THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 27th February 2025. Alice Wanderer, featured poet

hosts: Shalini Pattabiraman & Vidya Shankar

mentor: Lorraine Haig

A Thursday Feature

27th February 2025

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT BELOW

This month we have the pleasure of celebrating the work of Alice Wanderer. 

Alice Wanderer has been dabbling in haiku for decades but only became excited about haibun in 2018 or so after reading work produced by Kala Ramesh and her students on Facebook. Alice's book of translations of the haiku of Sugita Hisajo, Lips Licked Clean (Red Moon Press) won a Touchstone Award in 2021. Her first chapbook, Flow, deals with the rivers and beaches of her local place and indigenous dispossession. Her second, She Wants to See Birds and Flowers, will be appearing on the Snapshot Press website in the spring of 2025. 

We thank Alice for her wonderful sharing and wish her the very best.

Alice Wanderer

On the Horizon

(Anderson Hunt's Iron Landscape, 2009, Cranbourne)

Life-sized. Leafless. Three artificial trees emerge from a platform of red scoria. Recalling ringbarked River Red Gums, each has a trunk of rusted iron with attached silvery patches, two branches and a few terminal twigs. A uniform blue scorcher of a day.

Below the platform, at ground level, a beach of sand. Eight scattered rocks, also made of iron, represent the major fragments of the Cranbourne Meteorite. A fiery sky visitor.

Ryōanji. Contented Dragon Temple. Late 15th century. Kyoto.

A dry rock garden. 15 stones stand in raked ripples of white gravel. 14 peaks emerge from mist or foam. From every observation point, a 15th disappears.

bushfire clean-up

skulls

at the waterhole

Note: Anderson Hunt’s Iron Landscape installation commemorates the Cranbourne meteorite, the second largest meteorite found in Australia. Since the mid-1800s, several fragments have been found in the city of Cranbourne in Melbourne, Australia. Click to learn more. Photo by Alice Wanderer.

Source: https://contemporaryhaibunonline.com/cho-19-2table-of-contents/alice-wanderer-on-the-horizon/

Prompt:

For our final prompt this month, I invite you to write in response to the title of a poem by Denise Riley, ‘Outside from the start’. Consider what it means to be on the outside of something. If we are on the outside of something perhaps we are also on the inside of something else. How do you look at these different worlds that put us on the outside or inside of a world?

You can additionally read the poem here: 

https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-5707_OUTSIDE-FROM-THE-START

PLEASE NOTE:

1. Only two haibun per poet per prompt.

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. Post your final edited version on top of your original verse.

5. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems.

Please Note: No haibun will be picked up from here for haikuKATHA, issue 43, May 2025. See the notice below for submission details. The workshopping will continue. And The Haibun Gallery will continue to function the way it has been since November 2021.

Please read the Announcement completely, till the end :)) If you have doubts, write to us here, on this thread. Your ONE HAIBUN Submission can be from the haibun you have posted here.

Choose your best!

We nominate your poems for Contemporary Haibun Anthology brought out by Red Moon Press and Touchstone Haibun Contest. Help us to make this new format successful.

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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT from Kala: NOTICE

              NOTICE

Dear Haibuneers

Starting from March 2025, we at haikuKATHA are moving on to a new submissions format for haibun submissions. (Only for haibun, please note!)

Writers are invited to submit one unpublished haibun per submission window.

Kindly note the submissions calendar.

1-20 March, to be considered for publication in May

1-20 June, to be considered for publication in August

1-20 September, to be considered for publication in November

1-20 December, to be considered for publication in February

All accepted submissions will receive an email to confirm their acceptance by the 5th day of the publication month.

Your unpublished (only one) haibun should be sent to: https://forms.gle/xUEiiDR9wd2dgqtR9 only during the submission period. 

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The Haibun Gallery continues as is.

We will be having editors and prompts, and your sharing…