Emily Dickinson haiku kobayashi issa National Poetry Month nature poetry poetry poetry about nature time travel fiction

A clover and a bee .. a Zen Revery?

I’ve been re-reading Emily Dickinson’s poems lately, one or two a day. Although her early editors removed her original groupings — the “fsaciles” or small booklets in which she grouped them — I enjoy the section “Nature” that groups together a major focus of her writing. Emily doesn’t write about nature as pretty or ornamental, though she certainly finds beauty and delight in it. But she writes more like a Zen monk, or like my…

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childhood drama dylan thomas haiku kobayashi issa memoir ocean poem poetry prose robert hass under milkwood

Poetry & Prose — the Twins in My Life

If you have an addiction to writing like I do (and a writer by definition is an addict), perhaps like me you can’t contain it within just one literary genre. I began with poetry, getting swept up first in the poems of the haiku poets Basho, Buson, and Issa. Issa (Kobayashi Issa 1763-1828, one of the Big Four of Japanese haiku) charmed me with tiny masterpieces that evoked a stunning attention to the natural world,…

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