Our guest poet is Francine Banwarth of Dubuque, Iowa. She has been studying and writing haiku and related forms since 1988 and was editor of Frogpond from 2012 through 2015. Growing from that experience, she co-authored, with Michele Root-Bernstein, The Haiku LIfe: What We Learned as Editors of Frogpond (Modern Haiku Press 2017). She tells us, “I try to be present in the moment and cultivate a haiku mind.”
While we have had a busy half year since our 20th anniversary issue, the biggest news by far is that we have added a new poet to the Route 9 Haiku Group, the first since Ion Codrescu joined us in 2006 and the first to join us for monthly meetings since Tom Clausen in 2003.
Mary Stevens lives near Woodstock, NY. She and I were, for a couple of years, both members of the Hudson Valley Kukai, which meets monthly in the Woodstock Public Library. Mary teaches Spanish at State University of New York at New Paltz. In recent years, we have encountered her in various conference settings and have felt a growing sense of our shared attitudes toward haiku. While we were still meeting in person, Mary joined us for a session at Tai Pan and, afterward, in happily dawned upon us that we were all thinking she would be perfect as a new member of our group. She has been meeting with us for virtual sessions for part of the past six months and makes her debut in Upstate Dim Sum with this issue. We hope you will look forward with us to seeing more of her poems, for many years to come.
js
Sample Poems
winter
walk me through it
one more time
Francine Banwarth
hole in the shoe
his portal
to earth
yc
milk moon
my palms
full of light
ms
summer clouds
rephrasing
a gesture
js
the sight
of people
turning away
tc
low sun
the headstone shadows
bond
ht
Upstate Dim Sum 