Randy M Brooks

A 1992 anthology of writers from the Midwest or writing about the Midwest. I really liked the format of this book -- each author had a chance to write a short essay about themselves and the reasoning behind their poems -- a great opportunity to get to know people and to see various thought processes. One unfortunate bias I noticed was what seemed to be an admiration for the rural lifestyle, and a sense that city-folk couldn't really have quite the haiku intuition -- it wasn't a major theme, just a feeling I picked up as I read. I've got two disagreements with this point of view. First, that nature and seasons are everywhere if you tune your senses to them. Donald Kelly writes a couple poems in this anthology about kids in the driveway and pink lemonade that wonderfully capture the suburban Midwestern experience (as well as being fairly universal). Second, my concern is that haiku is viewed as being limited to nature topics. In city life, so often our lives are dominated by other types of experiences, that are equally legitimate for discussion in haiku, and I hate to think people might be suppressing those experiences in their poetry in favor of some kind of pastoral worship.

In any case, as a native suburban midwesterner myself, I can vouch for this anthology as an accurate rendition of midwestern life. It provides an excellent model for bringing haiku to a specific locale.… (meer)

The Haiku Society of America publishes the journal frogpond. I don't know what process determined the poems in this collection, but the selection is reasonable. For some reason, I found the poems here about human affairs to be the most compelling, for instance, "raking leaves" or "boy in the doorway". By far the most magical poem was this one by Kim Dorman: "monsoon burst--/barefoot girls dash/for the temple". I can't quite pin down why it feels so legitimate, but partly it must be that every element is in such perfect unity.… (meer)