by Mary Barnet

Out of a renovated 1836 barn in New Jersey nearby where George Washington camped, 2 artists whose families likewise date back to early America work on the Internet and in ‘live media’ Mary Barnet’s husband, Richard Schiff is in and contributed footage to the Academy Award winning film “Freeheld”; his paintings are in the Whiney and other collections as well as The Jerusalem Museum of Fine Arts; he publishes The Greenwich Village Gazette (nycny.com), and PoetryMagazine.com, which Mary founded in 1996 and still edits; Richard, a man of many hats is likewise known as founder of a new genre of poetry film makers (his work can be seen widely on the Internet).

Mary, when she is not leading her band of internet poets, is the author of The New American: Selected Poems with artwork by husband Richard Schiff (richardschiff.com).

The New American was called by writer/critic Adam Doanaldson Powell of Norway “an intelligent work,” and the work of “a mature artist,” and by Janet Brennan “one of those rare pieces of art that will live long into the future.”

He states:

The title of this collection of poetry describes the book quite aptly. It represents the tradition of Americana – both re-visited and updated. The poetry varies in style and form, including nature romantic, inspirational, social anthropological and socio-political commentary, and both free-style prose poetry and some rhyme. The writing is somewhat deceptive in that M. Barnet-Schiff has quietly worked hidden layers into many of the poems, that are first revealed after several readings.

In fact as Janet Brennan, US author and critic says:

It is indeed, a compilation of what it means to be The New American”. It is the sum total of what was and still are the values that our country was founded upon. Mary takes us into the hearts of those hardworking entrepreneurs who founded the small businesses in our country in her “At Nine we Open the Door,” and “Losing Hands,” only to go on to question the disappearance of these wonderful icons in her “Fourth of July.”

Mary Barnet does something and she does it well. She weaves her own images of her beautiful homeland into her poetry as only a lover of life can do. Barnet successfully manages to realize that there are always questions and it is not necessary to have answers.

Mr. Powell says further that this is a “well-written and well-conceived work of art, which especially lends itself to being performed or read out loud to oneself.” He states further “This work is full of reflection and description, and without poetic ostentation. Although the author has achieved extraordinary visual imagery and music without requiring the reader to consult a dictionary or thesaurus, many of these poems are carefully tailored pearls that could only have been written by a mature artist. While reading this book I was often reminded of the poetry of Walt Whitman and the music of Charles Ives. While Barnet-Schiff has her own particular literary accent and signature, her adeptness in regards to bringing out the music and imagery of America through varied eyes and voices qualifies her (in my opinion) as a commentator and visionary of contemporary Americana.”

In conclusion Grace Cavalieri, of the Library of Congress, as well as her The Poet and the Poem satellite radio show on Public Radio says of Mary “You are a light to many artists and to the world !”

Literary criticism (2008) by Adam Donaldson Powell and J.B. Stillwater (Janet Brennan) (based upon “The New American”, published by Gilford Press, New Jersey, USA, and printed by Cyberwit.net, 2006, ISBN 81: 8253-066-0, 99 pages, paperback). The book is available at Amazon and directly from Cyberwit.com.

Mary’s chapbooks include: “Orchidia”, “My Father’s Shoes” and “Landscape”. She has been performing poetry her entire life and has read at many venues including at Greenwich Village’s legendary Figaro Café.

---

by Jane Reichhold

Haiku, one of the shortest poetry forms now in use, is rapidly circling the globe as poets far and wide recognize and utilize the marvel of this handy form.

Haiku was developed in Japan in the 1600s from an even older poetry form called waka or tanka. Since haiku is about half the length of a tanka, it is an excellent way to begin to understand how the Japanese use poetry to express the complete range of emotions. Another amazing thing about the haiku is its elasticity. Once you are acquainted with it, you can use it to record everything from the silliest joke-idea to the deepest profound inspiration of the divine.

You may have already heard of haiku as having seventeen syllables. Let us get this straight right now. In Japanese, the haiku has 17 sound units; however a Japanese sound unit is much shorter than English syllables. If the writer uses 17 syllables of another language, that poem will contain about one-third more information than one in Japanese. Let me show you with a translation of the best-known haiku ever written by Japan’s most famous writer – Basho.



I have given you the Japanese with hyphens to show you the sound units. Underneath is an exact word-for-word translation. From this you can see that if your haiku has around 10 – 12 syllables, it will be closer to the example of a haiku in English. However, if you want to use 17 English syllables you can and you can still call the poem haiku. Just understand why others may be writing haiku that are shorter.

So how do you know when you are in front of a haiku wanting to be written? Haiku come from the world around us; are things that are seen, smelled, heard, touched, or tasted. They should not arise from our minds, our opinions, or our judgments. They just are sensations – pure and simple. Often when I have the joyous feeling I would like to say to some one, “Oh look at that!” or “Have you noticed how. . .” I am near to something that wants be in a haiku.

Writing haiku demands that we go through life noticing everything around us with new eyes – with the open joy of a child just exploring this wonderous world. The writer demands that we write the experience down in the shortest way using simple terms and without adding abstract ideas.

It sounds easy and it is! Finding haiku is an excellent method of sharpening your skills of observation as well as writing them will quickly hone your methods of using words. In spite of its shortness of form, haiku can have more rules, techniques, and methods than any other poetry form. So while you can learn a haiku in the time it takes to write three short lines, it is so complicated and offers so many levels of understanding that haiku can also be a life-time learning experience.

I invite you to my website, AHApoetry.com to explore and learn more about haiku, and maybe even tanka, renga, haiga and haibun.

Jane Reichhold’s newest book, Basho The Complete Haiku, will be released by Kodansha International of Tokyo in May. It contains translations of all the 1012 of Basho’s hokku, giving the Japanese in romaji and kanji, English and word-for-word along with notes of explanation as well as a biography of this most famous Japanese writer who lived from 1644-1694.

by Josie Whitehead

If you Google "Josie's Poems" or just "Josie Whitehead" or click here , you will discover a treasure trove of freely available poems with attached voice recordings to both enhance your reading of the poems and to help with the difficulties of the English language. My name is Josie Whitehead and I am the writer of these poems which I hope you will very much enjoy.

I have been a teacher all my life and have really enjoyed working with young people. English was one of my main subjects, but I certainly never envisaged for one moment that I would write poems in my retirement. I am married to Mike, who has made the website for the poems, and we have a daughter and two delightful little grandchildren. I wrote two poems for Christmas about 12 years ago, and discovered how much I enjoyed writing poetry.

I didn't stop until I had finished 53 poems over the Christmas period. The poems lay dormant in my notebook for 12 years. Then I offered to go in as a volunteer helper in our local school to listen to the children reading and help them. When they had a poetry lesson I mentioned to the teacher that I had written some poems for children and was invited to read one to them the next week. I read my poem called "Mickledy-Me" who is a really naughty invisible friend. The children told me that they too had invisible friends (something popular it seems with children), and they really loved the poem to the extent that they invited me to write another poem about him for the next week. I wrote "Mickledy-Me Goes to School" and the children loved this poem too.

The children in this class, and especially the children in the class the following year, were the ones who really encouraged me to write more poems for them. They also persuaded me to make them freely available to them via the internet as they didn't have enough time for them at school. They also asked me to add my own voice recording to the poems as they pointed out these things: 1/ English is a difficult language, and when you read words in a book, you can't be sure how to pronounce the words. eg "through" looks exactly like "cough" and "bough" etc and yet they are all pronounced in a different way, whereas "you" and "through" and "threw" and "blue" are all spelt differently and yet the vowel sounds are the same.

It makes sense that reading and hearing a word at the same time can help enormously with English. 2/ It is lovely to hear the voice of the person who wrote the poem reading it to you. 3/ Children who are blind or who cannot yet read can hear the poems and enjoy them too. 4/ You can download the poems onto an ipod and listen to them when you go to bed. So it was a good idea to add my voice recordings.

I have tried to write poems which range from fun story poems with rhyme and rhythm which younger children especially enjoy, but which actually are enjoyed by both young and old. I have tried to write on as many different subjects as I can possibly write, but I expect I will find lots more. I have varied my vocabulary so that older children are stretched a bit and may need to use their dictionaries. You don't just want to spend your life using simple words when the English language is so packed with wonderful language. I have also written poems in completely different styles so that you can see that, although rhyming and rhythmic poems are lots of fun, there are many more different ways to express yourselves poetically. Blank verse can be great fun, Petrarchan sonnets extremely hard to keep to the rigid guidelines. Some of my poems will just dance across the page, some will teach you some educational facts, and some, I hope, will stir up a discussion in your class. I hope you can print off some of the poems as card inserts and make birthday cards to go with them. It will be great fun for you to design the cover of your card to match the poem.

As I have been a teacher all my life, I have included for the teachers lots of ideas for lessons, using my poems, lesson plans etc. I hope to do more as the year goes by. I want to teach children about iambic feet and trochees etc and how they have an important role to play in the writing of poetry. I hope to open the door to lots of fun in your classrooms and homes with poems, and I hope to instil in you a love of poetry which will go with you right through your lives. I hope that beyond my life in this world, people will still continue to enjoy the poems which I have enjoyed writing for them, and that through reading my poetry, they will be inspired to write poems of their own. Do visit my poetry website often, and please let others know that it exists freely for their enjoyment and benefit as well.