A Lesser Triumph by Timothy Green ... Yesterday I remembered applause ...
Thrilled to have this leading off the new issue of 32 Poems! For years, Katie's been trying to get me to actually submit poems to the magazines I like. I've been terrible about it, but it's nice to have started now at the top of the list.
The End of Loneliness Is Not a Crowd, is not a thousand patrons talking loud inside a cafeteria, nor the cloud of smoke that hangs outside, a dirty shroud over the city. Nor the field, now plowed in the distance, nor the farmer feeling proud about his work. Is not a tree endowed with fruit (not hanging low, not many-boughed). The end is not the cows so crudely cowed inside their pens like heavy furrows browed, as tightly packed as their beefy bulk allowed while they kicked and stomped and groaned aloud. The end of loneliness can’t be ka-powed like that. The judges aren’t so simply wowed. That doesn’t mean it should be disavowed.
Thanks to Lester Graves Lennon and Rosebud magazine for nominating this one for a Pushcart Prize! It's always such an honor to be one of the editors' favorite pieces in a year.
6/ Which is why I say haiku are "two worlds in one breath."
5/ So to think of haiku in a way that's respectful of the tradition, you have to see it as a kind of tiny PechaKucha. It doesn't matter how many syllables you cram into the length of time, it's the length of time that matters—in the haiku that's one breath.
4/ What's especially interesting about this cool concept, though, is that it might illuminate why haiku are not 5-7-5. In the Japanese, those are 5-7-5 mora, not syllables. Like measuring a poem by time rather than meter, mora is a unit of DURATION rather than stress.
3/ We're used to measuring poems by line length or meter, but measuring time is something we hardly ever do outside of a poetry slam.
2/ The whole presentation, then, should be exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. And if you click the link, you'll see the audio recording is ... 6 minutes and 40 seconds, plus an extra few seconds of silence on either side of the track.
Just when you think you've seen it all, today's poem at Rattle by Julie Kane is a PechaKucha—it's a spinoff of a Japanese form of slideshow presentation, where you show 20 slides for 20 seconds each, and fit stories into exactly that length of time. 1/
www.rattle.com/old-maid-a-p...
Cover of Did You See the Moon Honey by Katie and Tim. A view of a fence looking up at the sky in neon colors.
Our new book-length haibun crown is hot off the press!
@katiedozier.bsky.social and I wrote these through the month of April, and posted them right here every day. Pick up your copy and help prove you don't have to follow all the antiquated rules to make meaningful books!
Awards list from Modern Haiku's fall issue
It's really an honor to win the favorite award for an issue of Modern Haiku. There's so much great work by so many poets in every issue, and I respect that community so much.
Attn: Houston Poets! There are a few slots left for our Hot Haibun workshop this August. Spend two intensive afternoons diving into the form with me and Katie Dozier!
In this week's episode of The Poetry Space_ with @katiedozier.bsky.social, two of my favorite poets go head to head in another date nite duel: Stephen Dunn vs. Kay Ryan. Three rounds. Three random poems. Lots of funny outfits.
Listen here to find out who won: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
3/ Killed in action during WWI at 34, Hulme left a small but mighty legacy. His bold ideas endure, proving a few poems can change everything. Learn more about rest of the Imagist legacy on this week's episode of The Poetry Space_:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
2/ Hulme wanted poetry be “hard and dry,” free of romantic fluff. His influence on Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and others cemented modernist verse, turning words into crisp, photographic images.
T.E. Hulme, poet and visionary, founded the Imagist movement in early 1900s London, crafting a sharp, vivid style that reshaped modern poetry. His life, though, was cut tragically short. 1/
Thanks, Matthew, good one to bring up—I don't think we've read that on the podcast before! Also good suggestion!
10/ Another great little Imagist poem, "Fog" by Carl Sandburg:
Mike White's "NASCAR" from Rattle 32 is the first to come to mind—note the way the triple-metaphor relies on the immediacy of the image of the dog: rattle.com/nascar-by-mi...
8/ What's your favorite use of imagery in a poem? Share some in the comments and we'll share them on the next episode of The Poetry Space_! I'll add some more too.
7/ Images are processed more quickly and permanently than the other senses we can evoke—and they function most effectively in the symbolic realm where the wisdom of our holistic right-brains reside. Images are the stuff of dreams, and dreams are the stuff of poetry.
6/ The Imagists—Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, etc.—recognized this, and taught us all to be visual writers ever since.
5/ We read body language, we remember subtle differences in faces, and our recognition of visual symmetry is the foundation to our sense of beauty itself. Our brains care so much about vision that we evolved whites in our eyes just so that we can see what others are seeing.
4/ As scavenging hunter-gatherers, we relied primarily on sight for threat-detection and food acquisition, and honed those tools even further as a key component of group social structure.
3/ Why is imagery such an important element in poetry? Around 40% of of human cerebral cortex is devoted to image processing—more than all the other senses combined.
2/ That painting is Charles Demuth's "The Figure 5 in Gold," inspired by one of the great William Carlos Williams poems:
Imagism was a relatively brief trend in poetry, and maybe that was because it taught such singularly valuable lesson: even in poetry, imagery is king. 1/🧵
Q: What literary publishers are especially modern and forward-thinking? For example, I love they way @onlypoemsmag.bsky.social focuses on community. @atticusreview.bsky.social is moving to the blockchain. Who else out there is thinking way ahead of everyone else?
Wonderful suggestion, thanks!
