “corners of air” “over spatterdocks” delighted me. At first I imagined that spatterdocks was an actual dock but then sheepishly discovered it was a plant! (Spatterdock is a perennial plant with leaves that arise from a large spongy rhizome.) Always a pleasure when we learn more about our world, especially in haiku! I have loved, too, the inimitable witty wink of solemn satori:
Thanksgiving alone:
ordering eggs and toast
in an undertone
For me, Nick Virgilio has been and remains a splendid mentor, an American sage, a true master and pioneer of the haiku form. Those well acquainted with his earlier Selected Haiku and with his work in periodicals and anthologies will certainly want to purchase a copy of this book. Anyone unfamiliar with Virgilio will want to do so, too. The marvelous selection of previously unpublished haiku, the essays and the wonderful radio interview beautifully bring to life his zeal, his character and his vision. To visit with his haiku and his illuminated life is truly to recognize his heroic qualities. Virgilio, like many of us, arrived at haiku as a life calling almost accidentally, but his immersion in the form and devotion to its creation leaves no doubt that there was nothing accidental about the passion and precision he poured into his love for it:
my spring love affair:
the old upright Remington
wears a new ribbon
on the manuscript
the shadow of a butterfly
finishes the poem
Notes 1. de Gruttola, Raffael, ed. Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku. Arlington, VA: Turtle Light Press, 2012, 137 pp., perfect softbound, 5.5 x 8.5. ISBN 978-0-9748147-3-5, US $14.95 . 2. Ibid., p. xi. 3. Ibid., p. xii. ♦♦♦
Tom Clausen lives in Ithaca, New York, and has worked at Cornell University in the A.R. Mann Library for over 35 years, where he currently coordinates a daily haiku feature on the library’s home page. Tom has been reading and attempting to write haiku and related short poetic forms since the late 1980s. He has been a member of the Rt. 9 Upstate Dim Sum haiku group since 2003 with John Stevenson, Hilary Tann, and Yu Chang.
Frogpond v.35 no.2 Summer 2012
06 Monday Jun 2022
Posted Book reviews, haiku, Modern Haiku
inTags
Book review by Tom Clausen in Modern Haiku vol. 34, no. 1 Winter-Spring 2003 finding the way: haiku and field notes by paul m. (Foster City, Calif.: Press Here, 2002). 56 poems, 4 field notes. Introduction by the author. 4″ x 5.5″, saddle-stitched, with a heavy illustrated wrapper. ISBN 1-878798-25-1. $6.00 postpaid in the United States, or $7.00 elsewhere, from Press Here, P.O. Box 3339, Redmond, WA 98073-3339 (please make checks or international money orders payable to “Michael D. Welch”). |
“Finding the way” is a wonderfully apt title for a collection of haiku, and in this collection, paul m.’s first, you will find the pleasure and serendipity of a well-chosen path. The author has been writing since 1988, with many of his haiku winning awards and recognition for their clarity and gentle reach. Press Here publisher Michael D. Welch states about this collection “A serenity of quiet confidence marks these poems, a serenity of having found the haiku way.” In an insightful introduction paul notes that haiku “of all poetry seems to most closely examine the light that connects us with the seemingly disparate, the intimate details of our lives and surroundings, the echo of one thing upon another.” Although finding the way is replete with haiku values and aesthetics, I feel that what gives this collection a distinguished signature is its use of this “echo.” Throughout this beautifully produced book are haiku that demonstrate how a reverberation between two images with one working against (or with) another enhances both. For example falling leaves the rusty wheelbarrow heavy with stones• ** ** that chipmunk again river sunlight skipping leaf to leaf ** ** There is much to delight in this collection as you discover how finely and carefully paul presents the “coming to”—a clear intuition of what it is that speaks to us in a haiku way. There is a strength to the evenness and consistency in the tone of these haiku. There are keen perceptions and thoughtful relationships that unfold slowly in the consciousness at just the right speed. Many of the haiku appear to be from hikes on trails and what was found off or beyond these trails. unpacking the map— a mountain spring crosses the trail• ** ** cold wind on the granite slope marmot scat One feature in finding the way that seemed slightly disconnected from the strength of the body of haiku contained are the four field notes which are distributed throughout the collection. These are brief prose passages detailing paul’s mindset on the trail about the trail. Although the field notes certainly do not detract from the superb quality of this collection, I personally did not feel that they added significantly to what is conveyed marvelously by the haiku themselves. With extraordinary quality to the paper, design, and presentation, this collection of haiku invites repeat visits for solace and inspiration. At $5.00 this is an exceptional book of haiku to add to your haiku library or give as a special gift. Relatively small in size, finding the way is a book you can easily carry along to a favorite reflective place to savor the way these haiku will find you, finding the way. A personal favorite in closing: uphill trail the scarred trunk of a giant sequoia |