HAIKU DIALOGUE – Surrealistic Art – “Harlequin’s Carnival” – long list

Surrealistic Art with Guest Editor Lafcadio

For the next few weeks I would like to be your docent in The Haiku Foundation museum. We will only have time to visit the surrealism gallery, which I’m sure will have enough inspiration for getting in touch with our subconscious mind and release its creative potential through the power of the irrational juxtaposition in these drawings and paintings.

First, we can discuss surrealism some to make sure we are all on the same page, or in the same room. Surrealism is an artistic movement that began in the early 20th century. Surrealistic painters created dreamlike and often inexplicable images. One of the major characteristics of this kind of painting is the comparison of unrelated entities and components. This creates a surprise for the viewer and hopefully carries them into a world of fantasy and symbolism. This technique of painting not only challenged traditional painting but was also a representation of the social and political upheavals of society after the trauma and disillusionment of World War I. Still, surrealistic painting is used today to transcend the boundaries of the ordinary and deliver us in the realm of extraordinary.

I can’t remember which came first for me…surrealistic poetry or surrealistic paintings. Either way I am firmly entrenched in surrealism and would love to see your responses to some of the surrealistic artwork. There is so much abstraction and symbolism in the drawings and paintings, I think there will be ample material to use in writing haiku and senryu.

Below is Lafcadio’s selection of poems on the topic of “Harlequin’s Carnival”:

labyrinth dancing
the cochlear cacophony
of a silent symphony

Curt Linderman
Seattle

 

fish out of water
another round
of socialising

Jahnavi Gogoi
Ajax, Ontario, Canada

 

the myth of the moth
and all its dark counterparts
colours in soundwaves

Patricia Hawkhead
UK

 

dark night
a planet sneaks in thru
the open window

Chen Xiaoou
Kunming, China

 

snakes and ladders shedding skin in the game

Tracy Davidson
Warwickshire, UK

 

small town fair the sudden flight of a carousel horse

Mona Bedi
Delhi, India

 

sacred light the ascension of belief systems

John Hawkhead
UK

 

pipedreams
before the fallout
twisted girders

Keith Evetts
Thames Ditton, UK

 

harlequin mask
the light in the painting
inside me

Stephen A. Peters
Bellingham, WA

 

winter carnival
confetti adorning
our silence

Aparna Pathak
Gurgaon India

 

oh, busy bee
makes flying honey pots –
treble clef

Anne Curran
New Zealand

 

finding the pi of the apple of my eye

Daya Bhat
India

 

through the window
raucous winds
oh, their ambivalence

Luke Brannon
Pacific Northwest

 

on a roll
winged
creature

madeleine kavanagh
United States

 

how light
divides a sphere
lunar eclipse

Annie Holdren
California, USA

 

the guitar
fishing
for a muse

Pamela Garry
USA

 

prismatic
the eloquence of the chair
stretches and splits

J E Jeanie Armstrong
Canterbury UK

 

funfair frolic
a whole in the heart
of Harlequin

Eavonka Ettinger
Long Beach, CA

 

cupping a lighter
for the dying mate’s cheroot—
those eclipsing eyes

Milan Rajkumar
Imphal, India

 

spanish dancer
releasing the juice
in a peach

Jerome Berglund
Minneapolis

 

all the unplayed notes
from a forgotten guitar
dusty attic

Cindy Putnam Guentherman
Illinois, USA

 

he double downs
on the drumbeats
rainbow haze song

Subir Ningthouja
Imphal, India

 

travelling circus
the chaplinesque walk
of a funambulist

R. Suresh Babu
India

 

in a cosmic eye
all the colors sharpened
on a snake-devil’s fang

Ron C. Moss
Tasmania, Australia

 

hissing sounds
of headless snakes
harlequins in action

Radhika De Silva
Sri Lanka

 

fragile existence
In the macrocosm
the earth is dewy beads

Teiichi Suzuki
Japan

 

snare drum the loud sounds of overthinking

Nitu Yumnam
India

 

tidal pools
of sea stars and mermaids
–sideshow aquarium

Nancy Brady
Huron, Ohio

 

almost eyeshine my sovereign machines

John Pappas
USA

 

break time
the airport drug patrol
a red ball in her mouth

Maxianne Berger
Outremont, Quebec

 

shoulder to shoulder
ablur in the afterglow . . .
carousel ponies

(Late summer season word, kigo 季語: the evening glow, the afterglow, the glow of the sky at sunset, a sunset, yuyake, yuuyake 夕焼, ゆやけ / ゆうやけ)

Monica Kakkar
India

 

a participle dangles in the balance

Roberta Beach Jacobson
Indianola, IA, USA

 

gray matter
pizza melts
a pop of brain confetti

Marjorie Pezzoli
USA

 

swallowing itself
the dream of a clown
python ball

Sangita Kalarickal
United States

 

auto-immune
my body turns
trickster

Anne Fox
Broomes Island, MD USA

 

summer fair…
the fool appears
in every reading

Shloka Shankar
India

 

looking the other way Medusa’s hairdresser

Harrison Lightwater
Netherlands

 

fiesta
our spit-shined skeletons
bloom

Orense Nicod
Paris, France

 

wind-up music box–
giving his mustache
a twirl

Laurie Greer
Washington, DC

 

carnival
the rumbling stomach
of a great dane

simonj
UK

 

eyeballing the mouse
a devilish cat
(r)eels in the cheese

Bonnie J Scherer
Palmer, Alaska USA

 

after the dancing
the dog barking at a shoe –
lenten moon

Deborah A. Bennett
Illinois, USA

 

the writhing snake
in and out
of my conscience

Debbie Scheving
Bremerton WA USA

 

bombs a trinket in the King Cake candy sky

Corinne Timmer
Portugal

 

harlequin’s carnival—
I find a collective noun
for menopause symptoms

Adele Evershed
Wilton, Connecticut

 

carnival time
Cask of Amontillado waits
for unFortunato

Ashoka Weerakkody
Colombo

 

little mermaid
cutting the tail off
a meteorite

Alex Fyffe
Texas, USA

 

matching my smile
to funny-faced pansies
winter garden

Rupa Anand
New Delhi, India

 

where ends meet medleys swerve between eels

Victor Ortiz
Bellingham, WA

 

catgut fishing catfish

Biswajit Mishra
Calgary, Canada

 

primary school
an apprenticeship
in shape shifting

Jenn Ryan-Jauregui
Tucson, Arizona, USA

 

smorgasbord
on the White Black Lake
meerkat sonata

Sigrid Saradunn
Bar Harbor, Maine

 

joker’s laugh
the universe
in Krishna’s mouth

Vandana Parashar
India

 

loose thread
the evening wind
untangles me

Nalini Shetty
Mumbai, India

 

a dead orator
sculpts his statue
my failing voice

Sumitra Kumar
India

 

on the sea floor
a wasp plays
the Euphonium

Melissa Dennison
UK

 

a bee holds me captive in the trapeze

Neena Singh
India

 

all the squiggling I can muster the blues

Madhuri Pillai
Australia

 

stringed wings
pluck a tune from silence –
gravity dissolves

C.X. Turner
UK

 

laugh-cry of the jester –
always the reality
begins later

Dan C. Iulian
Romania

 

around and around
a merry-go-round
for the eye

Jennifer Gurney
United States

 

driftwood wands
the scattered syllables
of stones

Kathabela Wilson
USA

 

a well-mannered fish
shedding its scales
for the day

petro c. k.
Seattle

 

breathing rain
I am drawn to
the tiger’s cave

Ranice Tara
India

 

escape clause:
this madness
is not final

A.J. Anwar
Jakarta, Indonesia

 

kaleidoscope mind
trying to remember
last night’s party

Annie Wilson
Shropshire, UK

 

getting our
pinfeather’s worth
side show

Lorraine A Padden
San Diego, CA, USA

 

ground truthing an eyeball

Rashmi VeSa
Bengaluru

 

mardi gras
the dragonfly eyes
of the Harlequin

Archie G. Carlos
Minnesota

 

a bee dances
on a die
carnival of destiny

Stoianka Boianova
Bulgaria

 

blue sky tabletop one eye on the portal

Lee Hudspeth
United States

 

crescendo!
he becomes the stars
in my eyes

Kimberly Kuchar
Austin, Texas

 

stroke of midnight
time for the toys
to go mad

Marion Clarke
Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland

 

smog nimbus
disassembling the color
of a calliope song

Pippa Phillips
United States

 

blues tumble
through the stilted corners of
grandma’s mind

Michelle Hoover
Castle Rock, Colorado

 

suspended in topple
mermaids pantomiming
the birds

Aja Rhianna
North Carolina, United States

 

effervescing the mind stew autumn’s muse

Surashree Joshi
Pune, India

Join us next week for Lafcadio’s commentary on additional poems…

Guest 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 Threads @lafcadio2.0

Lori Zajkowski is the Post Manager for Haiku Dialogue. A novice haiku poet, she lives in New York City.

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

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Photo Credits:

Banner photo credit: Lafcadio

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.