Poet Details

Vanessa Proctor

Vanessa Proctor’s interest in Japanese poetry began while she was working as an English teacher in Japan in the early ’90s. She was invited to give a speech on haiku at Kyoto University in 1994, where she won the Kyoto Foundation Essay Award. She now lives in Sydney with her husband, two small children and one elderly cat. She is widely published internationally and has won many awards for her work. Her haiku have appeared in several editions of the Red Moon Anthology and she appeared as a featured poet in A New Resonance 3: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku. She was also a featured poet in Presence. She participates in renku online and has recently enjoyed leading renku groups in person rather than in cyberspace. She is a founding member of HaikuOz and is HaikuOz’s contact officer for New South Wales, she’s a founding member of the online international haiku group Zazen, (originally based in New Zealand) and she founded the Sydney Haiku Group the Red Dragonflies in 2008. Her most memorable haiku moment was seeing the boulder carved with her haiku ‘night kayaking’ being blessed in the rain by Maori elders on the Katikati Haiku Pathway in 2010:

night kayaking
never quite reaching
the moon

Awards and Other Honors: See bio above for a few of her awards and other honors.

Books Published: Temples of Angkor (Sunline Press, 2003); Jacaranda Baby (Snapshot Press, 2012) [ eChapbook: http://www.snapshotpress.co.uk/ebooks.htm]. She edited A to Zazen (Kiwiana Publishing, 2004) and was co-editor of The Second Australian Haiku Anthology (Paper Wasp, 2006) with Janice Bostok and Katherine Samuelowicz.

dusk
the hunter kneels
to brush his dog

starless night
the flicker of a moth
in my hands

starry night
snapping the wishbone
by myself

breastfeeding
the slow drip of rain
on the nursery roof

a bench by the sea
it never leaves me
this loneliness

cloudwatching . . .
my son’s small hand
curled in mine

Credits: "dusk" - Presence #33 (2007); "starry night" - First Honorable Mention, Anita Sadler Weiss Memorial Haiku Awards (2007); The Dragonfly: Newsletter of the Haiku Poets of Central Maryland (2007); "a bench by the sea" - Presence 31 (2007); Presence 32 [announcing winner of best of issue award for Presence 31] (2007); "starless night" - Frogpond XXX:2 (2007); Runner-up, The Haiku Calendar Competition 2007; The Haiku Calendar 2008 (Snapshot Press, 2007); Presence’s Seashell Game, 7th place (2010); "breastfeeding" - Commended, Paper Wasp Jack Stamm Haiku Award (2006); A Fine Line (New Zealand Poetry Society Magazine, August 2008); "cloudwatching" - Frogpond 32:2 (2009); Winner for June, The Haiku Calendar Competition 2011; The Haiku Calendar 2012 (Snapshot Press, 2011); Jacaranda Baby (Snapshot Press, 2012).