Deborah P Kolodji - Poetry Scrapbook and Random Musings

I had a wonderful weekend up at McGrath State Beach, on the border of Oxnard and Ventura. Although I was slightly disappointed that it turned out to be more difficult to walk to the beach from the campground than expected, the reason for the obstacle was rather cool. The Santa Clara River dumps into the ocean here and the reason the ocean used to be an easy 400 yard walk from the campsites was because they used to dredge the river. But dredging destroys the natural wetlands and estuary that has rejuvenated itself, making it a great place to birdwatch.

So, we drove to the public beach around the corner from the campground and had a great day on Saturday. While I was there, I got the anticipated call about the Rhysling Awards.

Short Poem:
Winner - Amal El-Mohtar - "Songs for an Ancient City"
2nd Place - Samantha Henderson - "Spell"
3rd Place - Billy Collins - "The Future"

Long Poem:
Winner - Geoffrey A. Landis - "Search"
2nd Place - Samantha Henderson - "Hungry: Some Ghost Stories"
3rd Place - Amal El-Mohtar & Catherynne M. Valente - Damascus Divides the Lovers by Zero, Or, The City is Never Finished

Mike Allen reports that it was a fantastic Rhysling Slan. I can't wait to read the full skinny. (I've heard reports of as many as 80 people in attendence!) Amal and Cat were present, so it was wonderful to have some winners in the audience this year. I called Geoff and Samantha, since they weren't there. (I don't have Billy Collins' phone number - lol).

The Rhysling Awards will be announced tomorrow at ReaderCon.

Mike Allen will be twittering from the event, so it should be posted on his twitter feed shortly after 4 pm EST, tomorrow, July 11th.

http://twitter.com/mythicdelirium

We will put it up on the SFPA website as soon as humanely possible. It may be a few days.

Robin Mayhall, our webmaster, is in the hospital. Liz Bennefeld has been helping out but she has a very special family event scheduled this weekend.

As for myself, I'm going to be at the beach, away from any internet access, so I won't even be able to post it here until Sunday night.

After yesterday's post, I was asked for online links to speculative haibun. I did a quick search but didn't find any so here are a couple of mine.

Poems from the New Symbiont

Metamorphosis is gradual. First, the human victim craves unusual foods, tastes of a far off planet. A new entity emerges and personality fades to the stronger force, sometimes emulating historical figures.

another Bashō
he sees the Milky Way
from the other side

-Deborah P Kolodji

from Scifaikuest, February 2007, print
reprinted in The 2008 Rhysling Anthology



Unknown Invasion

A 2005 university study published in February announced that perchlorate, a toxic chemical found in rocket fuel, was found in all thirty-six samples of breast milk taken from nursing mothers in eighteen states. In San Antonio, Texas, a three year old boy climbs to the top of the big slide.

daytime fireworks
his mother doesn't listen
about the spaceship

- Deborah P Kolodji

from Dreams and Nightmares #73, January 2006



The second one started out as a mainstream haibun. My first attempt at a haiku for this haibun was:

rocket fuel
nursed at her breast
his first launch

but this haiku was far too close to the prose. My next attempt almost went too far away from the rocket fuel, one of the strongest images in the prose.

first launch
wind whorls of plum
blossoms

Then the science fiction poet in me took over and I saw the spaceships...

I’m fond of speculative haibun. When speculative haiku fails, it often fails for being too cryptic. On the scifaiku list, there are wonderful long links of scifaiku, where each poem links to an overall theme known by all who are participating. But sometimes, a speculative haiku that causes me to sigh “ah” on the list will lose some of its sparkle and genius when the poem is lifted away from the chain and shown to a non-participant, who has missed all that has gone on before.

A speculative haibun can solve this problem, because it allows some space to set up the universe the scifaiku resides inside.

Several years ago, I used to lament the fact that not enough speculative haibun is being published. This is rapidly changing, and several examples have landed in my mailbox over the past several months.

First, the March/April 2009 issue of Star*Line contains three, including one of my own. The prose in Terrie Leigh Relf’s “The XenodateT Center for Physical Enhancement” reads like a lively advertisement aimed at intergalactic singles unlucky on the dating scene. Even though my haiku editorial eye longed to rearrange the haiku so it had only one cut, ultimately Relf’s combination of prose and haiku works effectively and it's a fine piece.

I like Shawn Bowman’s “Layover” even better. In his prose there is little to clue the reader that the scene is anything but an airport, train station, or bus station, but the haiku makes us realize it’s a teleport, along with the reason for the layover. It links to and shifts away from the prose, leading the reader smoothly to the element of surprise.

As to the third, I don’t feel comfortable reviewing my own “Falstaff Revisited” but I will say that it probably works better for fellow fans of The Bard.

The May 2009 issue of Scifaikuest has seven haibun, poems by David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Greg Schwartz, Thane Thompson, Terrie Leigh Relf, Tim Conally, Fonda Bell Miller, and John J. Dunphy. David K-M is the featured Scifaijin for this issue and his section includes another haibun and a piece of tanka prose.

My two favorites are Greg Schwartz’s “Alien Seed” and John J. Dunphy’s “The Illegal.” Although the title clued me that Greg’s climatic haiku was coming, it still left me satisfied. Greg’s poem is a story about a pick-up bar in an area plagued with UFO sightings and a resulting one-night stand. The half-alien child in the speaker’s womb puts her through agony. It would seem that not all half-alien/half-humans are as easily carried to full term as Spock, which makes a lot more sense if you think about it.

Dunphy has perfected the art of “alien” scifaiku and speculative haibun. Even when I think I’ve read all he could possibly write, he surprises me again. “The Illegal” starts off describing a very earthlike scene, an illegal immigrant working hard to make ends meet, in the face of hostility from legal residents. Like Bowman’s piece in Star*Line, there’s little in the prose to indicate to the reader that the poem’s about an extraterrestrial until the haiku. If there’s a weakness in this fine piece of writing, it might be that the political message is a bit too transparent. Yet, when I reached the haiku and saw the alien’s four hands, I knew that John had done it again.

There are other haibun here I could wax about, but perhaps I’ll leave a few for you to read in case you decide to get your own copy.

My cousin Roy loved fireworks. Family rumors say his backyard 4th of July spectacular in St. Paul used to be amazing. So, when unnamed people somewhere in my neighborhood started shooting off what appeared to be professional grade fireworks, I couldn't help but look heavenward and remember him with a smile.

Temple City is one of those rare Los Angeles County cities where fireworks are legal. Technically, according to the LA County Fire Department, only "safe and sane" fireworks are legal, but the definition of "safe and sane" is a bit vague. My thought is that if it's being sold at one of the city permitted roadside stands, it probably satisfies the "safe and sane" definition. Fireworks generate revenue for Temple City each July, so I doubt there are any legal flashy fireworks these stands wouldn't sell....

But, I must admit that there were things flashing in the sky tonight that did not look like ANYTHING you could buy at one of those little roadside stands. I don't know who was shooting them off but I have to admit, it was a good show.

sky spark orgasms
no one really knows
if it's safe

Just in case you're worried that you missed the Rhysling Award postmark deadline of July 1st, Drew will accept e-mail votes up to midnight EST on July 8th.

The Spring/Summer issue of Frogpond is out now. It landed in my mailbox today with some other poetry journals. It seems as if the USPS decided to save up all my poetry reading for one big delivery.

I have two poems in this issue of Frogpond:

* A haiku on page 36 written during one of my visits to the Los Angeles County Arboretum

* A haibun on page 61 inspired by my 2007 road trip from Los Angeles to Montana.

Another highlight for me is a haiku by ankh_hpl on page 10 that pushes the boundary between speculative and mainstream. I also enjoyed John Dunphy's haiku and Michael Dylan Welch's humorous essay "Haikuholics Anonymous."

And I've barely started to read it!

Speaking of the Arboretum, there are extended summer hours for members right now. I keep saying I'm going to go there early and take a 7 am walk before work, but here I am again, burning the midnight oil.

Is there any interest in a periodic tanka workshop in the general Los Angeles area? I'm thinking maybe Glendale, maybe a Tuesday evening....

Victor Ortiz, Peggy Castro, Phyllis Collins, Kathabela Wilson
top row: Michael Angerman, Liz Goetz


Last Saturday was the monthly Southern California Haiku Study Group meeting at the Pacific Asia Museum. Thirteen poets attended and some of them are pictured above.

Each meeting I like to bring haiku books and journals for the haiku read-around in case anyone is new to haiku and/or doesn't have any haiku with them. Each meeting, I randomly pick different things from my bookshelf.

This time I brought:

Outside Robins Sing: Selected Haiku by Paul O. Williams, Brooks Books
Baseball Haiku edited by Nanae Tamura and Cor van de Heuvel
Modern Haiku 40.2, Summer 2009, edited by Charles Trumbull
Haiku Humor by Stephen Addiss with Fumiko and Akira Yamamoto
Masaoka Shiki - Selected Poems by Masaoka Shiki, translated by Burton Watson
Classic Haiku, A Master's Selection selected and translated by Yuzuru Miura
South by Southeast, Volume 16, Number 2, edited by Stephen Addiss, Angela Detlev, Josh Hockensmith, Phil Rubin, and Kelsey Rubin-Detlev

I had a productive writing session, drafting six haiku. I entered three in the kukai. A total of 39 haiku was entered in the kukai and Liz Goetz and Victor Ortiz wrote the biggest vote-getters. I've been writing fairly steadily since the workshop. For whatever reason, the monthly haiku meetings tend to rev my muse into gear.

new passport
places I want to go
unstamped

- Deborah P Kolodji

(haiku posted to fridayhaiku community)

I don't know why I'm so taken by this plant...



Amorphophallus titanum, The Huntington, June 17, 2009, 6:30 p.m.


but I am.

At first I didn't think the much-hyped "stink" was nearly as bad as we were led to think it would be. I thought it smelled more like rotten cabbage than a corpse. But, then I caught a whiff of it while lying down on the bridge above it trying to get the best possible camera angle.

Definitely worse than any funeral parlor....I actually felt faint for a second.




At the moment I'm on poetic sensory overload, so there are no poems yet.

Debbie, Kendall, Samantha

The UPS delivered 8 boxes of Rhysling Anthologies to my doorstep at 2:00. By 6:30, I was home from work and samhenderson, her family, and Kendall Evans had arrived. By 7:30 and several parrot fly-overs, we had feasted on pizza and eggplant parmigiana. By 10:30, we had all of the SFPA member copies in envelopes with ballots, ready to mail.

At this point, I still need to actually get them to the post office. And prepare the non-member contributor copies for mailing.

But, the books are coming...

My poem Lamar Valley is now online at Raven Electrick. It turns out that this will be the last published poem at Raven Electrick, according to editor Karen A. Romanko:
http://ravenelectrick.livejournal.com/88198.html

"Lamar Valley" is yet another of a dozen poems or so which came out of my 2007 trip to Yellowstone National Park.

Yesterday, I received the most recent issue of South by Southeast. It has two of my haiku and one of my haibun in it. It also has some tan renga by Michael Dylan Welch and Paul O. Williams. Most of you probably know, but in case you don't, Paul died suddenly last Tuesday with an aortic dissection. So, it was moving to receive some work by Paul in the mail.

Curtis Dunlap has a nice page about Paul here:
http://tobaccoroadpoet.blogspot.com/2009/06/sad-news-paul-o-williams.html

The Shiki Kukai has collected some of Paul's kukai haiku here:
http://www.haikuworld.org/kukai/paul.o.williams.html

In other things haiku...

Carmen Sterba is the featured haiku poet on Blogging Tobacco Road:
http://tobaccoroadpoet.blogspot.com/2009/06/carmen-sterba-three-questions.html

Karma Tenzing Wangchuck has a haiku on the Mann's Library Daily Haiku site at Cornell:
http://haiku.mannlib.cornell.edu/

More locally, the Southern California Haiku Study Group meets at 2 pm next Saturday (the 20th) at the Pacific Asia Museum. Our annual anthology reading will occur at the museum on Sunday, August 30th, also at 2 pm.

Finally, I received a crisp dollar bill from Modern Haiku for the Autumn 2009 issue.

In the next couple of days, the much heralded "Son of Stinky" corpse flower will bloom at The Huntington. I stopped by this morning to check it out.



"Son of Stinky" at the Huntington, June 13, 2009.
Height as of this photo: 6'4"

The amorphophallus titanum plant is really weird and fascinating. It is from Sumatra and grows from an underground corm. The plant will either send up one gigantic leaf or a bloom. The leaf can be 12 feet tall, has a long smooth stem and a bunch of leaflets making it look more like a tree than a leaf.



"Big Stinky" - the original Corpse Flower which bloomed at the Huntington in 1999 and 2002.

The bloom can be 8 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter. When it blooms, it smells like rotting flesh which is why in Indonesia, it is called "Bunga Bankai" which means "Corpse Flower." The smell attracts the carrion beetles, flesh flies and sweat bees that help pollinate it.

The Huntington is now estimating that the plant will bloom on Monday and is planning to open the gardens on Tuesday, when it is usually closed, to the public. There will be a reduced adult admission rate of $8, since only the gardens and conservatory will be open.

While I was in the conservatory I also checked out the carnivorous plants.



Pitcher Plants in the Bog Garden

A few more photos are in a flickr set:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dkolodji/sets/72157619713225720/

There are poems here. I know it!

This weekend is Stoker Weekend in Los Angeles, almost timed perfectly for the blooming of the corpse flower at The Huntington.

Although I am not registered for the main events, I did drop by the mass book signing at Dark Delicacies last night.



Karen A. Romanko, Ellen Datlow, Deborah P Kolodji

The place was packed with horror writers, so much so that at times it was difficult to move around the store. It was set up similar to the Mystery Writers of America party I went to at the Mystery Bookstore in Westwood last April. There were drinks, snacks, tons of books to buy and tons of authors on hand to sign them.

The challenge, of course, was to find a book by the author you wanted to sign it, and once you'd located such a book and purchased it, then trying to find the author again! But, as a way to meet and mix with other writers, it was a blast.



Corrine De Winter, Maria Alexander, Deborah P Kolodji

Now, if I can only catch that corpse flower bloom....

When life gets busy, there's more to blog about but less time to blog it!

Last Sunday's event at the Japanese Garden was a wonderfully creative day. This year, we were up in the friendship garden part of the Japanese Garden, away from the major foot traffic around the pond. This placed us near the sumi-e painting and the marbled paint fan dipping, but away from the crowds.

At first, I was a bit disappointed, but as the day progressed it turned out the location had its own merits. It was a bit quieter without the distractions of the main garden. This meant that we had a lot more people this year who were willing to try to compose their own haiku.

We had several different projects, aimed at different age groups, spread across two tables. At one, for our youngest visitors, we had coloring sheets featuring a classic Japanese haiku with an illustration they could color. I would read the haiku to the children as they colored. We also had some blank sheets printed with Chiyo-Ni's morning glory haiku. We had an illustration showing how to draw a morning glory, but some children preferred to trace it.

At the second table, I had a stack of photos I had taken of the Japanese Garden over the years along with some 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inch card stock. Each visitor to our table could pick one photo, glue it to the card and then write a haiku about the garden. We had several books of haiku on display, so some preferred to copy a poem by Basho or Issa on their card. One teenager copied her poem in Japanese.

Five members of the Southern California Haiku Study Group were on hand. Science fiction poet Kendall Evans stopped by and wrote a remembrance haiku for the koi who used to swim in that garden. I didn't actually write any haiku there, but have written almost a dozen about the garden in the last couple of days.



top row: Naia, Victor P Gendrano, Wendy Wright
botton row: Deborah P Kolodji, Margaret Hehman-Smith

More of my garden photos are in a flickr set:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dkolodji/sets/72157619544989485/

I took this photo at the Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden on Sunday. It was a day filled to the brim with art and art inspiration...





prom dress
she sees her dreams
in the mirror

Tomorrow is the annual Arts Day at the Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden at California State University, Long Beach.

Once more some members of the Southern California Haiku Study Group will be on hand to man a haiku table.



Wendy Wright helps someone write a haiku at the 2008 Arts Day


There will be tables for calligraphy, sumi-e, and other art forms, in addition to live entertainment, including taiko drumming and Japanese dance.

Admission is $7 for adults, $6 for seniors, $5 for members. Children 12 and under are free.

To get to the garden from the 405 Southbound, exit at Bellflower Blvd. Turn left from the off-ramp and then make an immediate right on Bellflower Blvd. Continue to Beach Drive and turn left into the CSULB campus. Turn Left on Earl Warren Drive. At the second Stop sign turn Right, into Parking Lot 16



Sumi-e table at the 2008 Arts Day

There's something about pelicans. The way they fly in lines, dive for fish, splash and frolic when they land in the ocean. I can watch them for hours and feel invigorated.

the wind lifts my hair
a pelican pauses
before diving





Photos taken 5/30/09 in Malibu, California.