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Robyn Hood Black - children's author, poet, artist

Life on the Deckle Edge

Poetry Friday: ONE SMALL CANDLE: Enlightening Haiku from Young Paideia Poets

August 25, 2015
Tags: Poetry Friday, Poetry, haiku, student work
one small candle by the Paideia Fifth Grade Chorus, buddha baby press, book & graphic design by Stanford M. Forrester, bottlerocketspress.
Cover Art by Ajanta Farrell.

It's always a pleasure to share the work of young haiku poets from The Paideia School in Atlanta. You've grown to look forward to our Student Haiku Poet of the Month each school year, n'est-ce pas? Have no fear - we'll be doing that again this year!

This week, however, is a special treat, featuring work from some talented fifth-graders. They are in sixth grade now, but these poems were composed for a project this past spring.

Creative writing teacher Tom Painting teamed up with Kate Murray and her 5th grade chorus class at The Paideia School in Atlanta.

“The idea was to have students perform their haiku to music as part of the spring choral concert” he says. “The book, one small candle, features one haiku from each of the 40 students in the class."

Stanford M. Forrester (Sekiro), publisher of haiku, senryu and other small poems at bottle rockets press, designed the small book and published it under buddha baby press.

It features the lovely line art of Ajanta Ferrell on the cover.

The title comes from this entry by Audrey Felske:


one small candle
warms the room
cold shivers down my back


Here is a larger sampling of the many fine poems:



sunset glowing
cows in the field
chewing their cud

Sean Zheng



autumn afternoon
sun burning
the golden field

Duncan Kelly



autumn
wrapped in a blanket
by the candlelight

Morgan Cobb



autunm day
golden leaves fall
on the dirt road

Luna McCauley



leaves fall
I sweep them
from my shoulders

Reid Celestin


In addition to the poems above, the following four haiku received recognition in the United Nations International School Haiku Contest this year:



smell of pine
lingering in the air
faint whisper of the woods

Ajanta Farrell



winter’s night
an owl hoots
through the silence

Jesse Chang-Friedan



the flower
opening up
shared secrets

Emma Delman



winter’s end
ice on the river
gives way

Sean Zheng


All poems © their respective authors. Posted with permission.

Congratulations to each student poet, whether highlighted here today or not. Your haiku warms the room and helps light the darkness!

For poetry of all temperatures today, please visit the incredible Sylvia at Poetry for Children for this week’s Roundup. Sylvia has recently returned from South Africa, where she’s been sharing and receiving all kinds of poetic light.
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Poetry Friday - Back to School and Love in the Air...

August 13, 2015
Tags: Poetry Friday, Poetry, haiku, ponderings, Love

Greetings, Poetry Lovers!

Many of you are just back in school - in classrooms and media centers - or getting ready to return to school, or sending kiddos off to school, or otherwise in the balance between summer and early fall - perhaps in your first year of retirement after years of teaching!

My daughter Morgan is hosting "Meet the Teacher" today for her second year wrangling third graders in upstate SC. AND (drumroll...) she's receiving her Masters in Education Saturday evening at Furman University. AND (fireworks, canons, bird murmurations...) she JUST GOT ENGAGED! It's been a busy week and a half. She and long-time honey Matt have their eyes and calendars set on a June wedding.

We were thrilled that Matt arranged to propose while we were all together last week, at the beach and bopping around Beaufort. I hid my camera in my purse and behind my back until he popped the question at the waterfront, then was so excited that I kept accidentally turning it off between snapping shots! But I still got a bunch of good pictures. Seth, who returns to the mountains next week for his junior year of college, took some great video. And Matt pulled off a surprise - hard to do with our aforementioned teacher-daughter, who is usually on top of everything.

In unrelated but coincidental news, Jeff was cleaning out some boxes and came across an old notebook from our early married days. I'd had the grand idea that we should start a collection of "Poems for Sundays," in which we'd each present the other with a poem or two each week. We seem to have kept up with that for, um, about three weeks.... But for some reason we still have that notebook from 1987.

We were hopeless romantics for sure. My first entry was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous love song from Sonnets of the Portugese:


How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)


How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.


And, to my surprise and delight I'd included this the next week:


old pond
a frog leaps in
water's sound

Basho


Confession: I have NO recollection of any familiarity with Basho those few decades ago! Where did I come across his most famous poem? What spoke to me then? The seeds of my love affair with haiku in recent years were planted long ago, it seems.

Another poem I included was Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode, still one of my favorite poems ever, and one which I quoted in response to a question our pastor posed recently about what we believe, but that's another story.

Jeff included a poem he found in the front of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, author unknown. "Days when it all gets too busy/I drift away to the sea/or where sunshine filters through trees..." (anyone know this one?) and an excerpt from "These Things Are Ours" by Gwen Frostic - "The sun reflects upon the moon.../the moon upon my heart..." I looked her up online. Though she died in 2001, her block prints and words live on. I MUST go savor that website! On the "About Gwen" page, it reads:

Long before her death she wrote her epitaph:

"Here lies one doubly blessed.
She was happy and she knew it."

That's quite profound, if you think about it for a moment. And that's the kind of happiness I wish for Morgan and Matt, and for you!

For more great poetry to help you pivot toward new seasons of life, visit the incomparable Heidi - teacher, poet, and leader of the Mighty Minnows, at My Juicy Little Universe for our Poetry Friday Roundup.
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Student Haiku Poets of the Month Place in UN Contest

June 11, 2015
Tags: haiku, student work, Student Poet of the Month, Poetry

Greetings! Apologies for the earlier confusion, but here are the UN International School haiku contest winners from our featured student poets of the month, announced last weekend in New York. I’d like to thank so many of you for supporting another year of our “Student Haiku Poet of the Month” feature, wherein we celebrate promising young poets from The Paideia School in Atlanta each month with examples of their poetry and some of their thoughts about haiku.

This monthly treat is made possible by the efforts of Tom Painting, an award-winning haiku poet and teacher or former teacher of these wonderful young writers. [Click here for a post about Tom from my blog in 2013.]

Several of them recently won awards in a big international contest – the 2015 Student Haiku Contest hosted by The United Nations International School, the Northeast Council of Teachers of Japanese, and the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations.

Of our featured poets from this year and last, the following students were recognized in this year’s competition:


First place, Junior High division - Olivia Graner


creak of the door
the attic's smell
floods the hallway


©Olivia Graner. All rights reserved.

[Click here for Olivia’s Student Poet of the Month feature.]



Honorable mention, Junior High division - Cole McCord


spring cleaning
the smell
of expired milk


©Cole McCord. All rights reserved.

[Click here for Cole’s Student Poet of the Month feature.]



Second place, High school division - Marisa Schwartz


boardwalk
the taste of the ocean
in a pretzel


©Marisa Schwartz. All rights reserved.

[Click here for Marisa’s Student Poet of the Month feature.]



Third place, High School division - Emma Jones


sliding over
grandma's rough hands
soap bubbles


©Emma Jones. All rights reserved.

[Click here for Emma’s Student Poet of the Month feature.]



Paideia had winners in the elementary division and several more honorable mentions in the junior high/high school divisions. Congratulations to all these young poets, and hats off to each student who entered from all over the world.

The judge for English poems for the Elementary, Middle School, High School, and Teacher categories was John Stevenson . Submissions in the English Division came from 19 different schools/programs in the US and around the world. Finalists came from schools in New York, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, and also from Belgium, Kenya, and Japan.
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Poetry Friday: On the Haiku Road with Jack Kerouac

May 21, 2015
Tags: Poetry Friday, haiku, HSA, poets, conferences, workshops
Top: Robyn and award-winning poet and conference speaker Stanford M. Forrester, editor of bottle rockets and past president of the HSA;
Center: Current HSA President David G. Lanoue, poet and teacher Tom Painting, and poets Ray and Terri French (current Southeast Regional Coordinator for the HSA).
Bottom: Kerouac memorobilia displayed at The Kerouac Project house in Orlando.

Confession: I've only read a few excerpts of Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD and other novels. Unfiltered stream-of-conscious accounts of unbridled lives of the Beats (with no white space!) isn't quite my cup of tea. However, I was intrigued when my son gave me a copy of JACK KEROUAC - BOOK OF HAIKUS, edited and with an introduction by Regina Weinreich (Penguin, 2003) a year or two ago. And one of the houses Kerouac lived in (in 1957) is smack-dab in the middle of my old stomping grounds in the College Park area of Orlando, just a couple of miles from my folks' current home.

So when I learned the second quarterly meeting of the Haiku Society of America (HSA) would be coming to the Southeast, and to Orlando and the Kerouac house specifically, I signed up right away.

What a terrific weekend of learning, writing, and camaraderie!

The day began and ended with presentations by former HSA president, award-winning poet, and bottle rockets press editor Stanford M. Forrester of Connecticut. He did a wonderful job explaining how important Kerouac's role was in the development of haiku here in the states, noting that Kerouac drew mainly on Zen rather than Tibetan Buddhism, and that he "exchanged dogma for a more 'free-wheeling' life."

One of Kerouac's haiku that we looked at was this:


In my medicine cabinet
      the winter fly
Has died of old age


I'd remembered it from Weinreich's book and it was one of my favorites. I liked it even more after Stanford pointed out that to open the medicine cabinet, the speaker would likely encounter an mirror. Of course! Makes the poem even richer.

The middle of our day included a trip from Rollins College (where the lectures and meeting were held) to the cottage in College Park where Kerouac and his mother lived in 1957 - in the back part of the house, not the whole cottage. It has been preserved with generous support of some savvy volunteers, who administer residencies for selected writers four times a year (one per season). The folks from The Kerouac Project who gave us a tour (the current writer-in-residence was out of town and so we could see the house) joined us in many conversations and couldn't have been more welcoming. Several of us bought Bob Kealing's book, KEROUAC IN FLORIDA: : Where The Road Ends, which chronicles Kerouac's life in several houses there until his death in St. Petersburg in 1969 at the age of 47.

After a picnic lunch in the yard, we made the short trek by foot to Lake Adair, where I spent many an afternoon as a teenager. This was our "ginko walk" - poets walking together to soak up inspiration from the surroundings and compose haiku, perhaps with sketchbooks or cameras in tow. Cypress knees, red-winged blackbirds, and a circling osprey gave us plenty to work with on a sunny day.

Kerouac and fellow writers often composed haiku during their road trips. How fitting that HSA President David G. Lanoue and three more folks making up the New Orleans contingent did the same during their long, long drive. The result was a lively renku read during Saturday evening's poetry reading at a local watering hole, where 20-somethings huddled over laptops with beer or coffee, strung lights and colorful paper cut-outs made for festive, hipster-friendly décor, and our haiku folks took up most of the room with its small stage. Actually, the linked verses (36) were not read so much as performed, set to some top-notch harmonica improvisations by one of the renku poets.

A bonus for me was getting to make it a weekend trip with my husband (and the dogs!) to visit my folks. Jeff came with me to the reading Saturday night and got to hear me read a few poems as well. It was a friendly, laid-back audience. We enjoyed 15 or so sharings of haiku, haibun, tanka, and even Japanese music combined with poems.

This was only my second time to an HSA meeting, and it was a treat catching up with folks I'd met in Atlanta a year and a half ago as well as making new acquaintances. To think haiku poets gather around the world like this sharing their passion and knowledge is a wonderful thing, much like we gather in our virtual meeting places here on Poetry Friday.

Marching to his own energetic beat is our Poetry Friday Rounder-upper today, Matt - go check out all the great offerings at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme.
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Poetry Friday - OOPS - Student Winners from the United Nations International Haiku Contest coming in June...

May 14, 2015
Tags: Poetry Friday, Student Poet of the Month, haiku, contests, Poetry

Oops...

Update: My apologies, but we needed to wait until after June 6 to celebrate the Haiku Student Poet of the Month writers who placed in the United Nations International School Student Haiku contest. Click here for the link!

Speaking of haiku, our own amazing master of haiku and soooo many other things, Diane, has rounded up Poetry Friday this week at Random Noodling. Thanks, Diane!

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Poetry Friday: Haiku Student Poet of the Month Dylan Levy

May 7, 2015
Tags: Poetry Friday, Poetry, haiku, Student Poet of the Month, student work

Happy Poetry Friday!

Can you believe another school year is coming to a close? Neither can I.

We will ring it out in style, though, with several oh-so-talented student haiku poets for these last few weeks of this month. In fact, today’s special guest is our Student Haiku Poet of the Month for May, Dylan Levy.

Dylan is a seventh-grade student at The Paideia School in Atlanta. She claims her life is like any other typical teenage girl’s, full of volleyball and writing. She says she is always thirsty for something new and is never satisfied, noting that her words “tremble and soften” when she reads in front of a group. Her days are spent at home, using her free time to write. Dylan “never keeps secrets” because “her blue eyes and wide smile always tell the tale” -- her words do as well, as you'll see.

Why haiku? Here are Dylan’s thoughts, with some insightful "how-to's" folded in:

In appearance a haiku is just a few words on a page, but in reality haiku is much more,” she says. ” A good haiku is not choppy or too wordy; it should flow. Haiku doesn’t have to be complicated, it’s simple. Haiku cannot be forced; it is something you find and can be difficult in this way; each word painting the picture of an image.

Here is a sampling of Dylan’s poetry, which I think you’ll agree demonstrates those characteristics.



silence broken
the little girl hums
a lullaby



classical music
my palm to the air
catching each note



red bird
softly cooing
fire in my hands



thunder storm
the deaf lady
covers her ears



one-way road
a downpour
carries the leaves


Poems ©Dylan Levy. All rights reserved.


Many thanks to Dylan for sharing these fine poems here this week. For more posts in this series featuring talented students, please click here.

Our Poetry Friday host today has been known to wrangle a haiku or two. Please visit Michelle at Today’s Little Ditty for all the great poetry posted around the Kidlitosphere!
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Poetry Friday - What We Leave Behind

April 30, 2015
Tags: Poetry Friday, Poetry, haiku, ponderings
morguefile.com

Whew! It's May.

I hope you had a terrific Poetry Month.

I am looking forward to circling back to visit some of the wonderfulness I missed on so any great blogs.

I'm also looking forward to sharing some great haiku here this month, including poems from talented student writers.

For today, a short post - just one poem of mine in the current issue of Acorn.. (I'm traveling all week. Actually driving through some of my former stomping grounds.)


contrail
in the sunset sky
what I left behind


copyright Robyn Hood Black. All rights reserved.

Acorn, #34, Spring 2015


Keep the poetry love going! Today you'll find the Poetry Friday Roundup at Space City Scribes - https://spacecityscribes.wordpress.com. UPDATE: Actually, today you can find the links temporarily parked in the comments at Mary Lee's: http://readingyear.blogspot.com/2015/05/poetry-friday-emotional.html#comment-form (Thanks, Mary Lee!)

See you next week with our final Student Haiku Poet of the Month for this school year.
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Poetry Friday: Haiku from the EarthRise Rolling Haiku Collaboration

April 23, 2015
Tags: Poetry Friday, Poetry, haiku
Yay Images

It’s still Poetry Month! Hope you are enjoying April wherever you are.

One thing I love about Poetry Friday is the web of connections we make each week. Last Friday, I was so focused on celebrating The Poetry Friday Anthology of Celebrations with Janet and Sylvia, and rounding up posts, that I almost missed something special: the inaugural “EarthRise Rolling Haiku Collaboration” from The Haiku Foundation celebrating International Haiku Day (April 17).

Lucky for us, Joy Acey and Diane Mayr were on it and shared the link. Here’s the description from The Haiku Foundation:


"Welcome to the largest collaborative poem on the internet. This year’s theme is the Year of Light, as designated by decree of the United Nations. Please add your poem(s) in the Comment box below, ideally at dawn at your location, but any time that you are able… ."

A “seed” poem was offered:

will anyone
not be taking up his pen?
tonight’s moon

— Onitsura (1660 – 1738)

That writerly challenge might have been issued three centuries ago, but I couldn’t resist! I took a break from rounding up posts (the sun had just come up here) and went outside to exhale and invite a haiku moment that I could add to the thread.
Here was my contribution:


april morning
the reach of seedlings
toward the sun

©Robyn Hood Black. All rights reserved.


More than 400 haiku from around the world were posted! I appreciated seeing some familiar names and asked a few of my poet friends if I might have permission to share some of their entries. Each one generously obliged (such a great group of folks). Many participants posted one poem, as I did, while others posted several. Some also shared previously published work that fit with the theme.

Enjoy this sampling...



a streak of light…
my cat alarm clock
goes off

©Diane Mayr. All rights reserved.



sun rise radiates
through a dew drop on the limb
a prism rainbow

©Joy Acey. All rights reserved.



a flicker of light
from my pen to yours
rising sun

©Peggy Bilbro. All rights reserved.



heat lightning
a fox
in the blink of an eye

©Michael Henry Lee. All rights reserved.



first light what’s not to believe

©Michael Henry Lee. All rights reserved.



morning fog
the sober glow
of streetlights

©Ben Moeller-Gaa. All rights reserved.
A Hundred Gourds 1:2 (2012)



morning prayers
the rising sun between
my hands

©Kala Ramesh. All rights reserved.
Ambrosia– Journal of Fine Haiku, Spring 2009



slipping in
beneath the kitchen door
– first sunlight

©Kala Ramesh. All rights reserved.



first light
the ethereal phrase
of a wood thrush

©Tom Painting. All rights reserved.



You probably recognize Tom Painting’s name – In addition to being an award-winning poet, he is the teacher behind our Student Haiku Poet of the Month series here.

Be sure to tune in next month, when it will be All-Haiku Every Poetry Friday! We’ll spend a couple of those days with Tom’s students, and then we’ll welcome international students at the end of the month with Kala Ramesh (see her poems above.

Many thanks to all the poets sharing their work here today. If you are new to haiku, The Haiku Foundation is a treasure of resources. For more great poetry of all kinds, paddle over to No Water River, where the amazing Renée has the Poetry Friday Roundup!
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Poetry Friday: Student Haiku Poet of the Month Lila Chiles

April 2, 2015
Tags: Poetry Friday, Poetry Month, student work, Student Poet of the Month, haiku

Happy National Poetry Month! I’m thrilled to kick off April’s Poetry Friday posts here with our Student Haiku Poet of the Month, Lila Chiles.

Lila lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her mom, dad, big sister and a Goldendoodle named Teddy. She is a seventh grader at The Paideia School, and “will finally be a teenager” in June! She enjoys playing sports—especially soccer—writing, drawing, playing Poker and eating watermelon Sourpatch candy.

Here are some of Lila’s thoughts about haiku:

"When my teacher Tom told me about Haiku, my first thought was, 'Aw, man! Yet another form of poetry that I'm not so good at.' I wrote my first haiku later that night:


downpour
broken sign
swinging in the wind


I showed it and a few others to my mom and she told me that they were beautiful and that I should immediately send them to her and Tom. I'm proud that they both liked my haiku. Now, there have been four times I've been recognized for my haiku.

For me, haiku are both simple and complex. I can be anywhere and words will just start to fill my head and form an image, which is what makes it easy. It's complex, though, because you have to move words around and change them until they are in a perfect form. It's like a puzzle. That's my favorite part of all. I think that's pretty amazing."

Here are some more of Lila’s haiku – I think they’re all pretty amazing!


abandoned umbrella
the sun chases
the clouds away


aromatic flowers
I socialize
with the sun


summer night
mosquitoes here and there…
and everywhere


summer lingers
a ball kicked
into the tall grass


meadow breeze
a fresh stack
of hay


Poems ©Lila Chiles. All rights reserved.


These seem especially resonant as we shed winter to embrace the warm weather again! Which ones most speak to you?

For more posts in this series featuring talented students, please click here. Huge CONGRATULATIONS to our February featured poet, Olivia Graner, who won the UN International School Haiku Competition, junior high division. Way to go, Olivia!

Go bask in more Poetry Month Poetry Friday goodness over at The Poem Farm, where our always-amazing Amy is hosting this week’s Roundup. [Check out her month-long "Sing That Poem" project, too - guaranteed to have you humming for the next several weeks.] Read More 
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Poetry Friday: Student Haiku Poet of the Month Cole McCord

March 5, 2015
Tags: Poetry Friday, Student Poet of the Month, haiku, David G. Lanoue, Poetry, student work



Greetings, Poetry Fans!



I’m serving up our Student Haiku Poet of the Month on the early side, as we welcome the month that comes in like a lion. (Next Friday I’ll be at our SCBWI Southern Breeze Springmingle in Atlanta – and away from a real computer.)



Please join me in welcoming Cole McCord, a seventh grade student “with a passion for poetry.” Cole lives with his parents and sister Layney and attends The Paideia School in Atlanta.



Cole explains that when he was first introduced to haiku, he was “misled into thinking that haiku has to be written in five, seven, five. “ He credits language arts teacher Tom Painting for guiding him in his current haiku journey, and “derives haiku from every aspect of the world” around him.



“To me, Haiku is a way of life,” Cole says. ”Every moment you withhold haiku, a piece of you goes missing. Even if no one ever sees it, Haiku needs to be released. Haiku reveals who you are; it reveals your view on life and the world around you. Haiku is the one form of writing that is pure and must not be forced. According to haiku poet David Lanoue "Haiku is life; life is haiku.”



(You can read my post featuring Haiku Society of America President David G. Lanoue here .)







Here are some of Cole’s wonderful haiku:




Sunday morning
in my sister’s room
retrieving something stolen


spring dawn
in the meadow
blooming avens


autumn afternoon
on easel and canvas
pond landscape


school morning
on the bus
blather bullies my ears


spring cleaning
the smell
of expired milk


starlit night
a diamond ring
in the riverbed


Poems ©Cole McCord. All rights reserved.


Many thanks to our guest poet today. Cole, you’re one to watch! (That "blather bullies my ears" line is something else.)

For more posts in this series featuring talented students, please click here.

And for the Poetry Friday Roundup, please visit Robyn Campbell this week. [Thanks, Robyn. Look – we spell our name the same way!! :0) ].  Read More 
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