THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 15 August 2024 — featured poet — Kati Mohr (Touchstone Award winner, 2023)

hosts: Vidya Shankar & Shalini Pattabiraman

A Thursday Feature.

poet of the week: Kati Mohr

15 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. The third winning haibun we present is Kati Mohr's All These Things (The Haibun Journal, 5.1).

About Kati Mohr:

Kati Mohr, born in 1976, is a German disabled intuitive artist and poet, known online as pi & anne. She lives in Nuremberg with her family and two rabbits. Her aim is to explore the filters we humans use, because how we see things often says more about us than about the things themselves. She is still busy creating a collage of her own life that makes sense to her.

Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, e.g. Kingfisher Journal, The Haibun Journal, Whiptail Journal, The Other Bunny, The Pan Haiku Review, MacQueen's Quinterly.

She came second in the Marlene Mountain Memorial Contest 2023. In 2024, her haibun All These Things was honoured with a Touchstone Award by The Haiku Foundation.

piandannes.wordpress.com

linktr.ee/pi.and.anne

@pi.and.anne

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All These Things

— Kati Mohr (The Haibun Journal, 5.1)

In front of a store in Manila, mask on. A queue. People stand six feet apart. Men with guns check everyone who wants to go inside. They send some in. They send some away. She crumples a piece of gum wrapper in her pocket, while she enters. A quick walk along the shelves, in her hand a list of several people’s requests. What does this mean? She picks, unsure. Checking her list again and again, she calls, she texts. When she leaves, her eyes are smaller. She carries everything to others’ homes. Her friends’. Her family’s, where they complain about the things she has brought, about their lives, their homes. About Corona. She texts me, and we type “hugs” and “hugging you”. She asks me to tell the universe to answer her prayers. And I do.

her foot hovers

between metro and platform

warm up-draughts

On the table: a set of magnetic tiles. Each one has a word on it. Her hands move across the surface, pushing the magnets here and there, here and there. After a while, the words shape lines. The lines build verses. Houses made of verses. A poetic map. She reads them aloud and pauses. This is how she creates sense.

Before the lockdowns, she goes to the park to smoke. To write to her friends. To smoke some more. To breathe. That’s not a contradiction. She sends a picture of her hand holding a cup of coffee. The coffee is sweet and black. She sips. Her friends send random pictures of pets and selfies. I send a picture of my garden from a thousand miles away.  A home in the rain in the park.

drips and drips

in the locked bathroom

a clouded moon

In front of her: a box of rectangular stickers with short quotes. They all begin with, “Hello, I am … .” Some people come to her little counter at the art market, read, smile and buy. Hello, I am a customer. What is not on the counter is: Hello, I am someone who listens. Hello, I am a human being. Hello, I am asking for help. I am stronger than I think. I am right by your side. I am weaker than I want to be. I am tired. I am …

Between, during lockdowns, she finds a marble. It rolls on the ground. There is a wild, white spiral inside which seems to be circling as she slowly rolls the marble between her fingers. This small, big thing. People rush by. People stop and stare. People’s voices mingle and mesh. She covers her ears to keep them from getting to her. Her fingers slowly clasp the marble. This is hers. The marble in her hand she begins to walk. Of course, this is not about a real glass marble. She knows it. I know it too. More importantly, it really is a small big thing, hope.

still water

maybe a carp deep down

taking a turn

In the middle of the pandemic, she says yes. In love. Very much so. And I wish I could have been there.

Love is: the way she insists on using her own kind of ellipsis .  . just two dots and two spaces in between. The power of two.  The impossibility of yes and no. The first thing that captivated me in her art.  Another way of surviving: she writes prose that sounds like poetry because it is. Love is the way she says yes anyway and no without doing it, the way she writes the longest and shortest sentences. They run all over the place. It is a serious creative business: a rope she feels along and away from rooftops.

rock salt mango

another sleepless night

moongazing

She writes to me that she will move out tomorrow. That she will still do the grocery shopping, put on the mask. She will still help her father feel safe in a world that threatens to be swallowed by a tasteless fog. Tomorrow, all the weight of the illness will still be there, and there will be a home. She wants a home. She wants her home. She has an idea of what her home might look like. When she looks up at the stars, she sees hope like pinpricks in the blackness of everything. The blackout poetry that she has to create herself. That there will be someone to hold her hand. That she will take more small steps, and that she will pay attention to them. She writes, “Mother, I have kwento.” And I read. This is what we do. We are making space for each other. She writes that there will be a tomorrow. That tomorrow is closer now.

It stinks. She rips a page of a book out, paints it almost entirely black. Over phrases, fragments, words.  Then she moves on to the next page. But after a while the ink becomes transparent. There is less and less of black. The page would need another round of ink to become truly dark. In the end, it is what it is. The paper can only hold so much ink before it tears. There are only a few words left that can be read well. They combine in new ways. That too is a language: Where nothing seems to be, something is.

ulan sa hardin

more than a starlit sheet

fills the cradle

kwento (Tagalog) = storyulan sa hardin (Tagalog) = rain in the garden

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VS: Congratulations on winning the Touchstone Award, Kati. This award has put All These Things in the pages of history as a chronicle of those traumatic times, ensuring that details of the lockdown struggles are not forgotten with the passage of time but are passed on to future generations. It was a time when the world was going through confusion and loss, and hope was barely a thing. The different voices in All These Things and the various haiku succeed in creating that mood in its readers. My question to you is what prompted you to choose to write about COVID and the lockdown when it is not topical now?     

KM: Thank you dearly for your kind words about my haibun and the congratulations! To get right into answering your questions, I haven’t really thought about writing specifically about COVID and the lockdowns, it just happened to be the time that a lot of things cumulated and peaked for people, didn’t it?

Actually, my motivation to write this haibun was a good friend who I’ve been knowing for many years now, and as she lives in the Philippines and I live in Germany, we have never met in real life. But what does ’real’ even meant? I respect and love her. I wished to write about her and therefore about all the women that carry the brunt of emotional care in families while struggling themselves— who should they turn to, when there is no one to rely on and to trust? Who else than their circles of friends and chosen family…

I believe COVID is still all around us, just now that we have vaccines available, it has become more ’daily life’, but foremost for those who have underlying medical conditions and are more vulnerable, it remains a daily (additional) fear. As I said, COVID and the lockdowns forced all of us to face (our own deepest) fears and to deal with changes in our ability to accommodate to our own needs (gatherings, freedom of movement, and so on). We had to learn to think about the needs of others and weigh them in comparison to our own. We were asked to face questions of care, precaution, and applying kindness and grace towards each other. And a lot of more care-work was again put on the backs of many women, as society still holds up the idea of it being a “woman’s work”.

All These Things happens to be about COVID, but it is foremost written with love and admiration for my friend, an artist, a writer, a poet, an incredible woman.

VS: What was your writing process?

KM: I sat down and wrote the prose parts almost all in one setting, although the initial prose needed a lot of editing. I was determined to make it right. All the haiku happened alongside, it helped to feel deep into the moments that I described and let the haiku reflect and expand those. I tend to have a much easier time writing haiku when I write prose alongside. It is as if one feeds the other, like best friends supporting each other [sic]. After that first draft, I asked my friend for permission to continue working on it and submitting it, as it is about her. I also asked if I was allowed to use “All These Things” as the title which has been a phrase she had repeatedly used in her own prose pieces. I just found it to be perfect. The editing took some more weeks, included a lot of fine-tuning of the sentences and getting the order right, until I reached the point where I just knew that nothing more could be done about it.

I was delighted that The Haibun Journal accepted it immediately!! It was part of the first set of haibun that I ever submitted.

VS: Why did you choose to bring in different voices?

KM: Let’s have a look at the prose parts, some are written in regular font, some are in italics. You might notice the latter are all about a creative process or activity, contain a different art form. When I started to write this haibun, I was sure I needed to include all my friend’s creative expressions, so I tried to pair them up with what was going on in her life. She taught me all I know about blackout poetry and prose poetry.

As a result, the haibun moves from a scene in her life to a way she uses art to deal with it. I as the author appear in my role as her friend, and also as the one who looks at her, trying to take on different angles.

I believe it is something that results from wanting to pay respect… not just showing one side of a person, but trying to widen the view by positioning us as writers in several places around. Putting on different glasses.

Aren’t we all a myriad of past and current selves, facets of us coming together to appear as one? This complexity is so fascinating.

VS: I repeat the same question I have been asking the other Touchstone Award winners. When most poets are trying to write short poems, what prompted you to write a lengthy poem? Was it a planned choice?

KM: I guess I have already answered that a bit, haha. I do love short poetry, the way it condenses is remarkable. It’s like zooming in on the central motif in a movie. (But what about the movie?)

At times a short poem is not enough. We need a story, a setting, a backdrop. We need the conversation.

I wrote haibun-like before I knew haibun existed, or even before I knew about haiku. I always loved to combine poetry and prose. I loved short passages of prose that encapsulated a story much greater than they took up space on a page. Haibun have the same ability! Something magical happens between the haiku and the prose, the same goes for tanka prose. I could go on for days about this…

I had to smile a bit about the “planned”. I never plan for real, I follow the flow and what feels right in the moment I do it. This might sound not very sorted, or even adult, but you know, let’s play. Art needs us playing. I knew I wanted to write longer about my friend, no single haiku could have hold everything that I wanted to express, so seeing it from that perspective I have “planned” to write a lengthy poem. In fact, I didn’t have a choice though, it just wanted to be written exactly in that way.

Prompt for members:

Here are some phrases from Kati's haibun that appealed to me:

1. "This small, big thing."

2. "...making space for each other."

3. "In the end, it is what it is."

Do these phrases stir something in you? I am looking forward to reading your haibun inspired by these phrases. Any one or all three even. You are not required to use these phrases in your haibun, but should you do so, please remember to give credit to Kati.

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.