Bookstories Slide

“It wasn't really an attempt to make sense of things . . . so much as it was an attempt to order the chaos of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath . . .”

“I had been trying to write haiku since I had found an anthology of Japanese haiku translated into Dutch . . .”

“ . . .a faint line, thick as a narrow path or road, ran down the middle of an olive-gray color field---a remarkable intuitive leap . . .”

“. . . the poems and haibun fell into order as if there had been a DNA code for this . . .”

“vince tripi was living in Novato, California, about a forty-minute drive from my rented cabin in Lagunitas . . .”

“My two haiku books grew out of a strong need to tap into my spiritual core . . .”

Revision is the activating elixir for most good writing. See how Polona Oblak got her haiku to “pop” . . .

“None of these pieces could have come forth were it not for the Muse, who tends to make her presence felt at awkward times . . . ”

“Probably my strongest influence was H.P. Lovecraft--if I could write poems of that nightmarish nature, I'd be happy.”

“I was working at St Martin’s School of Art in London, teaching printmaking.”

The best way to learn something is to teach it---just what Naomi Wakan decided to do with Haiku--one-breath poetry.

“You got a lot of those?” he asked. “Sure,” I lied.

“We were walking in Forest Park and Joel said, ‘We ought to write a book together.‘”

"As a freshman at the University of New Haven in 1971, Wally Swist would pack up 200 mimeographed copies of his newest collection of poetry and haul them down to Washington Square in Manhattan."

"In autumn the Santa Ana winds blow from the desert and dry the already parched ground, turning every blade and twig to tinder."