Coming Soon: New THF Feature Creative Blooms

Richard Gilbert has long been interested in the interplay not only between images of poems, but between poems themselves. His talk at Haiku North America 2019, “Haiku Poem, Haiku Mind: Exploring Diversity and Life-philosophy in Contemporary Haiku” was an opportunity for him to explore these realms. One of the techniques he uses is the comparison of arrays of contemporary English-language haiku for thematic consistency and variety. Professor Gilbert brings this technique to bear in a new feature on The Haiku Foundation site, Creative Blooms. As Gilbert says of these interactions: “There is a takeaway in the dance between world and poem. In this spirit Creative Blooms aims to offer novel enjoyments of insight brought to you by the poets considered.”

Creative Blooms will appear every other Tuesday beginning January 21. Three poems will be provided with commentary, and an additional three offered for creative interaction by our readership. And with every third installment, Gilbert will introduce a young and largely unknown Japanese poet, translated into English for the first time. We look forward to a lively discussion of these fascinating and challenging poems.

Richard Gilbert, professor of English Literature at Kumamoto University in Japan, is the author of Poetry as Consciousness: Haiku Forests, Space of Mind, and an Ethics of Freedom (illustrated by Sabine Miller, Kebunsha Co. Ltd., 2018, ISBN 978-4-86330-189-4), The Disjunctive Dragonfly (Red Moon Press, 2008, rev. 2013), and Poems of Consciousness (Red Moon Press, 2008), among others. He is also director of the Kon Nichi Translation Group, whose most recent book is the tour de force Haiku as Life: A Tohta Kaneko Omnnibus (Red Moon Press, 2019). In January 2020, he announced the creation of Heliosparrow Poetry Journal, an evolution of the Haiku Sanctuary forum.