A train ticket and a (kid-friendly) poem in your pocket

April 29 is Poem in Your Pocket Day (2022). If you’re a parent or teacher looking for poems to share with kids, haiku is the perfect pocket poem –tiny, quick to read, and easy to jot down on a small scrap piece of paper.  Last Train Home is a collection of train-inspired haiku from around the world (edited by me and available through Amazon). The book is aimed at adults, but includes many examples of poems that will inspire kids and teens. A sampling:

bullet train for Tokyo

too fast to finish

my box lunch

– Emiko Miyashita, Japan

*

thinning crowds

the station mouse obeys

the Keep Left sign

– David Jacobs, United Kingdom

*

on the Jacobite

twenty-one arches near Glenfinnan

crossing worlds

– susan spooner, Canada

*

[Note: in the Harry Potter movies, the train to Hogwarts crosses the Glenfinnan Viaduct in north-west Scotland]

*

evening star

a child echoes every call

of the train vendors

– Ramesh Anand, India

*

night train

an open boxcar

filled with stars

– Ron C. Moss, Australia

*

 

 

Sharing a train window

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Last Train Home, a new collection of haiku, tanka, and rengay celebrating train travel! The book is edited by me, with contributions from poets around the world.

Over the past year, many of us have had to cancel trips and stay close to home. But there are no limits to where our imaginations can take us. Last Train Home is an invitation to remember past trips, and imagine the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and emotions others have experienced crossing the Canadian prairies or the Australian Outback, climbing China’s Yellow Mountain, travelling at night between Paris and Madrid, glimpsing Mount Fuji, stopping at border crossings, and so much more. It also looks forward to when we can once again travel freely, get together with family and friends, meet new people, and explore new places.

In the meantime, I’d like to welcome you on a virtual train tour, beginning with a photo of sunrise from Saskatoon station on my first cross-Canada VIA Rail trip back in the mid-1980s. The haiku that follows speaks to more recent experience on the same train—sharing a dining table with different passengers each day.

sunrise

across the dining car

an exchange of hometowns


Jacquie Pearce

And a few more selections from the book:


Paris to Milan train

the baby cries

in every language


Karen Hoy



departing Valencia

as my vacation ends

scent of oranges


Roberta Beach Jacobson



dark night

a migrant catching sleep

on the last train


Adjei Agyei-Baah

Last Train Home is available on Amazon in various countries. You can also drop into the Last Train Home -haiku Facebook page for more poems, photos, and stories related to the book and train travel in general.

To keep the virtual train going, I’m inviting other creative writing bloggers to share their train stories and photos and link back here.

Next stops on the tour:

kcdyer, Vancouver-based author of the literary travel adventure, Eighty Days to Elsewhere

Poet Julie Thorndyke from New South Wales, Australia

Haiku Railroad Blues video with US haiku poet Alan Pizzarelli

Crafty Green Poet, Juliet Wilson, writing from Edinburgh, Scotland

a past train post by UK poet Alan Summers and a new post about the train anthology.

Haiku poet Agnes Eva Savich shares some of her train haiku and images from her 1998 European train travels

Call for train haiku . . .

I’ve always loved trains (the lonely call of a whistle in the night, the view of passing landscape from a train seat, the rocking rattle of an overnight berth, conversations with strangers in the dining car…), and have been thinking for some time about putting together an anthology of haiku about trains. Well, the project is finally getting on track.

You are invited to submit haiku, tanka, rengay, and haibun with a train theme (including experiences and imagery related to steam trains, bullet trains, cross-country journeys, commuter trains, freight trains, the passing landscape, human interaction on trains, internal journeys, etc).

Please submit:

– up to 20 haiku

– up to 5 tanka

– up to 3 rengay

– up to 3 haibun

Unpublished and previously published work will be considered. Please include submissions in the body of the email, and provide previous publication credits, as well as your name, email and postal address. Please put “train anthology submission” and your name in the subject line of your email.

Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2018 [Submissions now closed. Info on upcoming book will be posted in spring/summer 2020]

If you’re coming to this blog for the first time and would like more information about who I am, I write haiku and other poetry, short non-fiction, and novels for children (my website: jacquelinepearce.ca). My haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, and two of my haiku recently co-won the League of Canadian Poets inaugural haiku contest. I also co-edited The Jade Pond, a collection of haiku by the Vancouver Haiku Group published earlier this year, and I’m a co-judge for the 2018 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational.

You can read something about my family’s train legacy here.

My year of Joy Kogawa House and Haiku

For me, 2017 has been a year connected to Joy Kogawa House.

Historic Joy Kogawa House is the childhood home of Canadian author Joy Kogawa, who wrote the ground-breaking novel Obasan, a fictional story based on Joy’s memories of being interned as a child during WW II, along with thousands of other Canadians of Japanese descent. Located in the Marpole neighbourhood of Vancouver, the house was built in 1912-13. Joy and her family lived there from 1937 until they were interned in 1942. During the war, the house was confiscated and sold, and Joy’s family was not able to return to Marpole. Years later, however, Joy lent her support to a community campaign that saved the house from demolition. Today, the house is a space for author residencies, literary events, as well as remembering the injustices experienced by Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, and moving toward healing and reconciliation.

Joy and her brother at the front (west side) of the house c. 1938

 

I was grateful to be offered a writing residency at the house, which was initially planned for February. Since February is National Haiku Writing Month (the shortest month of the year for the shortest form of poetry), and haiku is one of my passions, I decided to focus on haiku, and to partner with the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival (VCBF), preparing for the spring blossom celebration and the festival’s international haiku contest. Plans shifted slightly, and rather than staying at the house in February, I organized a poetry reading and haiku workshop, and worked with the VCBF on koinobori scale-painting activities in preparation for Sakura Days Japan Fair without staying at Joy Kogawa House (which I was able to do since I live in the Vancouver area). (More on these activities in an earlier blog post.)

February poetry reading, plus haiku workshop & koi scale painting

In May, I visited the house for a reading and performance of “A Suitcase full of Memories” by Joy Kogawa and Soramaru Takayama of Japanese Poets North of 49, and was delighted to meet and briefly chat with Joy afterwards.

In July, I was able to live at the house and work on my own writing projects, finishing a verse novel for children, and co-editing an anthology of haiku poetry written by members of the Vancouver Haiku Group. I started the month by hosting a book-making workshop given by poet and book artist Terry Ann Carter from Victoria, which brought together many creative people, and was an inspiring kick-off to my in-house residency. Staying at the house by myself gave me time and space to focus on writing without my usual distractions, making a big difference to my writing pattern and productivity. I also enjoyed the opportunity to explore and get to know the Marpole neighbourhood, including its tree-lined streets, housing mix, history, and changing local culture, and to relax in the peaceful stillness of the backyard where a young Joy Kogawa once played.

I returned to the house to live and work at the end of August, and also hosted a presentation by my friend and colleague Jean-Pierre Antonio, a professor at Suzuka University in Japan, who gave us a fascinating account of the life of Japanese immigrant Masayuki Yano through the translation of Mr. Yano’s pre-WW II diaries.

At the end of September, my haiku activities at the house concluded with the hosting of An Evening of Japanese Poetic Forms: from the Tokaido Road to the World Stage, with Terry Ann Carter reading from her new book of haibun (prose with haiku), Tokaido (Red Moon Press), Rachel Enomoto sharing haiku, and Kozue Uzawa reading tanka and leading participants in a short tanka-writing workshop.

An Evening of Japanese Forms, a Word Vancouver event (with thanks to Tracey Wan for the bottom right photo)

In early November, Joy Kogawa returned to the house to read from her children’s picture book, Naomi’s Tree, which was a treat for all of us who came out to listen and celebrate the old cherry tree in the laneway behind Joy Kogawa House. The tree now has a plaque, encouraging people to seek it out on their neighbourhood walks.

So now, I seem to have come full circle, enjoying the house in each season, and again, looking ahead to early spring when the cherry blossoms will bloom again.

My workspace while in residence at Joy Kogawa House (looking out at the old cherry tree behind the back fence)

 

To close, here are a few simple haiku written during my stay:

 

no need

for an alarm clock

early morning crows

 

picking the last

ripe raspberry

evening robin

 

And from my evening walk past the elementary school young Joy Kogawa attended:

 

fading daylight

the empty swing

still swinging

 

 

West Coast winter haiku

One thing I actually enjoy about Vancouver’s winter rain and early darkness is the neon reflections.

(A version of the above photo-haiga was published in the last issue of A Hundred Gourds)

Today, we even got some snow. It’s days like this that I’m happy to work at home.

A taste of Japan – through photos, haiku and food

Reminiscing, I decided to repost this haiku-photo collaboration from 2010. Sad to say that Ruriko, the owner of the cafe-gallery exhibit space, died of cancer a few years ago.

Note: Yokan is a winter citrus fruit. Also, I feel compelled to point out that my haiku have progressed since this time, and these older haiku have some problems, though I still like the yokan haiku and the collaboration with Jean-Pierre’s photos.

wild ink

Recently, Jean-Pierre Antonio, a friend who has lived and worked in Japan for over 20 years, asked me to write some haiku to accompany a series of photographs he took in Tokyo and Kyoto this past December. Usually my haiku is inspired by personal experience, and I wasn’t sure if I’d have any success trying to write in response to someone else’s photographs, but Jean-Pierre’s multiple images of  bright winter yokan fruit, calligraphic wisteria vines, and mysterious crows immediately evoked a strong feeling of place and mood, and the first haiku quickly took shape. Writing something to go with Jean-Pierre’s photos of young people engrossed in manga-reading and close-up sections of ancient fabric took a little more thought. To write about the fabric, I had to, in a sense, reach back across time to imagine what was going through the minds of the long-ago fabric artists…

The result of our collaboration is currently…

View original post 91 more words

Fall is cherry blossom time?

 

While spring is the traditional time for celebrating cherry blossoms, fall is when we hear the results of the annual Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational contest. This year, I was excited to learn that one of my haiku (inspired by the Vancouver Canucks hockey team making the Stanley Cup playoffs) was selected as the top winner in the “Vancouver” category. And, seeming in honour of the occasion, these rather confused cherry blossoms were blooming in November when I visited Vancouver’s Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden.

Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational Top Winners, 2015

Vancouver

Stanley Cup playoffs
the last cherry blossoms
still hanging on
                      Jacqueline Pearce
                      Vancouver, British Columbia

British Columbia

cherry blossoms
come and go
my seventy years
                      Dan Curtis
                      Victoria, British Columbia

Canada

Alzheimer’s ward
cherry blossoms
in the fog
                      Marco Fraticelli
                      Pointe-Claire, Quebec

United States

cherry blossoms
no room in the selfie
for me
                      Joe McKeon
                      Strongsville, Ohio

International

cherry blossoms
falling
in love again
                      Brendon Kent
                      Southampton, England

Youth

cherry blossoms—
grandma tells me about
her first date
                      Cucu Georgiana, age 12
                      Botosani, Romania

Click here for commentary on winning poems

Fall is also a time when local cherry trees are filled with beauty of a different colour.

Fall is in the air

Technically, it’s still summer, but with many people heading back to school and the long summer drought finally ending here on the BC coast, it feels like fall has arrived. The long string of dry hot days has also turned many leaves prematurely brown.

For years after I finished high school and university, I used to get itchy feet this time of year and feel that excited flutter in my chest that comes with the anticipation of seeing old friends again, the potential of meeting new ones, and (in university years) wondering what exciting vistas new classes might be about to open for me. In more recent years, this feeling seems to have morphed into a yearning to travel in the fall ─to explore new places and admire fall colours in different locations.

 

autumn wind─
I have the sudden urge
to buy school supplies

 

Winter haibun

Jean-Pierre Antonio and I have been friends since elementary school, when we shared the grade five classroom art corner and snuck off with class-mates to explore the nearby creek during lunch hours. Jean-Pierre has lived in Japan for the past 25 years. I’ve enjoyed hearing about his experiences, have visited him there, and we’ve done some collaboration featuring Jean-Pierre’s photographs (taken in Japan) and my haiku written in response to the photographs (here’s a post on our 2010 exhibit at Sawa restaurant-gallery in Vancouver). Recently, I found myself responding to one of Jean-Pierre’s emails with a poem that seems to be part haiku, part tanka. Together, the two pieces form a kind of haibun (a writing form combining prose & haiku). Perhaps this will be a new trend in our collaboration.

In the Depth of Winter

The clouds rolled down from the mountain today, bringing drizzle just this side of snow, and drawing the heat out of my body as I rushed home after work. I thought of the scene in the movie version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe ──the one in which Lucy meets the fawn, Mr. Tumnus, by the lamp post. It’s snowing, and she is wearing just a light skirt, blouse and sweater, and she is very cold. He invites her for tea, and they go to his cave-home. Inside, there’s a fireplace with a warm fire already lit, and he brings out the pot of steaming tea, along with sugar, milk and toast. That’s what I want today ─a warm fire to put the heat back into my bones, the orange tinted light to drive away the grey outside, and a soothing pot of hot tea.

tea buns
by candle light─
in the depth of winter
the sheltered ember
of spring

Getting ready for Chinese New Year

I didn’t expect to see much in Vancouver’s Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden in the middle of January, but when I visited last Saturday, I found it blooming with red lanterns and bustling with preparations for Chinese New Year. I was also surprised to see winter jasmine in flower and many trees full of early buds.

The Chinese  lunar New Year (which begins on January 31 this year) is a time for sweeping away the old (dust, clutter, debts, worries) and welcoming in the new (renewing hope for health, happiness, and good fortune). Staff and volunteers at the garden were busy cleaning, tidying, tying up loose-ends, and decorating in preparation for the upcoming Year of the Horse Temple Fair, Feb 2 (2014). Red lanterns are hung around the garden to bring good luck (red is considered the most auspicious colour because of its association with fire, the sun, energy, light, and life-blood, which demons fear, so it also keeps demons away), and they welcome back the light of spring.

A few images and haiku from my visit:

New Year’s lanterns─
the courtyard mosaics
swept clear

preparing for
the New Year─
peony buds

still pond─
finding the courage
to say goodbye