HAIKU DIALOGUE – All the World’s a Stage – Trap Door

All the World’s a Stage with Guest Editor Alex Fyffe

Welcome to our latest performance of Haiku Dialogue: All the World’s a Stage! Tonight’s program will begin shortly. Don’t forget to tell your favorite performers to break a leg! And let’s hope they don’t take you up on it – after all, tonight’s show is full of trap doors! That’s right: The inspiration for the next several weeks is once again going to come from theatrical terms. In the past, we’ve seen how terms like “intermission” and “curtain call” could inspire some bravura haiku, so we’re coming back on stage for an encore!

prompt: Trap Door

Smoke rolls across the feet of the actors. Suddenly, a figure mysteriously rises up from the smoke, as if emerging from Hades. It grabs one of the characters and drags him down to some horrible fate, swallowed up by the very stage itself.

The trap door is one of the oldest magic tricks in theater, amazing audiences with the appearance and disappearance of figures and objects right before our very eyes. The size and shape of trap doors changes depending on the needs of the play, and they all have fantastical names: grave trap, star trap, vampire trap, Corsican trap, cauldron trap (for definitions of these and more, see here).

The trap door can represent access to lower levels of a building, such as a dungeon, or to the grave or underworld. It shows us descent, of course, but also ascent – a ghost returning from Hell, a soldier arriving at the top of the tower, a spy secretly gathering intel from just beneath the players’ feet. Trap doors are the access points between worlds, what waits below and what lingers above. They also represent mystery, sudden arrivals and departures.

You may rely on real world observations of theatrical trap doors or draw inspiration from the metaphorical meanings that trap doors provide us: rising and lowering, appearing and vanishing, high and low, world and underworld, Heaven and Hell, known and unknown.

The deadline is midnight Eastern Standard Time, Saturday February 15, 2025.

Please use the Haiku Dialogue submission form below to enter one or two original unpublished haiku inspired by the week’s theme, and then press Submit to send your entry. (The Submit button will not be available until the Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in.) With your poem, please include any special formatting requirements & your name & residence as you would like it to appear in the column. Please note that by submitting, you agree that your work may appear in the column – neither acknowledgment nor acceptance emails will be sent. All communication about the poems that are posted in the column will be added as blog comments.

Join us next week for Alex’s selection of poems on the topic of Trap Door…

Bios:

Guest Editor Alex Fyffe teaches high school English in the Houston area. His haiku and senryu have been published in various journals, including Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Failed Haiku, Akitsu Quarterly, and the Asahi Haikuist Network. Some of his favorite short form poets include Issa, whose work he discovered in the intermediate Japanese textbook he used while studying in Hikone, Japan, and Santoka, whose writing introduced him to the liberating concept of “freeform haiku.” Currently, Alex uses haiku in the classroom to ease students into poetry and build their confidence as readers and writers. Alex also posts haiku, including translations of contemporary Japanese haiku, on Twitter @AsurasHaiku.

Assistant Editor Lafcadio, a former teacher, now works from home writing, editing and proofreading study guides for nursing textbooks. She lives in Tennessee. She has written poetry for a long time but a couple of years ago fell in love with Japanese micropoetry and hasn’t looked back. Lafcadio has been published in a number of journals and anthologies. She writes under the nom de plume of Lafcadio because nom de plume is so fun to say. You can read her poems on Twitter (X) @lafcadiopoetry or BlueSky @lafcadiobsky.

Assistant Editor Vandana Parashar is an associate editor of haikuKATHA and one of the editors of Poetry Pea and #FemkuMag. Her debut e-chapbook, I Am, was published by Title IX Press (now Moth Orchid Press) in 2019 and her second chapbook Alone, I Am Not, was published by Velvet Dusk Publishing in April 2022.

Lori Zajkowski is the Post Manager for Haiku Dialogue. She lives in New York City and enjoys reading and writing haiku.

Managing Editor Katherine Munro lives in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and publishes under the name kjmunro. She served as Membership Secretary for Haiku Canada for ten years, and her debut poetry collection is contractions (Red Moon Press, 2019). Find her at: kjmunro1560.wordpress.com.

Portrait by Laurel Parry

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Please note that all poems & images appearing in Haiku Dialogue may not be used elsewhere without express permission – copyright is retained by the creators. Please see our Copyright Policies.

Photo Credit:

Banner photo credit:  “Interior of the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1874. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library.

Haiku Dialogue offers a triweekly prompt for practicing your haiku. Posts appear each Wednesday with a prompt or a selection of poems from a previous week.