Two Haibun, an Essay, and an Interview Published in “Notes from the Gean”

This week,  two of my haibun, the reprint of an essay about haibun published in Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry  (Dos Gatos Press, 2011), and an interview including a number of poems from several of my books–including one from my children’s alphabestiary,The Beastie Book, and the first paragraph of Limula’s Magic Tail, my new children’s story for the Delaware Bay ecosystem–have just been posted in Volume 3, Issue 1 of Notes from the Gean (Aberdeen, Scotland)

Haibun: http://www.notesfromthegean.com/archives/sept-2011/haibun/haibun_006.html

Essay: http://www.notesfromthegean.com/archives/sept-2011/haiku-matters/haiku-matters_001.html

Interview: http://www.notesfromthegean.com/archives/sept-2011/interviews.html

There’s quite a bit to take in here, and I’m honored to have so much space in this fine journal. Hope you can dip in and out of these now and then, and that you enjoy what you read.

Another Poem on “Your Daily Poem” site

I was away in Seattle, attending the 2011 Haiku North America conference (will post about that wonderful even soon), when this poem appeared August 5th on Your Daily Poem. I wrote it while at VCCA last January. I was missing Bill and staring out the window when this cardinal appeared. He loved birds, so of course I thought of him—and sat down to write the poem.

http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=816

Bill Higginson’s haiku to be on the EPN

Carlos Colon kindly requested permission to feature five of  Bill’s poems on the Shreve Memorial Library’s Electronic Poetry Network. They will be featured this coming week, beginning tomorrow, and running all day (or all weekend) long on an electronic message board at the Main Library in Shreveport, Louisiana.  There is also a companion location for the EPN on the library’s web site:

http://www.shreve-lib.org/index.php/services/poem-of-the-day (This is a new web page.)

If this does not work, go to the following link and click on “Services” and then on “Poem of the Day.”

www.shreve-lib.org

Bill would be so pleased, and I am very happy that his work will be posted.

Haibun posted at haijinx

Just a quick note to say that my haibun, “Against the Cold,” has been posted in the December issue of haijinx. You can see it here:

http://www.haijinx.org/III-1/haibun/index.html

As a postscript to my just-previous entry, I am recovering well from my hysterectomy on 10/28. I continue to be very grateful both for my ongoing and good healing, and for the excellent pathology that indicated I am fine now and will continue to be fine—no follow-up treatment needed. I have much to be grateful for this holiday season!

Speaking of the holidays, I had a lovely Thanksgiving with family and am now looking forward to Christmas, and then to my two-week residency at VCCA mid-January. So though we are in the time of growing dark as we approach the Winter Solstice, let us all remember to count our blessings and be light for one another this time of year.

Several Recent Events

I am really behind in posting news of several wonderful recent events, and will want to come back to them individually in the future, giving them their due, complete with photos. However, for now:

First, October 7th-10th, I had a wonderful time at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in and around the Performing Arts Center in Newark, NJ. My reading went very well, and I loved both seeing many old friends in the poetry community, and making some new ones. I traveled with Jan Marler, a poet and librarian I have met here in Mays Landing, and it was her first time at the Festival. It was great to share it with her. I also enjoyed spending some time at the table for the Haiku Society of America, the first time I know of  that the HSA has been represented at a Dodge Festival. Ce Rosenow, this year’s President of the HSA, and publisher, with her Mountains and Rivers Press,  of my new chapbook, Recycling Starlight, was there, and it was great to have the chance to get to know her even better. Also, dear poet friends from Canada, Terry Ann Carter and Claudia Coutou-Radmore, as well as Rick Black from Highland Park, came. It was great to see them! Having the Festival  in Newark worked very well, and I found it every bit as exciting as the previous Festivals Bill and I had attended over the years. I enjoyed a number of readings and panel discussions, and was especially impressed with the fine introductions Martin Farawell  gave each of the poets on the main stage. It was an honor to be counted among the Festival Poets.

I came home from the Dodge Festival on October 11th, then drove up to Princeton to participate in the opening celebration of the Scott and Hella McVay Poetry Trail at the D & R Nature Center. What a blessing it is to have a poem of mine selected for permanent installation on the Trail. I hiked the Trail, stopping to contemplate each poem, and later read my poem along with Paul Muldoon, Jerry Stern, and other fine poets reading their work. I will come back and tell much more about that marvelous occasion, adding more links and photos.

http://blog.grdodge.org/tag/penny-harter/

 

I’m behind in posting about these because the day after I came home from Princeton, I got the news that the results of an endometrial biopsy indicated the need for surgery. Between the 19th and the 28th of October, I had a CAT scan, blood tests, visited several doctors, and did pre-admission intake. Then, on the morning of October 28th, I had a successful hysterectomy. I am pleased to report that surgery went very well, and I received excellent pathology reports (cancer caught so very early, and so confined, that surgery has taken care of it). I got out of the hospital on Saturday, October 30th, went to my daughter’s for a few days, and came home on Wednesday, November 3rd. Now, though sore, I am recovering well, rejoicing that I was proactive, had excellent doctors, and as a result am fine and will continue to be fine. It was hard to go through this without Bill, and I thank family and friends across the country and the world for their prayers and loving support.

“Recycling Starlight” just published!

I’m happy to announce that my cycle of poems written during the eighteen months after Bill’s death, Recycling Starlight, is now in print from Ce Rosenow’s Mountains and Rivers Press. It has been published in a limited edition chapbook, beautifully designed by Jonathan Greene, and elegantly produced by Swamp Press, with a letter-press cover and hand-sewn signatures.

Here’s a link to the press’s Facebook page where, if you scroll down, you’ll find a photo of Ed Rayher and Jonathan Greene at Swamp Press–in the process of making the book.

http://zh-hk.facebook.com/pages/Eugene-OR/Mountains-and-Rivers-Press/104258476842

Both Sonia Sanchez and John Brandi have blessed me with comments about the book which appear on the back cover. I’m very grateful for their kind words, which I’ll share below:

*******************************************************

What a beautiful pavane Penny has written for Bill. We learn their secret names for death and love. Pain and birth. Hills and rain. Coins and ash. We listen and

these poems

bring the earth

to its knees . . .

—-Sonia Sanchez

*******************************************************

These poems are among Penny Harter’s best, a fine tribute to her  late husband, a wrenching presentation of loss, and an incomparable homage to love. Remarkable for their beauty and skilled compression, they fuse the deep territory of grief with the author’s powerful migration into light. The process is alchemic, the language channeled to reveal the heart. Penny Harter is a master at giving emotional complexities profound clarity.

—-John Brandi

Copies are available from Mountains and Rivers Press at: http://www.mountainsandriverspress.org/TitleView.aspx. 

The book will also be available at the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival: http://www.dodgepoetry.org/festival-2010/

and at the 2010 Seabeck Haiku Getaway: https://sites.google.com/site/haikunorthwest/seabeck-haiku-getaway/2010schedule which I will be attending again this year. I will be reading from the book at both of these events. Exciting times!

Review of my book “Turtle Blessing” (La Alameda Press, 1996)

Sometimes  the universe delivers unexpected gifts. In the early nineties, after Bill and I had moved to Santa Fe, we went to an arts festival (can’t remember its name, but I heard about it on the radio) in Albuquerque, where we met J. B. and Cirrelda-Snider Bryan, publishers of La Alameda Press. I had recently completed the manuscript of Turtle Blessing and told J. B. about it. He said he’d take a look at it—and to my joy, accepted it for publication. I was blessed with a beautiful cover design by J. B. , wonderful illustrations of a turtle shell by Bari Long, and humbling cover blurbs from John Brandi, Jack Loeffler, and Gary Lawless. I did some readings, and the book was well received.

Thirteen years have passed since then, and I am still as attached to the poems in Turtle Blessing as I was then—even did a reading from it several months ago in the local Borders. A week or so ago, as a result of having sent out the post about my poem “The Lone Ranger” appearing on the “Your Daily Poem” site, I heard from Cirrelda that a friend of theirs had written a review of Turtle Blessing—now in 2010! I asked Cirrelda to please give me a link to the review, and this morning she has kindly sent it to me.

It is not an accident that these gifts from the universe sometimes arrive when we most need them. Although it has been almost two years since Bill’s death (on October 11, 2008), and I have come a long way in my healing journey, there are still times when I miss him so much. This morning I woke up feeling lonely and a bit down. I am writing this just after reading Lisa Gill’s review, and the review has gladdened my morning heart on this hot and humid morning here in the southeast New Jersey shore area, where we wait to see whether Hurricane Earl will brush the coast or come further inland.

I am grateful that Lisa Gill loved my book enough to write such a moving review—and am glad my poems touch her heart. Although first and foremost, I write because a poem demands to be written, after work is published I hope that it will somehow reach out to and mean something to others. Here is the link to Lisa Gill’s review:

http://channelingfrank.wordpress.com/2010/07/16/on-turtle-blessing-by-penny-harter/

And here are the texts of the two poems she refers to in her review :

******************************************

The Way Home

There is a way home.
It runs through the cornfields beneath the stars,
rises like a river
to wash the apple trees below the barn.
If you are careful you will not disturb the snakes
who curl in the tall weeds
beside the grassy path your feet have known.

Sometimes in the distance
you will see the others,
silhouettes on moonlit hills
carrying hoes over their shoulders,
returning from their fields
even as you go to yours,
sure-footed as a goat
down the stubbled rows toward sleep.

When you climb to the graveyard on the hillside,
stop among the old ones,
take off your clothes,
lie down on the earth
with your head in the shadows
the moon throws between tombstones,
and begin to count the stars
in the Milky Way.

You will run out of numbers.
You will run out of words.
You will forget how to talk to the sky.
You will forget where you have come from,
or where you are going.
You will only know that you are light
among the stars,
that cornfields spiral out from you
on every side, shining corn
as far as you can see—
even over the edge of the world,
that dark circle you have found
at last.

******************************************

Tulip

I watched its first green push
through bare dirt, where the builders
had dropped boards, shingles, plaster—
killing everything.
I could not recall what grew there,
what returned each spring,
but the leaves looked tulip,
and one morning it arrived,
a scarlet slash against the aluminum siding.

Mornings, on the way to my car,
I bow to the still bell
of its closed petals; evenings
it greets me, light ringing
at the end of my driveway.

Sometimes I kneel
to stare into the yellow throat,
count the black tongues,
stroke the firm red mouth.
It opens and closes my days.
It has made me weak with love,
this god I didn’t know I needed.

******************************************

If after reading Lisa Gill’s review and my poems, you want a copy of Turtle Blessing,  you can order one from La Alameda Press, or on amazon.com. I also have copies for sale. It’s a blessing to know that this many years later, the book is still out there, still offering pleasure to those who come upon it.

My Poem “The Lone Ranger” on My Daily Poem site for 8/13/10

I’m happy to announce that my poem, “The Lone Ranger” is posted today on “My Daily Poem.”

“My Daily Poem” is a wonderful site, and I recommend your subscribing. The poems posted on it are designed to be accessible and appealing to anyone, not just poets and academics.  I’ve recently started getting them, and it’s a great way to start your day.

You can access my poem at:

http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=458

It takes you back to radio days—to when I was in second and third grade. Join me in that apartment dining-room in a big old house on Kingsley Avenue in Staten Island, NY, where my father and I shared an evening ritual of listening to “The Lone Ranger.” A few years later, in my cowgirl phase in Clark, NJ, I became Dale Evans. I still remember my red felt cowgirl hat, and my leather belt with holster in which I housed my pearl-handled cap pistol. Only problem was I didn’t have a horse.

Hope you enjoy the poem!

6 Poems On-line at fieralingue

A haibun and five poems from my forthcoming chapbook, Recycling Starlight, have just been published on-line at fieralingue. They appear in Anny Ballardini and Obododimma Oha’s  anthology: Health and Illness:Poetic Works on Health & Illness in Human Experience.

I’m pleased that these poems, two of which have been previously published in journals, are reaching a wider audience—as they and other poems in the collection will continue to do when the book comes out later this year from Mountains and Rivers Press in Eugene, Oregon. http://mountainsandriverspress.org/Home.aspx

I hope that these “grief poems,” written over the months since Bill died, will help others who are on a similar journey. You can read them here:

http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=3312

One-year Anniversary of Bill’s Death

Yesterday, October 11th, was the one-year anniversary of my husband William J. Higginson’s death. Although I felt subdued the last several days, I also felt embraced by both family and friends. All weekend, even continuing this morning, friends across the country and planet have been e-mailing me, offering me love and support. Thinking of this time last year, I sent a message to the haiku list “Blogging Along Tobacco Road,” thanking that community for their caring over the past months.

http://tobaccoroadpoet.blogspot.com/2009/10/message-from-penny-harter.html

And I deeply thank my loving family members for their caring. My sister called me from Texas to see how I was doing. My son Charlie came on Friday and stayed overnight, leaving Saturday afternoon for his three-hour drive back up to North Jersey. He helped me enormously with further migrating my files from my 10-year-old Compaq computer to my new Dell desktop. As he said, I’ve gone from horse and buggy to bullet train. And my step-daughter Beth made and mailed me the unexpected gift of a beautiful tapestry tote-bag which I’ll use for my books and manuscripts during my upcoming trip.

And yesterday, the day itself, my daughter and family picked me up late morning for a drive out into the country to a farm about an hour away. We drove on country roads through a tapestry of color—from burnished fields to brilliant trees just beginning to turn, and it was a quintessential fall day.  We bought pumpkins, gourds, cider donuts (wickedly good), and fresh cider. It was fun to watch the grandkids helping to pick out pumpkins. I found a little round one, and my daughter snapped a photo of me holding it.

We all felt Bill’s presence as we hugged one another good-bye when they dropped me off.

After I got home late afternoon, I was comforted by a caring phone conversation with a dear friend, then put on my walking shoes and took a twilight walk to a pedestrian bridge over a portion of the nearby Great Egg Harbor River. I paused a bit on the bridge to look down at the water and meditate. The sky was luminous and the water so still it virtually became that sky and the glowing trees that lined the river banks.  As I write this, I’m reminded of the “still waters” in the 23rd Psalm.

And so the day passed, and this morning I am focusing on getting further prepared for my trip to the Pacific Northwest (please scroll down for info on that).  I am deeply thankful for all the good things that have flowed toward me during the past months.  And as these days shift into autumn– some a panoply of vivid color under incredibly blue skies, others cold and gray with rain and wind, I continue my healing journey, grateful for the blessings of the ever-changing sky.