I hope you don’t mind me sharing my tanka and my modern haiku tribute poem to Bashō’s frog with commentary by the late AHA founder and poet Jane Reichhold who considered my poem among her top 10 haiku of all time. What an honor. Here’s the Bashō poem and commentary: Bashō’s frog four hundred years of ripples At first the idea of picking only 10 of my favorite haiku seemed a rather daunting task. How could I review all the haiku I have read in my life and decide that there were only 10 that were outstanding? Then realized I was already getting a steady stream of excellent haiku day by day through the AHA forum. The puns and write-offs based on Basho's most famous haiku are so numerous I would have said that nothing new could be said with this method, but here Al Fogel proved me wrong. Perhaps part of my delight in this haiku lies in the fact that I agree with him. Here he is saying one thing about realism-ripples are on a pond after a frog jumps in, but because it refers back to Basho and his famous haiku, he is also saying something about the haiku and authors who have followed him. We, and our work, are just ripples while Basho holds the honor of inventing the idea of the sound of a frog leaping is the sound of water As haiku spreads around the world, making ripples in more and larger ponds, its ripples are wider-including us all. But his last word reminds us that we are ripples and our lives are ephemeral. It will be the frogs that will remain. ~~ And my tanka: returning home from a Jackson Pollock exhibition I smear my face with paint and turn into art ~~ -All love in isolation from Miami Beach, Florida, Al

Beautiful deep swinging humour in music

Good morning , Shaylyn. A quality small press mag to submit to is a publication titled “Rattle” Each issue features a section on prize winning and honorable mention poems and the $$$ is good ( I believe $10,000 first prize , $500 runner up and numerous $500 honorable mentions with no entry fees. ). The following poem was a runner up and I fell in love with it. It was written by “Diana Goetsch” and was published in Rattle’s 2008 Issue #32. After the award, I e-mailed Diana and told her after reading the winning entry, I thought her poem was far superior. Anyway, I hope you don’t mind me sharing the poem. Titled WRITER IN RESIDENCE, CENTRAL STATE I’m writing this from nowhere. Oklahoma if you care. It’s not south, not west, not really Midwest. Think of a hairless Chihuahua on the shoulder of Texas, make an X, I’m in the middle, in an apartment above the dumpsters on a parking lot across from a football stadium. The shriveled leaves of what passes for autumn scuttle across the blacktop. Prairie Striders stand under cars saying Hey fuck you to French pluperfects in the pines. I’ve renamed the birds. They don’t seem to mind. In Oklahoma when you say a word like pluperfect, somehow you’re certain no one in the state has used it that day. Sometimes the parking lot feels like a lake, a lake with light towers and cars on top of it. Sometimes I see an Indian burial ground under there. You don’t think of asphalt as earth, but if they paved the entire prairie-which seems to be the plan-it would still curve with the horizon and shine in the sun. And no matter where you are, if you let the world quiet down you’ll start to hear the most terrible things about yourself. But then, like a teenager, it’ll tire of cursing and deliver you into the silence of graves. You’ll look out on the world and see yourself looking out. Now I know when monks retreat to the charnel ground and stay there long enough, the demons tire of shouting. No battles, no spells: you wait for them to cry themselves to sleep. If everyone were healed and well and all neuroses gone, would there be anything left to write about? Maybe just weather and death. I’d like to die on a mountain in winter in New Hampshire, the one the old man climbed, having decided his natural time was done. How alive he must have been during that short series of lasts-last step, last look around, bend of the waist, head on the ground, the soundless closing of his lids. How easy to be in love with the earth, breathing the crystalline air as he shivered and yawned and let the night take him home. Back in New York City there’s a book of Freud high on a shelf that presided over far too much. The past, it kept insisting, the past. There was also a mouse, who came out whenever I was still and quiet for long enough. She’d sniff my foot, go to the floor-length mirror, then drag her long tail into the kitchen. At first I set a trap. Then I knew her to be the secret life of my apartment, witness to everything without comment, her visit my reward for keeping still, for praying in a closet as Jesus advised. Don’t worry, said a woman last winter. I can see you’re worried. She had the wrinkled eyes of an old Cherokee, and spoke of past lives without a trace of contrivance. The silence here on weekends is so total it holds me. Even when the stadium is full, I don’t hear the people, just the PA telling who tackled who-who in Oklahoma was born and raised and fed and coached to deliver a game-saving hit. I don’t know where I will be or what I will do next year, but five miles underground in the womb of the earth there is no money, no lack of money, no decisions about dinner or weekends, friends or enemies, no stacks of unanswered mail. I’m trying to live there, so I can live here. -from Rattle #32, Winter 2009Honorable Mention __________ Diana Goetsch: “I’m basically a love poet. I’ve started to understand that after all these years. No matter the subject, I think my mission has something to do with redemption. And I just go for the hardest thing to redeem.” ~ All love, Al

thanks. a blessed afternoon!