Guest Poet: John Barlow
is the owner and editor of Snapshot Press, the premierpublisher of haiku in the UK and one of the most active in all of English-language haiku. His press has published the very popular Haiku Calendar every year since 2000 and many acclaimed volumes of haiku and tanka that have been selected for publication in the course of the annual Snapshot Press contests. He is also a prolific and widely read poet. His haiku have received awards in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. We are so very pleased to welcome John Barlow as our fall 2012 guest poet.
The Route 9 haiku group has been on the road a bit more than usual in thepast six months. We have affirmed our welcome at our second home, at Ithaca’s Taste of Thai restaurant, with a July session. And we met in Maine during the week before Labor Day, first at the home of haiku poet Kirsty Karkow and then on to our annual renku retreat at the Onawa Lake camp of poet and The Heron’s Nest editor Paul MacNeil (whose lake view is featured on this issue’s cover). Other meetings have taken place in our original home, Tai Pan in Halfmoon, NY.
Any travels we may have undertaken in the US pale, however, to those undertaken by our Romanian member, Ion Codrescu. Just during the months of September and October, he traveled to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France as a guest artist. We feel fortunate, indeed, that he has been able to find the time to grace these pages once again with new haiga (combinations of haiku and visual arts), an art form for which he enjoys a well-deserved international reputation. js
Sample Poems
dusk gathers
in the sodden clods
of the cabbage field
John Barlow
mild winter
the shore ice
releases its litter
ht
spring mud—
one patron
all over the library
tc
without a sound
a frog climbs out of
the pond
js
man-eating shark
the excitement
at breakfast
yc
Upstate Dim Sum 