Eschewing futile and empty gestures, the f/k/a Gang is not big on New Year’s resolutions. However, we are into improving, enjoying and appreciating life. Therefore, each of your Editor’s alter egos has made a promise to visit Cornell University’s Mann Library’s Daily Haiku website frequently in 2007 — and you will surely benefit, too, from our cyber visits to Ithaca.
At the Mann haiku page, you’ll find a daily poem written by the featured haijin of the month. The project began over ten years ago, when library staffer Tom Clausen — now an f/k/a Honored Guest Poet — started posting a daily haiku in the elevator of the old Mann building. As their About page notes:
[Tom] continues to post them near the New Book shelf of the Mann Library Addition. The poems are original works of an extended haiku community that includes many of his friends. This site is an effort to share these works with those of you visiting us on our Web site.
Yesterday, when we stopped at the Mann website for our first visit this year, we had a very pleasant surprise: Tom Clausen‘s own poetry is featured this month at the site. Tom is one of the four members of the Route 9 Haiku Group, and many of the poems were originally seen in Upstate Dim Sum, the group’s journal. Here’s a sampling of the poetry you would have found, had you visited Mann Library Haiku during the first week of 2007 (all the poems can be accessed through the site’s archives):
alone in the waiting room
checking the plant
for reality
one tree
one bird, one song
the dusk
daybreak-
from the bread truck’s roof
frost swirls
dawn…
at the empty crossroads
the signal blinks
power failure…
moonlit clouds drift
by the window
. . . by Tom Clausen. Visit his personal website here.
p.s. If you’re looking for a new novel this week, don’t forget that Richard North Patterson’s latest, Exile, is being released on Jan. 9, 2007. The book got a very positive review here at f/k/a last month, as both a legal-politcal thriller and an introduction to the history and emotions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. See our posting Exile: facts & fiction, Israel & Palestine (Dec. 14, 2006).