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The latest issue of NOON: journal of the short poem is online at:
https://issuu.com/noonpress/docs/noon_13

the contents also available as pdf here:
https://noonpoetry.com/issues/

I hope you enjoy the issue. (Note: submissions for the next issue are not yet being considered. Please check noonpoetry.com guidelines for updates.)

All the best,

Philip Rowland

This is just a reminder that the deadline for submissions for the next (March) issue of NOON: journal of the short poem (which includes haiku and related forms) is the end of this month. Please see https://noonpoetry.com for basic guidelines, previous issues, etc.

All the best from Tokyo,

Philip Rowland

The latest issue of NOON: journal of the short poem is online:
https://issuu.com/noonpress/docs/noon_12

The issue is available also in PDF at https://noonpoetry.com/issues/

Contributors:
Dean Brink, Helen Buckingham, David Burleigh, Markeith Chavous, Bill Cooper, Joseph Cooper, Cherie Hunter Day, Susan Diridoni, Laurie Duggan, Carrie Etter, Robert Farrell,  Jane Frank, Bill Freind, Bob Heman, Kevin Heslop, Gary Hotham, Alan Ireland, Jim Kacian, Elmedin Kadric, John Levy, Marcus Liljedahl, Rebecca Lilly, Eve Luckring, Scott Metz, Michael Meyerhofer, Tristan Moss, Sheila E. Murphy, Peter Newton, Alistair Noon, Derek Owens, Christopher Patchel, John Phillips, Sophie Philips, Eric Rawson, Anna Reckin, Peter Robinson, Adam Rosenkranz, Agnes Eva Savich, Shloka Shankar, Robert Sheppard, Sandra Simpson, George Swede, Rick Tarquinio, Maurice Turcotte, Ian Willey, Mark Young, Peter Yovu.

Submissions for the next, early Spring issue are welcome at any time until 31st January. See https://noonpoetry.com/guidelines/ for more details.

The deadline for submissions to NOON: journal of the short poem, 12, due to appear in September 2016, has been extended to the end of this month (July). Submissions of haiku or other short poems are welcome (though please read a previous issue or two before submitting, if you haven't already -- see noonpoetry.com).

NOON: journal of the short poem, 11, is now online, accessible via

http://issuu.com/noonpress/docs/noon_11/1
or
http://noonpoetry.com/issues/

with poems by: Eve Luckring, Mark DuCharme, Cameron Anstee, Paul Rossiter, Burt Kimmelman, Mercedes Lawry, Rick Tarquinio, Mark Brager, John Phillips, John Levy, Kathleen Rooney, George Swede, J.R. Toriseva, Rachel Adams, Roberta Beary, Cherie Hunter Day, John Martone, Stephen Toft, Philip Rowland, Peter Yovu, Anthony Nannetti, Mark Terrill, Scott Keeney, Michael Ruby, Michelle Tennison, Sandra Simpson, Peter Newton, Mark Young, Tristan Moss, Wes Lee, Phil Wood, Peggy Aylsworth, J.M. Hall, and Paul Willis.

Submissions for the next, Summer/Autumn issue, are welcome — provisional deadline 1st July.

All the best,

Philip Rowland
NOON: journal of the short poem
noonpoetry.com

Submissions of haiku are welcome for the next issue of NOON: journal of the short poem (deadline: 31st Jan. 2016). See http://noonpoetry.com/issues/ to read recent issues. With a poem-per-page format, I have to be very selective, so please send your best work!   

Submissions of haiku and other short poems are invited for the tenth issue of NOON: journal of the short poem, due to appear in the Autumn. The deadline for submissions is September 1st. The most recent issues can be read online at http://noonpoetry.com/issues/

Submissions of haiku and other short poems are invited for the Spring issue of NOON: journal of the short poem. The deadline is 31st March 2015. (Submissions received after the deadline will be considered for the following issue.) Please send 5-15 poems to Philip Rowland: noonpress [at] mac [dot] com. Expected response time is 2-4 weeks. See noonpoetry.com for more details.

Re: Paul's "as we have seen 'blue' might not even be the right word (as in: preferred ... over the choice of 'natural' etc":

"aoi" is a colour word; it can indicate youth or naturalness or inexperience, immaturity, unripeness, but it would, I think, be taking liberties to translate it as other than "blue".

For me, "blue" (in "blue mathematics") works because of the various and somewhat contradictory/ironic connotations, which never quite resolve; with the total effect working intuitively, too, partly due to the feeling of coldness i get from the image -- "blue with associations of cold and the colour of distant things," as Lorin wrote. If "blue" simply connoted sadness, fpr instance, it would be a considerably less interesting poem. I brought in some examples of Emily Dickinson's "strangely abstracted images" earlier to emphasise that we don't always need to be able to explain or account for the logic of an image for it to "work" imaginatively or intuitively. Some other examples, from haiku in translation, that come to mind: Sayumi Kamakura's

The child deep
in green sleep;
the mother sleeps
in purple

Why purple? I could ask, but don't feel much need to. (Which is not to say it's not sometimes worth asking.) My guess, however, is that "sleep[ing] in purple" is more accessible than "blue mathematics"; likewise Tomas Transtromer's:

The white sun's a long-
distance runner against
the blue mountains of death.

Or even (returning to haiku written in English), perhaps more challengingly, Ashbery's:

a blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing

As with "I inch..." (mentioned in my FN "Challenge" and in Peter Yovu's post on this page), it may not be necessary to make clear sense of the poem referentially for it to "make sense" poetically; the interplay of syntax, sound and images (quite vivid in "a blue anchor...") takes precedence. I wouldn't be surprised if many baulk at Ashbery's haiku, for amounting to little more than the play of technique, but presumably few would argue that modernist and postmodernist conceptions of poetry be disallowed in haiku?

Re: Richard' reply #15, above:

First, the comments of mine (of 15 years ago) on Ashbery's haiku were not meant to be taken as particularly relevant to "war dead", though in terms of the perceived "abstraction" of both (Ashbery's further along in that direction, agreed), some slight connection may be made. The BHS consensus on "the nature of English haiku" that I referred to in the essay and Paul Miller's comment on the "distancing" effect of "blue mathematics" may be related (similar). Hopefully, my take on the Ashbery haiku is clearer in the context of the whole essay (in which, as I wrote, my broadest aim was simply "to challenge or at least complicate the received view that it is necessarily 'concrete images, not abstract words, that carry the meaning and create the tension and atmosphere in haiku'"). "Haiku moment" and "the continuous flow of experience" were terms of the BHS consensus (the notion that the haiku arrests a moment in time, registering its temporality), and my adopting those terms in reading the Ashbery haiku was a bit tongue-in-cheek. 

I agree that the "war dead" haiku is more realistic; Ashbery's ku more surrealistic -- or abstract expressionist? In the latter, there seems to be no "event," other than "the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice" (Stevens), to which to relate it. It is playful (and to be playful, you have to feel pretty much at home), and, I agree, it's a line drawn in the sand, one kind of limit, regarding genre in haiku ("tundra", for example, another). I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's "a big tease," though (has nothing to do with pole-dancing, I presume!); I find it "makes sense" rather beautifully; its "veracity": that it's damned hard to explain or paraphrase! -- or as you put it, "that it exists!" (In the David Porter piece on Dickinson that I referred to in an earlier post: "Abstract expressionist artists since Kandinsky have sought representations of this sort of experience that unknowably is.) "The twisted pole gone in spare colors" touches on something that's hard to put your finger on, in somewhat the same way as "blue mathematics".

Sugimura's "war dead" seems, in contrast to Ashbery's piece, uncanny, not at home in the world to which it refers. It is "abstract" in the sense that it takes an ineluctable fact and tries to come to terms with it metaphorically, via an idea-image (or "strangely abstracted image").

I have to keep this brief, but thanks for the thoughts in response!

Phil
PS. (re: #17): Yes, i love that "...yasen no tani no kani ni aru" - how to reproduce some sound-sense of that?! Right now I prefer "...in a night war's canyon a crab" to what we had. 

Richard, Re.

安死術夜戦の谷の蟹にある　　                平畑静塔
anshi jutsu yasen no tani no kani ni aru      Hirahata Seito

and

砲音に鳥獣魚介冷え曇る　                             西東三鬼
houon ni choujuu gyokai hie kumoru                  Saito Sanki

the versions we ended up with were:

clean kills: in a night war a canyon a crab

and

at the shriek of artillery
birds beasts fish shellfish
chilling dim

My guess is that the second of these is more in need of revision, tho the first is tricky, too...

Hi Richard, Good to revisit the illuminating "New Rising Haiku" monograph.

Re. "I'm unclear of the exact dates of our submission of these poems to the Noon journal": it was May 2006; selections finalised in June; publication September 2006. I remember being particularly pleased to be able to include a selection of these anti-war haiku; and getting some insight into the translation difficulties in discussion of a couple of pieces I picked that don't appear in the monograph:

安死術夜戦の谷の蟹にある　　                平畑静塔
anshi jutsu yasen no tani no kani ni aru      Hirahata Seito

砲音に鳥獣魚介冷え曇る　                             西東三鬼
houon ni choujuu gyokai hie kumoru                  Saito Sanki

Can you show us, and talk about, one or more poems which you find personally challenging?

One that springs to mind is by John Ashbery, the last of his "37 Haiku," which can be found in A Wave (1984). A number of these are memorable, but for almost two decades, one in particular has stuck in my mind, challenging me to come to terms with it, which may be partly why I find it so compelling. (Which is not to say that I find it opaque; enigmatic, yes, but compellingly.)

       I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors

Here's what I wrote about it in the late 90s, in an essay presented at a conference in 2000. The essay explored the idea of "avant-garde" haiku in English, taking as a starting-point the notion that the avant-garde must be in some sense "unacceptable." Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs was also a point of reference. "NEH" refers to "The Nature of English Haiku," a pamphlet distributed by the British Haiku Society (BHS) at the time. I'm not satisfied with my take on the poem here, but put it forward again as possible starting-point for discussion:
~
For Barthes, the quintessential haiku's "propositions are always simple, commonplace, in a word acceptable (as we say in linguistics)"—as Ashbery's plainly are not:

        I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors

Commonplace? Acceptable? The apparent absence of any concrete outside reference draws attention away from the "natural world" and towards—in the poet's own words—"the experience of experience." Does such abstraction necessarily preclude "evocation of haiku spirit" (NEH)? Arguably—again with reference to the terms of the BHS consensus—Ashbery's work bears witness to "the continuous flow of experience" that is intrinsic to the "haiku moment" precisely by incorporating the mediation or "interference" of language in the experiencing of that flow—or as he himself puts it, "the way a happening or experience filters through to me." This practice does of course tend to displace more concrete subject matter, but also yields flashes of particular insight into the poetic process. "I inch"—well don't we all, "only sometimes" realizing a negative capability by virtue of which the unsaid (or unpainted, "gone in spare colors") can be left to speak for itself.
[Complete essay available here: http://roadrunnerhaikublog.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/avant-garde-haiku.pdf

More could be said about the sound and rhythm of the line, the rhyme between "far" and "spare," for instance, which helps the long line unfold and resolve into "colors". It's also worth noting that Ashbery's writing of these haiku was inspired by his reading of Hiroaki Sato's one-line translations of Basho in the anthology In the Country of Eight Islands; there are clear echoes; they also remind me of Sato's translations of Hosai Ozaki's haiku, which "sometimes sound like fragments of a prose monologue or something insignificant and vague" (Kyoko Selden). Sato's dedication of the Hosai translations to John Ashbery is also worthy of note.

I very much agree with Peter Yovu's point about the challenge of avoiding imitation or getting bogged down in orthodoxy, new or old. This (here I go again) is why I think it's important for haiku in English to appear in broader poetic contexts, to help keep things in perspective, and allow readers to encounter haiku afresh, relatively free from the orthodoxies that cannot but heavily inform (as Paul Miller points out above) more "specialist" journals.

Incidentally, another challenge, I've found in editing NOON in particular, is whether a haiku can stand alone as compellingly as a longer, short poem. I was surprised to read some "complaints" about space being wasted in Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years where single poems are presented on their own pages; would have thought that haiku poets and readers, more than most, would appreciate the space allowed for haiku to "breathe" (to devour the surrounding space, as it were, and extend out). In some cases, it would be a shame, I think, to shove a poem up against others, particularly if the others aren't quite as outstanding. (And at risk of getting off-topic, the challenge of engaging with the poems that are there, rather than those that aren't or other matters of editorial approach, seems to be one that few – including reviewers in specialist journals – have taken up.)

Richard -- I agree that Paul Miller's

war dead
killed from calculations that I find sad

has "little to do with the original poem," but would be very surprised if he meant it to be read as a haiku; I took it to be a slightly mocking paraphrase, deliberately poor, poetically. Well, just thought to point out that he merely (if, IMHO, misguidedly) put it forward as what he thought the poet was "trying to say." 

As perhaps first publisher of the "war dead" haiku with English translation (first Japanese publication sometime between 1937 and 1940, according to Ito Yuki), thought I'd chip in... In 2006 I found this haiku challenging and compelling, and still do. That "we are supposed to think it cool and clever" seems unfairly dismissive, as does reducing it to a paraphrasable message. Granted, it has been presented here in English, but some acknowledgement of its being a Japanese poem -- of the challenge of translation and what might have been lost (and gained) in the process -- is in order, as Richard has just indicated.

Probably most Japanese readers - unless they have a strong interest in modern poetry -- would be baffled by the poem; it's undoubtedly towards the abstract end of the spectrum. But "blue mathematics" doesn't seem at all "tacked on"; its cool abstraction (complicated by other connotations of "blue", in Japanese and English) is anticipated by another coolly neutral, Latinate word: "exit". "blue mathematics" strikes me as an idea-image of the kind David Porter considers in his essay on Emily Dickinson's "strangely abstracted images" (in Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall, 1996). His essay begins by acknowledging a view akin to Paul M's on "blue mathematics":

"Abstraction, we are told repeatedly, is inimical to poetry. Yet in images that are so abstract they have given up their sensuous immediacy to pure meaning, Dickinson asserted her poetic individuality. ... these peculiar figures with no light-catching body perform in her poems on occasion so audaciously as to reveal the interior moment when for her events became apprehended by language."

He later cites Archibald MacLeish's attention to her "drained images":

"'Amethyst remembrance," "Polar expiation," Neither of these exists upon the retina. Neither can be brought into focus by the muscles of the eye. ... And yet all of these present themselves as images, do they not? -- act as images? Where can remembrance be amethyst? Where but in the eye?"

Whether "blue mathematics" succeeds as an image of this sort, in the context of Sugimura Seirinshi's haiku, is bound to be a more subjective matter than most, because it's a more audacious image than most in haiku -- an image that (for me) succeeds in apprehending the nearly inexpressible thought of the "war dead," and in evoking a feeling of anger or hopelessness coupled with horror.