Trust me (and verify below*), nobody has better haiku credentials than John Stevenson. But, his real vita is the body of haiku I will begin sharing with you today. Cor van den Heuvel sees sadness, cynicism, darkness in John’s work; like myself, Peggy Lyles sees fragile hope “in the sharing and the linking, in the listening and in words that are just enough” (Forward to Quiet Enough, Red Moon Press, 2004) His haiku will surely resonate in a personal way with you, touching the universal and the personal.
John’s haiku are filled with reality and insight that belie their brevity. My hope is that you’ll enjoy and appreciate them as much as I do — and that dagosan learns quickly by osmosis how to see the material of haiku moments everywhere, and how to describe them in just a few telling words. You can find a representative collection of John’s work at Terebess Asia Online.
Here are three haiku from John Stevenson‘s first full-length collection, Some of the Silence (Red Moon Press,1999):
morning sun enters
the sleepers
earstairway
descending into
her perfume
proud host
his orchard bursting
with fireflies
And, here are the “title haiku” from his three published volumes, Something Unerasable (1996); Some of the Silence (1999) and Quiet Enough (2004), respectively:
under the
blackest doodle
something unerasable
a deep gorge . . .
some of the silence
is me
snowy night
sometimes you can’t be
quiet enough
We’ll be sharing many more of John’s haiku in the weeks and years to come.
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* John Stevenson is a former president of the Haiku Society of America and currently serves as editor of HSA’s journal Frogpond, one of the oldest and most widely circulated journals of English-language haiku. His poems have won awards in innumerable haiku competitions. He is co-founder of the Rt. 9 Haiku Group, which has created the Upstate Dim Sum journal and website. Born and raised in Ithaca, NY, he now lives in Nassau, NY.
John has been a frequent subject of research projects at the Millikin University haiku program, for example, here and here.