S. L. Poulter was an early advocate of formal variety within the traditional haiku genre. He essayed the rarest of haiku formats—the occasional two-liner—along with four-liners, and the cantilevered middle line may be his invention. This chapbook was a product of Peacock Press in 1974.
You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library.
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Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by Jim Kacian, following a concept first explored by Tom Clausen, and are used with permission.
in a shadow a bowed head . . .a snake its length slowly from that mistfrom monarch to leaf the way the rain slides off the butterfly's wingcracking out of the wind the sound of leaveshow the sun reddens half in the wateron his upturned face a bounce of light through the sweatgoing to take all day the way that grasshopper eats
Email me @ [email protected] for more car haiku’s
A V8 rumbles [5]
From a British super car [7]
Purring on a road [5]
A Haiku about an Aston Martin V8 Vantage
http://betterparts.org/images/aston-martin-v8-vantage-n420-01.jpg
A very apt selection for Christmas Day. Poulter’s online history includes an article from the Milwaukee Journal September 28, 1973 which details Poulter’s harsh upbringing, a crime resulting in a woman’s death for which he was sentenced, and his discovery of poetry during his incarceration. The article has a selection of his poems including one titled, “Wisconsin State Prison, 1971” which includes these lines, my verse/ neither relieves / nor passes time … These haiku from Distant Thunder underscore the redemptive power of poetry.
I’m very grateful for the work that goes into to making these books available.