Book of the Week – Fiddle in the Floorboards by Ben Moeller-Gaa

Music disappears the moment it is played. Yet somehow it remains with us. We find it in memory, in the rhythm of walking, in the cadence of rain, in a familiar room that suddenly seems to hum with an old tune. Ben Moeller-Gaa’s Fiddle in the Floorboards explores this territory precisely. The poems do not merely refer to music. They move like music, improvising around recurring motifs of jazz, blues, folk songs, and memory until the reader begins to hear them and not simply read them.

Moeller-Gaa, an American haiku poet from St. Louis, has long been recognised for bringing contemporary sensibilities into Japanese short forms. This chapbook, published in 2018, consists of just fifteen poems, yet each one feels like a different movement in the same composition. The poems are linked less by narrative than by rhythm and resonance.

The opening poem establishes the collection’s musical architecture:

pulled back to the refrain
sunrise (p. 1)

A refrain usually belongs to a song, but here it belongs to the day itself. Sunrise is never identical, yet it returns with the familiarity of music we know by heart. The poem invites us to think of repetition beyond routine as a symbol of renewal.

Jazz appears early in the collection:

morning drizzle
the shifting calculus
of jazz (p. 2)

The phrase “shifting calculus” is unexpected. Jazz is often associated with freedom and improvisation, yet Moeller-Gaa reminds us that improvisation is built upon structure. Rain, like music, follows patterns that are never entirely predictable.

One of my favourite poems in the chapbook brings together memory and family:

picking through the milkweed
grandpa’s banjo (p. 7)

Nothing is explained about the grandfather, nor does it need to be. The banjo arrives as the marker for the grandpa’s personality. The milkweed becomes a doorway into remembrance, suggesting that memory often returns through texture, scent, and touch before it returns through story.

The title poem is equally memorable:

pub crawl
feeling the fiddle
in the floorboards (p. 10)

Going beyond a simple description of live music, it builds an experience of music entering the body. The floorboards become an instrument themselves, carrying rhythm through wood into the feet of everyone present. The poem captures communal listening without mentioning the crowd.

Near the end of the collection, Moeller-Gaa offers a wonderfully playful close:

turtledoves
every word of the song
but the title (p. 15)

The poem smiles at the way memory works. We remember fragments, melodies, and feelings more readily than names. It is a fitting conclusion to a collection built upon echoes rather than complete performances.

One of the pleasures of Fiddle in the Floorboards is that it demonstrates how haiku can borrow from another art without imitating it. These poems do not describe music from the outside. They recreate something of its timing, its pauses, and its improvisational energy.

As you read the collection, see if you had to pair it with a musical style, would it be jazz, blues, folk, or something entirely different? You may discover that the music you hear says as much about your own reading as it does about the poem.

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You can read the entire collection in the THF Digital Library.

The THF Digital Library can now also be found easily through the carousel on the home page, making it even easier to browse books, journals, and other treasures from the archive.

Do you have a full-length or chapbook-length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Book of the Week selections are made by THF Digital Librarian Vidya Premkumar and are featured with permission.