The New Year. Haiku. 1.4.2016

Encouraging other people to write is part of what I do. Lately, I’ve enjoyed talking about poems. Sometimes I say writing haiku is fishing, just like any creative practice, you sit and watch and wait. Once you feel the tug, there’s a dropping down and listening. Lure, line and movement (your body, pen and paper) bring the moment out of a beautiful murkiness where we can’t live (think water) and make it form. If you sit and really feel what’s around you long enough, you’ll make a poem.
And I also think haiku is a lot like photography. With the practice above, a snapshot materializes, and, due to the brevity of the form, it’s almost like a still image. Within the structure, which is bound by pretty strict limits without photoshop, a moment in time can develop. Try it! Happy New Year and Happy Writing.

At midnight, her hugs
tattooed glitter on our arms
the year gone, sparkling.
12.31.2015

A haiku unfurls
like Polaroid unveiling
–one chosen moment.
1.1.2016

Delicate tassels
of birch bark lift, then fall, in
a blessing of sky.
1.2.2016

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Merry Christmas. NYC. 12.21.2015

Walking around the city, even an iPhone and Insta can bring the magic. Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope your holiday is filled with love and light.

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-Radio City Music Hall-

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-East Side Steps-

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NYC. NIght. 10.22.2014

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Last night I was out with just my iPhone scouting locations for NYC Night. The public parks series is ongoing. There’s something poetic about subways.

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Reading M Train. City. 10.18.2015

I’m reading Patti Smith’s M Train, a transcendent memoir meditation traversing glints of story from Pennsylvania to Michigan to NYC to Rockaway Beach. In an event at the New York Public Library, the interviewer observes that Smith seems to have written a book inviting people to follow along with her, as if trailing to witness daily excursions. Smith’s response is that she hopes the reader will feel that it’s more like walking with, accompanying, and that when writing the book, she had tried to create an atmosphere the reader would want to enter. She has succeeded.

The book is also a meditation on coffee and the ritual that coffee drinking plays in an often solitary life. Reading the book, I sense the aloneness, not so much a choice, but as a mandate from the contemplative mind. Coffee is a companion here. Many of us in New York City filter our thinking through a cafe culture—communal, yet singular. Writing in notebooks, reading, we sit together, while we meet our minds alone. Last Monday I was in the East Village, and, having finished my coffee, the bill came attached to cardboard with a tiny clothespin. The clothespin took me back to something. I photographed it. I will write about the memory, but for now there’s the picture. While it may look more funny than evocative, this tiny object gave me a glimpse into something I want to pursue. Like the cowpoke says at the beginning of M Train, “It’s not so easy writing about nothing,” but I look at the picture knowing there’s something there.

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Poems. City. Country. 10.18.2015

Morning saunters in
as clicking radiators
–warm to human touch.

Two vibrant bluejays
flash like sapphire sky and sea
in autumn’s garden.

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September. Country. 9.12.2015

Sometimes between the lines of a simple haiku—childhood, city, country, loss and joy. I wrote this poem a couple of weeks ago. Today it seems to encompass decades, so much waiting to be written about in more detail. The poem as starting place. The poem as story.

Weighted hydrangeas
beautiful and falling now
–as if ground were sky.

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August. Country. 8.18.2015

On Mead’s Mountain, looking out over Queen Anne’s Lace and summer fog to Indian Head, late afternoon silence is stirred by breeze through grass and wildflowers. As I stood by the fence on Saturday, another car pulled over to take a photograph of the sunset, and a neighbor waved as he got his mail. Then I walked alone along the road. Only a couple of miles down the mountain, hundreds of people gathered in town to watch fireworks. The monastery through the forest behind me, a witness to the impermanence of that night’s boom and sparkle.

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NYC. Meatpacking. 7.23.2015

Walking through NYC’s Meatpacking recently, I shot a couple of pictures with my phone and sent them out on Instagram. The first one was shot at the new Whitney. The second, from the sidewalk looking into a pricey bistro. I’ve lived in NYC for 23 years, so I’ve seen the changes. I like finding text to photograph—here the theme is food. Well, sort of.

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City. Haiku. 7.21.2015

On these city streets
where fresh asphalt gleams and waves
–a heat that tingles.

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Back to NYC. Landmark Instas. 6.30.2015

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Central Park. Bethesda Fountain. Summer.

“The piece is the only statue that was commissioned for the Park. Created by Emma Stebbins, it also marked the first time a woman received a public art commission in New York City.” ~Official website of Central Park

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Empire State Building. Pride. Sunday.

“The international icon of the New York skyline, since 1976 the Empire State Building’s tower lights have maintained a tradition of changing color to recognize various occasions and organizations throughout the year.” ~Empire State Building website

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