Thursday, January 02, 2020

Best Poems of 2019

Basho … two haiku

Boncho … one haiku (“the brushwood”)

Linnea Brett … bird avenue

Buson … seven haiku

Chippewa song … Sometimes I Go About Pitying Myself

Sheila Dong … Prayer

Giles Goodland … Bees

Katharine Harer … Death Over Breakfast

Christopher Jon Heuer … The Hands of My Father

Jackleen Holton Hookway … Luxury

Hokushi … haiku (“I kept hanging the moon”)

Issa … three haiku

Joso … haiku (“above the noise”)

Julie Larios … What Bee Did

Dorianne Laux … The Lost

Michelangelo Buonarroti … 90. Sonnet; possibly for Tammaso

Jim Murdoch … Shadow Writing

Otsuji … haiku (“the spring rain”)

Roka … haiku (“the water-fowl swims”)

Ryokan … haiku (“the burglar”)

Shiki … three haiku

Michael Dylan Welch & Tanya McDonald … Between Night Hills (a haiku sequence)

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I have a loose leaf notebook into which I copy out poems. The above were the poems I copied out in 2019.

1 comment:

Jim Murdoch said...

I was touched to see a poem of mine appear here. Since I backed away from life online I’ve felt a bit forgotten. No one’s fault. Every day we’re assaulted with more and more to do, to read, to listen to, to watch, to endure. Who has time to look back? Hell, most of us don’t have time to send Xmas cards any more.

I wrote ‘Shadow Writing’ in 2007. It was poem #955. 2019 was a good year for poems, eighteen finished and all pretty decent if I say so myself. I kinda hoped when I packed in the blog after a few months I’d get bored and the writing would begin to flow again but that didn’t really happen. Eventually I bought a keyboard and spent six months writing music which was fun and then, suddenly, that dried up too.

In a fit of desperation last July I started pawing over old notes, some going back ten years, and, both to my surprise and delight, found much that wasn’t in bad shape and simply needed a bit of TLC to bring it up to spec. The most recently completed is poem #1131 which, if it’s the last thing I ever write (I don’t know about you but I pretty much assume everything I write is going to be my last thing) it wouldn’t be the worst swansong:

    The Science of Poetry


    You should consider these works carefully.
    They’re nothing special, true, but they can still
    rise to the occasion. It’s up to you.
    Or down. Up or down.

    Most words are unnecessary, at least
    not necessarily necessary.
    This poem could bob along nicely with
    half these words and still

    find a way to say something profound or
    dumfounding or, once in a blue moon, true.
    It’s neither here nor there if none of them
    are fit for purpose

    because it only takes a little time,
    barely any energy and even
    less thought to make any of this matter.



    17 November 2019