Poet Profile

Richard Tice

Richard Tice became interested in haiku after taking a Japanese Civilization course and then moving back to Japan (his second time) to teach there for three years. He has published a young adult novel, three ESL textbooks (in Korea), a collection of poems, two anthologies of his haiku, and numerous articles and poems in the U. S., Japan, and Korea. He was editor and publisher of Dragonfly: East/West Haiku Quarterly from 1985 to 1992 and translated more than two hundred contemporary Japanese haiku for Dragonfly and the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo. Richard worked as an editor for Deseret Book Company and the Ensign magazine for thirteen years and taught ESL in Japan and Korea for ten years. He currently teaches English composition and developmental reading and writing for colleges in the Puget Sound area in Washington. He has an M.A. in comparative literature from San Francisco State University.

Awards and Other Honors: Mayhews Writing Contests, BYU 1981: first place (poetry), third place (fiction), first place (essay); Haiku Society of America biennual book award (currently Merit Book Award): Second Place, for Station Stop (1986); Diamond pin publication awards, League of Utah Writers (1989); BYU Studies Poetry Contest, 2004: first place.

Books Published: Richard Tice, Station Stop: A Collection of Haiku and Related Forms (Salt Lake City, Utah: Middlewood Press, 1986); Richard Tice, with Jack Lyon and others, Familiar and Foreign: Haiku and Linked Verse (West Valley City, Utah: Waking Lion Press, 2008).

night rain
against the water, young rice
into the rain

moving together—
   noise of the bike, silence
       of the dragonfly

a world of dew . . .
the night’s slow passage written
in lines of slugs

rising toward
the slow turn of maple seeds
the child’s laughter

after the wedding
      clarity
of mountain water

A day at the office:
nothing to remind me
it’s snowing

Credits: "night rain" - Modern Haiku 11:1 (1980); "a world of dew" - Hermitage 2:1 & 2 (2005); "after the wedding" - Frogpond 6:2 (1983); "moving together" - Cicada 4:3 (1980); "rising toward" - Modern Haiku 14:2 (1983); "A day at the office" - Dragonfly 15:3 (1989).