hello again!

This project has been going on for maybe seven or eight years, but a few years ago i collated and printed e pluribus haiku (2011) and was soon thereafter invited to present at a benefit reading, the poster for which appears in this blog. I am all in favor of helping the homeless, based on my experiences, and took on the organization of the event along with the publicity it would generate. Pressured to make a publication, I put what I had in paper and on Kindle, and made it available.

The online version, which is on this site, continues to expand and now includes over 1200 haiku, which can be read by clicking on the state names further down in the template. My idea behind links in poems is to show one way links can be used, i.e. to represent a subconscious awareness that every moment is both within a natural seasonal frame as well as a specific place awareness.

For the online version, I find myself more indebted to the Univ. of Texas; i'm grateful for their maps, at least until i get my own, and, to those who unwittingly contributed pictures of "summer", "fall", "winter", "new year" and "spring" I say, thank you, at least until I replace those pictures with my own, which I keep promising to upload. The idea here is not so much to highlight, use, or exploit the pictures themselves, but to show that subconscious awareness that one has, within each poem, by using links. If you feel I have used your photo inappropriately, write and I'll remove it. I did not mean to exploit you, and the poems are not intended to highlight or take advantage of the photography itself.

At first I tried to publish the print versions every July 4, since the volume is at its heart a tribute to my native country. To be honest, however,my travels even in that time included three other countries, also quite intense, and choosing to do it this way has forced me to exclude them, or put poems about them elsewhere. In some cases I have taken events that actually happened in Canada or Mexico, for example, and simply put them in one of the fifty states; I make no claims about the historical accuracy of any of the events in this collection. What I will say, though, is that the U.S.A. is a wild and diverse country, and above all I'm grateful to have been here, as a young person, at a time when one could travel freely and experience what I did.

read these incorrectly dated notes, hidden, for more information.