hosts: Vidya Shankar & Shalini Pattabiraman
A Thursday Feature.
poet of the week: Matthew Caretti
08 August 2024
This month at The Haibun Gallery, instead of featuring a poet all through August, we are bringing to you each week, one of the four Touchstone Award 2023 winning poets. This week, we present Matthew Caretti and his winning haibun, ‘Deep Water Port’ (The Haibun Journal, 15.1).
About Matthew Caretti:
Matthew began publishing his poems in 2009. He has published two books of haibun, Harvesting Stones (2017, winner of the Snapshot Press eChapbook Award) and Africa, Buddha (2022, Red Moon Press), and a book of haiku, Ukulele Drift: Poems from a Small Island (2023, Red Moon Press). Matthew lives and teaches English in Pago Pago, American Samoa.
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Deep Water Port
— Matthew Caretti (The Haibun Journal, 15.1)
barbed-wire fence
winter stars hung out
for the night
A ripple of harbor lights becomes some recurring dream. Moving aft and fore on this floating world, I seek to unfind my sea legs. Enter the pub. Longshoremen long off duty unloading still. With another dark n’ stormy, the barkeep serves up an attitude. Especially for the one who keeps on about the waterspout and how all the fish just landed in his boat. She turns to seamen mansplaining the supermoon. Shrugs. Asks if I’d like one for the road.
night fog
the joss sticks
refuse my fire
The morning comes too soon. I look again. No ship on the horizon. A frigatebird edges instead a slow scissoring of the sky. I wade into the shallows. Allow salt and sea to scrub me clean. Sun dry on the shore. Washed up beside me like a drowned rat, a drowned rat. Blown out of the palms during last night’s storm or a stowaway escaped from one of the ships at anchor. I bury it in the sand. Climb the hill above the port. A stevedore sets down in the sprawling dockside maze the last container from a freighter already smoking at its stacks.
off-island news
a crease of sailors
along the fence
Back down the path to the spot where sea poison trees drop intricate blossoms into brackish waters. The fire coral below hasn’t bleached itself. I worry the change. Above these coral skeletons, I will a rainbow to bend back to the rising sea. To offer up some sort of treasure. Ever more the link and shift of dolosse counter the erosion along the coastal road. In the distance, a boy skips atop the seawall. Higher and higher. Sea monsters edging ever closer. Licking at his heels.
morning moon
among the whitecaps
a shark’s fin
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VS: Congratulations on winning the Touchstone Award, Matthew. Deep Water Port
is a great poem with arresting imagery and an ominous tone that seems to convey unsettling, inauspicious tidings. The generous use of sentence fragments add depth to the dark atmosphere of the poem, making the foreboding very palpable. We would like to know the writing process behind this creation — what prompted you to write this poem and the choice of style.
MC: Heartfelt thanks, Vidya. The award is indeed a great, and unexpected, honor. As for its coming-to-be, many, or even these days most, of my haibun emerge as a collection of haiku that fail in some way as individual poems. However, these pieces often contain compelling imagery that interrelates and, when combined, works to create a narrative. My journals are filled with haiku that never see the vetted-and-ready-for-submission file, though they serve as notes on meaningful perceptual experiences calling out for some sort of expression. With this particular haibun, the collection of perceptions began to form into lines that told of the human need for connection, the rather tenuous link remote islands (and islanders) have to the world at large and, finally, the growing stress on those links for younger generations, both in terms of our consumptive patterns and global climate change, which here translate as rising sea levels. During the drafting process, the haibun took on an appropriate cadence begun in those original haiku that, in light of the themes, indeed became "unsettling" and "foreboding".
VS: What surprised most of us about the Touchstone awards this year was the selection of lengthy haibun coming at a time when the writing world is headed towards the minimalist. What do you have to say to that, especially with regards to your own award-winning haibun?
MC: While I certainly write my fair share of “minimalist” pieces and enjoy the inherent challenges of that discipline, I find some haibun simply call for more—abundant imagery, lengthier narrative and, in the end, a higher word count. I especially enjoy creating the links and shifts that longer-form haibun require, particularly when those prose-poem and haiku elements pirouette with some adept balance around a cogent theme or collection of related themes and move toward something more poignant or evocative. This has been very much the case as I’ve gotten to know this island, but also as I travel. Experiences of the unfamiliar often, I find, coalesce around the place itself. In this case, that setting is the “Deep Water Port” of Pago Pago.
Prompt for members:
What does the concept of 'island' mean to you? It will be interesting to read the different interpretations of the term. Maybe, you could flip through your "journal...filled with haiku that never see the vetted-and-ready-for-submission file" and use them to write your haibun.
Haibun outside this prompt can also be posted! Remember, we are in the month of August and India has a lot to celebrate in August besides our Independence Day.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Important: Since we're swamped with submissions, and our editors are only human, mistakes can happen. Please, please, remember to put your name, followed by your country, below each poem, even after revisions. It helps our editors; they won't have to type it in, saving them from potential typos. Thanks a ton!
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PLEASE NOTE:
1. Only two haibun per poet per prompt. Please put your name and country of residence under your poem, it makes the editors' work easier. Thanks.
2. Share your best-polished pieces.
3. Please do not post something in a hurry or something you have just written.
Let it simmer for a while.
4. When poets give suggestions and if you agree to them - post your final edited version on top of your original version.
5. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems.
We are delighted to open the comment thread for you to share your unpublished haibun (within 300 words) to be considered for inclusion in the haikuKATHA monthly journal.
NOSTALGIA (title revised thanks to Lorraine)
( opening haiku revised thanks to Shalini)
under tree's shade
bulbuls nibble on fruit
family dinner
Papa sips tea at the kitchen island, the hooting of the pressure cooker interrupting the crinkle of his newspaper. I smell Mama's jasmine shampoo as she leans down to give me my milk. I'm involved in a staring contest with our cat in the corner. Both of us sipping our milk. His whiskers twitch in irritation while my milk mustache broadens into a smile. My sisters barge into the kitchen screaming at each other over a 'stolen' dress, so my cat settles down and begins licking his paws, waiting for the train wreck that is bound to happen…
#2 - 2024-08-14
(original)
An Island in the Cloud
I watched the clouds from the window of my room. Their whiteness reminded me of innocence, and the grayness of the sinful human soul. I wondered what kind of knowledge I could come to if I looked deeper into the clouds.
Some of them sailed slowly, others fast, and perhaps it just seemed that way to me. Perhaps it's not the perception that matters, but the moment, the core of the cognition I've been striving for.
One cloud distracts me. At first it seemed as if it was bluish-green, then as if I could see the coast of a famous island on it.
Under the sunbeams, that unusual cloud looked more…
Hometown
I’ve not been back in seven decades and was delighted to find a Facebook group where people are posting photos. In one the downtown, the church on a hill where there used to be a fort George Washington slept in, in another the stores my mother took me shopping, all of them gone out of business. At some point, the city dug up the main street for a trendy pedestrian mall, but the business district died anyway and now they’ve dug it up again for repaving. Facebook comments range from shock to snark.
I click “like” on pictures of my former high school with its football teams and marching bands and a couple of familiar teachers, all of them…
#1
Revised with thanks to Vidya:
Gembun
After a partial hysterectomy, my broken dreams.
twin moons
ovulating into
the abyss
Susan Burch, USA
Original:
Where Do Broken Dreams Go?
After a partial hysterectomy, I can’t have kids.
twin moons
ovulating into
the abyss
Susan Burch, USA
Comments welcome
#1 - 2024-08-12
(original)
In the Shadow of Cut Stalks
In the lobotomy of a lucid dream I tried to trample Walt Whitman's shadow while like a river
rearranged into unity, it snakes under my feet teaching me philosophically about maturing of entities passing each other.
Under the axiom fracture shine muses descended (after breaks) from the site of fire of stellar remnants and sang a song of separation of progress and decadence where I wisely found myself in the infinite transformations of long-ago lives.
After an extrasensory pact made under the auspices of innocent, deep blue cornflowers I sprouted from the blood of dry seeds whose cut stalks were scattered along the interstellar steps by the levitating hazy fireflies…