Skip to content

HAIKU DIALOGUE – Surrealistic Art – “Landscape” – long list

As some of you may have noticed, we experienced a transmission problem with our Submission Form last week, but all submissions have been recovered & the issue has been resolved. Special thanks to our amazing team – Dave Russo, Post Manager Lori Zajkowski & Guest Editor Lafcadio – much appreciated! kj

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 “Landscape”:

inclinations of a perfect getaway

Barbara Anna Gaiardoni
Verona-Italy

 

dreaming
my fears now
in technicolor

Jahnavi Gogoi
Ajax, Ontario, Canada

 

glints of burnished brass
marching songs of click beetles
plangent in the mist

John Hawkhead
UK

 

he leaps over the obvious
to land in a field
of zig-zag lightning

Ann Rawson
Scotland, U.K.

 

awakening
from aphrodisiac
my missing teeth

Jackie Chou
United States

 

bottled emotions
leapfrogging over
my dreamscape

Caroline Ridley-Duff
UK

 

vertical axis Norse mills

Roberta Beach Jacobson
Indianola, Iowa, USA

 

blue hour stacked nightclub tables sticky with vermouth

Keith Evetts
Thames Ditton UK

 

still motion: what is seen is what is seen and what else seen

John Zheng
Mississippi

 

vortex of water
through the tree canopy
third eye

Hifsa Ashraf
Pakistan

 

swallowing a placebo puffin leap from the cliff

simonj
UK

 

holding up
the sleep of mermaids
her long hair

Eavonka Ettinger
Long Beach, CA

 

golden linden tree…
when the sky is not
blue

Steliana Cristina Voicu
Ploiesti, Romania

 

over the plain
of the moon –
still life with red canoe

Deborah A. Bennett
Illinois USA

 

the sky
above scattered
impedimenta

Emil Karla
France

 

her hair
is a highway
he knows the road signs

Cindy Putnam Guentherman
Illinois, USA

 

moonstruck
a magpie’s nest abundant
with jewels

Robert Kingston
Chelmsford, United Kingdom

 

fold in
fold out
float away

Ruth Happel
United States

 

not escaping
the box…
smoke and mirrors

Nancy Brady
Huron, Ohio

 

concrete blocks the unfolding of water street

Joshua St. Claire
York County, PA

 

sunlit terrain –
a shadow walks
alone

Vijay Prasad
Patna, India

 

taking stairs
to a backstage void
between acts

Sarang Bhand
Navi Mumbai, India

 

my mind leapfrogs
between childhood games and pain
analyst’s couch

Jenny Shepherd
London, UK

 

Sleeping Beauty
the growing greyness
of her blonde hair

Chen Xiaoou
Kunming, China

 

fallen leaves
travelers disappearing
in a shattered voice

Teiichi Suzuki
Japan

 

childhood memories_
barbarian holding the sky
facing an octopus

Fatma Zohra Habis
Algeria

 

a lonely forest walk
the high heeled boots are foreign
to my fleeting thoughts

Yvonne Waern
Linköping, Sweden

 

still smiling
in the boutique’s backyard
broken mannequins

Milan Rajkumar
Imphal, Manipur, India

 

spirale …
il ricordo di un sogno
che non ricordo

spiral …
the memory of a dream
that I don’t remember

Angiola Inglese
Italia

 

hunter’s moon
antlers end the story
i started

Daya Bhat
India

 

her hips
the landscape
of my desire

Pris Campbell
U.S.

 

a full moon
sailing across
the sea

Dan Campbell
Virginia

 

equinox
the duck-rabbit
of the man in the moon

Laurie Greer
Washington, DC

 

what the daybed took from me shapeshifting

Sharon Ferrante
Florida, USA

 

eons before the stream of consciousness streams

Arvinder Kaur
Chandigarh India

 

mindscape…
dismembered emotions
fill dark spaces

Neena Singh
Chandigarh India

 

fishnet stockings
a rainbow trout
gasping for air

Orense Nicod
Paris, France

 

black dog blotting
out the sun eating
trout without a fork

Mark Gilbert
UK

 

Ophelia sinking into the therapist’s couch

Alex Fyffe
Houston, Texas

 

bronze butterfly
clangs its wings in rage
on my steel cocoon

Peter Larsen
Lake View Terrace, CA

 

lip twitch
of an old musician—
walking bassoon

Julie Bloss Kelsey
Germantown, Maryland, USA

 

couch surfing
every therapist talks about
her Cinderella complex

Adele Evershed
Wilton, Connecticut

 

she leaves nothing but a shoe
and a gap-toothed smile…
bombshell

Tracy Davidson
Warwickshire, UK

 

as they bottle it
she sneaks away
into the night

Melissa Dennison
UK

 

a thousand tiny deaths dreamscape

Jenn Ryan-Jauregui
Tucson Arizona USA

 

alter ego wrapped in someone else’s arms

Cynthia Anderson
Yucca Valley, California

 

cold space
outside the station
I lend Neptune a light

Biswajit Mishra
Canada

 

eretica notte –
a cavallo dello struzzo
i desideri

heretical night –
riding the ostrich
desires

Giuliana Ravaglia
Bologna (Italy)

 

unbuilding the home before my childhood home

Pippa Phillips
Greensboro, NC

 

autumn leaves
an artist speed paints
the soft slips

Jagajit Salam
Imphal, India

 

red lipstick
pieces of me
smeared across the floor

Kimberly Kuchar
Austin, Texas

 

sofa with red plush –
jumping figures
on the night stairs

Minko Tanev
Bulgaria

 

being both
dead and alive
tree stump fungi

Tony Williams
Scotland, UK

 

turning ‘red’ to ‘read’ mind renovation

Madhuri Pillai
Australia

 

on the road not taken
a rusty old kettle
offers me a wish

Lori Kiefer
UK

 

cold hazy night
rising walls battle with light
within and without

Padma Priya
India

 

the wind scatters the shapes and size of my mindset autumn

Lakshmi Iyer
India

 

all the world’s
a stage
. . . with teeth

Marion Clarke
Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland

 

sandy path –
the wind smells of thyme
from heated meadows

Krzysztof Kokot
Poland

 

half the moon
inside my pocket—
stars scatter

Nalini Shetty
Mumbai, India

 

hypnagogia
pieces of my dream
tangled in her hair

Bryan Rickert
Belleville, Illinois USA

 

dream therapy
my shrink doodles
what she thinks I said

Margaret Tau
New Bern, NC

 

renovating our house mother’s yawn

Richa Sharma
India

 

clouds unravel
as the hills dissolve slowly –
no horizon left

C.X. Turner
UK

 

oat juice orgy
my eccentric guests
eat the piano

Mircea Moldovan
România

 

in the eye of a cyclops Sauron

Susan Burch
Hagerstown, MD

 

mind-melding
with a surrealist . . .
the twilight zone

Valentina Ranaldi-Adams
Fairlawn, Ohio USA

 

chalk lines—
h(a)unting the wild things
of childhood

Jonathan English
Washington, DC

 

asleep in the Hunter moon
under the second moon’s shadow
Orion’s belt

(Note: We are experiencing a second moon which officially entered Earth’s orbit. Although it’s being called a “mini-moon,” the object is actually an asteroid named 2024 PT5. It has been temporarily captured by Earth’s gravitational pull.)

Seretta Martin
San Diego, CA USA

 

Alice
smoking out
the id

dusty fae
Miami, FL

 

adrift searching
imaginary fainting couch
splits metaphor

Sigrid Saradunn
Bar Harbor, Maine

 

the spiral
of my thoughts
reflux glass

Aja Rhianna
Greensboro, North Carolina

 

the psychiatrist’s couch…
fragments of memories
not fitting into one frame

Debbie Scheving
Bremerton WA USA

 

nightmares caused
by hair trapped in an eyelash
visions of breton

Curt Linderman
Seattle

 

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.

The Haiku Foundation reminds you that participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior from all parties. Please see our Code of Conduct policy.

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 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.

kjmunro

Comments (43)

  1. Thank you, Lafcadio for including me. Such a great variety of poems. The following two particularly are my favorites

    being both
    dead and alive
    tree stump fungi

    Tony Williams
    Scotland, UK

    on the road not taken
    a rusty old kettle
    offers me a wish

    Lori Kiefer
    UK

  2. Thanks for your comments on my haiku. Where was the painting some of you mentioned? I only saw the book cover of the musician. Was that it? Who knew? Anyway, if was an interesting, imaginative collection.

    1. Last week, Lafcadio provided a link to the artwork, “Landscape” by Andre Breton and 3 others. You can go still find it there.

      If this isn’t what you meant, my apologies.

  3. Thank you so much for the wonderful prompt dear Lafcadio, surrealism is one of my favourites! Thanks for the inclusion and to team haiku dialogue for all the work that goes into this weekly feature 😇
    Enjoying reading them all!

  4. Thank you Lafcadio. An interesting batch of verses! Many striking:

    eretica notte –
    a cavallo dello struzzo
    i desideri

    heretical night –
    riding the ostrich
    desires

    Giuliana Ravaglia
    Bologna (Italy)

  5. Delighted to be part of the cohort. Wonderful interpretations of the painting. The one that stood out to me in particular was :

    hypnagogia
    pieces of my dream
    tangled in her hair

    Bryan Rickert
    Belleville, Illinois USA

    Congratulations to all! And thanks to Lafcadio for considering my work. Cheers!

  6. not escaping
    the box…
    smoke and mirrors
    .
    Nancy Brady
    Huron, Ohio
    .
    Sometimes the person was never in the box in a magical illusion and it was done with smoke and mirrors. What is real and what is not real in a magical illusion? What is real and not real in life?

    1. Thanks, Valentina, for finding something I hadn’t considered. Congrats on yours about the twilight zone where everything is possible and yet…

  7. It is always a pleasure when my haiku is selected for publication in this column. Thank-you to Lafcadio, Kathy, Lori, and the Haiku Foundation.

  8. Thanks for this selection! Each haiku helped me see a part of the painting I had not noticed or understood!

    A few of them that struck me:

    all the world’s
    a stage
    . . . with teeth

    Marion Clarke

    as they bottle it
    she sneaks away
    into the night

    Melissa Dennison

    Ophelia sinking into the therapist’s couch

    Alex Fyffe

    what the daybed took from me shapeshifting

    Sharon Ferrante

    fold in
    fold out
    float away

    Ruth Happel

    1. It’s true…my interpretation of the picture totally changed after reading all the submissions.

  9. Thanks to Lafcadio for including mine too … I had a hard time writing it, I couldn’t find the right form.
    A very interesting selection!

  10. Congratulations to all the poets for these thoughtful, intriguing haiku (surreku?). Reading through them I was transported back, remembering the various elements of the painting. I am thrilled to have had one included in the mix. Thanks Lafcadio. Picking out favorites is impossible because there is so much variety. Dare I say it? Reading them was surreal.

    1. Ha! It was a pleasant break from reality to immerse myself in all the poems. Glad you submitted!

  11. This is a fantastic theme. Thank you for including my poem, Lafcadio.

    I enjoyed reading these and seeing the different approaches. These are some of the poems that stood out to me:

    holding up
    the sleep of mermaids
    her long hair

    Eavonka Ettinger
    Long Beach, CA

    chalk lines—
    h(a)unting the wild things
    of childhood

    Jonathan English
    Washington, DC

    hypnagogia
    pieces of my dream
    tangled in her hair

    Bryan Rickert
    Belleville, Illinois USA

    taking stairs
    to a backstage void
    between acts

    Sarang Bhand
    Navi Mumbai, India

    Ophelia sinking into the therapist’s couch

    Alex Fyffe
    Houston, Texas

    1. Oh my goodness, thanks, Kimberly! I loved your poem and all of these too. So much to enjoy.

    2. I’m glad we worked out the technical issues so we could publish your poem! Thank you for submitting.

  12. Oh, what fun it was to read your selections, Lafcadio! Thank you for including mine. There was so much to luxuriate within, and it was exciting to see so many friends stretch their surrealist muscles.

    I was really struck by this poem’s allusion to the great Gertrude Stein:

    still motion: what is seen is what is seen and what else seen

    John Zheng
    Mississippi

    It also serves as an apt description of the wide variety of interpretations of this first piece of art.

    1. I liked the poem you mentioned, but I didn’t immediately get the allusion. Thank you for pointing it out.

      1. The poet may not have even have intended it, but isn’t that was surrealism is all about, the subconscious?

  13. These are all wonderful and beautiful!!! 🖼 I had writer’s block. I don’t know how you all did it but I am enjoying looking at the painting again while reading your haiku. 📝

    ⤵️ Seretta! I love this. I had no idea. And we share the same sky. I shall look for our mini-moon… because as my name suggests… the moon captures me…
    ⤵️

    asleep in the Hunter moon
    under the second moon’s shadow
    Orion’s belt

    (Note: We are experiencing a second moon which officially entered Earth’s orbit. Although it’s being called a “mini-moon,” the object is actually an asteroid named 2024 PT5. It has been temporarily captured by Earth’s gravitational pull.)

    Seretta Martin
    San Diego, CA USA

  14. An interesting variety of approaches. Some ekphrastic descriptions of the art, some were more like reactions to it. I especially liked Emil Karla’s

    the sky
    above scattered
    impedimenta

      1. What I meant was that I love the Imagery, and it’s fascinating, but I feel like I’m missing something deeper. Sorry If I sounded rude at all.

        1. It was imagery from a dream, either influenced by or suggestive of this week’s image. I find surrealistic images really interesting.

    1. Oh thank you, Mark!

      Yours has a striking imagery: I can almost picture a corresponding painting, and I love the mystery of the missing fork. Makes me think of the famous surrealist description: “The Knife Without a Blade That Lacks a Handle”.

  15. A couple that stood out for me.

    in the eye of a cyclops Sauron

    Susan Burch
    Hagerstown, MD

    the psychiatrist’s couch…
    fragments of memories
    not fitting into one frame

    Debbie Scheving
    Bremerton WA USA

Comments are closed.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Back To Top