Book of the Week – More Power to You by Paul Reps
Ty Hadman writes (see the essay here): Paul Reps is America’s first haiku poet and was the first to write visual haiku and minimalist haiku which have continued to gain steadily in popularity over the years. It is a very little known fact that Paul Reps was the first American to have a collection of English language haiku published in the United States. His book of haiku, More Power To You – Poems Everyone Can Make, was published in California in 1939, 27 years before Robert Spiess’ first collection of haiku, The Heron’s Legs, was published and over 20 years before any of the few other very early North American haiku collections were published in the early and mid-sixties.
More Power to You was published in 1939.
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Below are a few selected poems from the book:
Factory whistle screeching
this thousand-eyed body
sits in the tall grass
—
All day
with the bamboo
by the house
—
Sitting on a tack
I am instantly
center of the universe!
—
Wanderlusting tumbleweed
lodged before our door
at nightfall.
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You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library. Please share your favorite poem from the book with us.
Do you have a full or chapbook length book published in 2019 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by the THF Digital Librarian Kenneth Pearson and are used with permission.
Comments (6)
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Keith.
You can fill your boots with Paul Reps here:
https://terebess.hu/english/haiku/reps.html
That url to Jane Reichold’s aha poetry doesn’t seem to be working,Keith. These two do:
https://www.ahapoetry.com/
https://www.ahapoetry.com/all%20haiku%20info.html
but I don’t know if either contains what you want.
Link: The problem with the link to Reichhold’s page on Paul Reps may be because there are two periods before the file type in the actual URL which a browser has to resolve? Here is the url again:
https://www.ahapoetry.com/PP1000..htm
If that doesn’t work try a search for ‘Paul Reps aha poetry’ and in Google it’s the first hit. Alternatively the long way is to go to the home page of aha poetry at https://www.ahapoetry.com/, and navigate the left column to ‘Discover Poets’ Profile’ and on that link you get to https://www.ahapoetry.com/pphmpg.htm with a link to Reichhold’s page on Paul Reps.
Ah, the same content on Reps in ahapoetry’s Poet Profiles (by haiku essayist Ty Hadman) is reproduced in THF’s Library here: https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/files/original/1bd7a5f39cde2480a536d2e8b79284c9.pdf
Immediately hooked by the examples above, I loved these! Very refreshing, and many, very good.
I also liked the varied styles, not least the ones with … let’s call it assonance.
A real find. Thank you.
Saved.
and I have found elsewhere…
sometimes in May rain
I can hear
my fingernails growing
Which would seem rather advanced among the stock haiku almost a century later, but at the same time carries the unmistakeable DNA
More Reps books to download free, please!
See also Jane Reichhold:
https://www.ahapoetry.com/PP1000..htm