Martin Lucas Haiku Award
MARTIN LUCAS HAIKU AWARD 2024
Judge’s report by Richard Tindall
I would like to thank Ian Storr for giving me the opportunity to judge the Martin Lucas Haiku Award 2024. My gratitude goes out to all the poets who entered their work. It was a pleasure to read your haiku.
First Prize
under the ice
the burn burbles
a nation again
D W Brydon
This haiku doesn’t draw attention to itself. It invites being entered into by intuition and not by thinking. It illustrates Martin Lucas’s belief that haiku is ‘not a descriptive poetry, it is a reflective poetry.’ We slip into this haiku ‘under the ice’ where the stream’s low bubbling sounds ease into burble’s other meaning of something being said in not a clear way. This visionary movement of water, now becoming language, flows into the phrase ‘a nation again’, implying a community of people whose language, traditions and politics are being reborn after a period of inertia. Whatever meaning you read into this wonderful haiku it is, ultimately, a celebration of harmony.
Second Prize
September morning
butterflies lift their copper
from the dappled path
John Barlow
In the UK, delight in seeing small copper butterflies is tempered by the knowledge of them suffering significant decline. This influenced my initial reading of the haiku and I was convinced its middle line referenced this. In ‘butterflies lift their copper’, I now intuit a gentle alchemy where the butterflies’ orange wings have been transmuted into copper as metal. Because the butterflies’ wing muscles are cold, due to the early autumn air, they rise from their basking carrying the extra weight of awkwardness.
Third Prize
still on its needles
the baby blanket
moth-holed
Ingrid Jendrzejewski
The unwieldy first line of this haiku unsettles. The word ‘still’ is an awkward fit, ‘still’ makes more sense when we read the second line and discover that the needles are knitting needles attached to a baby’s blanket, but it remains disturbing. At its ‘moth-holed’ conclusion, the haiku’s two timelines meet and ‘still’ is now seen to possess a psychological depth suggesting readings to do with loss and grief. The haiku’s lines, shortening in length as they descend, adds visual pathos to its powerful emotion.
Third Prize
December fog
the bikers’ caff steamed up
with chat and chips
Stuart Handysides
This ‘caff’ reminds me of the Ace Cafe portrayed in the 1960s British biker film The Leather Boys. The haiku echoes that film’s kitchen sink realism and its informal expression. With gentle mocking the poet has placed his bikers, traditionally seen as outsiders, on the inside. Framed by fog and steam, the poet’s compassion and humour shine through.
Commended
Gunmetal and gold
a sky so full of glory
promises a storm
Sheena Odle
An atmospheric haiku, reminiscent of a JMW Turner painting, that values emotion over narrative. The unyielding solidities of ‘Gunmetal’ and ‘gold’ suggest battle is imminent. We step back from this blaze of glory with the colourless last line which ‘promises a storm’. We are invited to meet this promise and relish further grandeur, as Turner would, or we can run away.
misty morning
a hawk tucked tight
into its feathers
Helen Ogden
A simply expressed haiku that moves beyond description with the words ‘tucked tight’. The closely compressed ‘t’ ‘ck’ and ‘d’ sounds are charged with the hawk’s physicality, which intensifies the hawk’s power even at rest.
sequins in the lint trap . . .
the first hummingbird arrives
at the feeder
Julie Schwerin
A haiku of colour and light that dazzles. The almost transcendental correspondence between human ornamentation and nature’s iridescence is both satisfying and beautiful.
lightening twilight
the thrush adds a note
to yesterday’s song
John Barlow
Each time I read this haiku, I emerge from it with a sense of hope, and experience what Jane Hirshfield calls ‘a restoration of faith in continuance.’
MARTIN LUCAS HAIKU AWARD 2023
Judge’s report by Jim Chessing
I am honored to adjudicate this year’s Martin Lucas Haiku Award. Lucas challenged us to look beyond content to the way that content “is formed, cooked and combined” (Martin Lucas, “Haiku as Poetic Spell,” Presence, 41, May 2010). Haiku has always been about finding poetry in the commonplace, and it has been form, the way it is said, that allows the commonplace to be experienced in a new light. In a haiku contest, I think the way it is said is all the more paramount, because it is technique that can be judged, not content. As I read through the entries, I kept Lucas’ principles in mind and noted where they overlapped with my own. As daunting as it was to cull the winners from the field, I fear the more daunting task has been to convey the rationale behind those choices. I hope I have succeeded. It is with humility and gratitude, then, that I offer the winners.
First Prize
after the crescendo
of a sedge warbler’s song
a breeze in the reeds
John Barlow
The sedge warbler is a shy, medium-sized bird that favors marshy, reedy habitats, and is more often heard than seen. The males’ song is a series of 6-10 whistled notes that accelerate over the course of the roughly 1-second song that typically ends on a rising note. Recordings of their song convey a distinct clicking or chattering quality. The poem begins with attention to the song of the unseen sedge warbler. When, for a moment it stops, the wind, which had been clattering through the reeds simultaneously but unnoticed, is now heard as if for the first time, echoing the sedge warbler’s song. Bird, wind and reeds come together in a moment of sensual harmony that just carries me away. Of all the entries, this one most of all captures Martin Lucas’ sense “that what is described is somehow so satisfying that we linger in the moment, and almost seek to dwell in it. This resonance is more readily evoked in rural scenes that have about them something almost primitive or archetypal . . . resonance is a natural consequence when the human focus shrinks and the horizon expands.” Form and content are inseparable. There is no element that can be altered in any way that would not diminish the poetry. From a technical point of view, I marvel at the lines’ effortless and inevitable flow through the prosodic elements that mimic the music: the repetition of r-sounds, d-sounds, and the near rhymes of “after” and “warbler’s,” “breeze” and “reeds.”
Second Prize
the rust
of a bluebird’s chest
a half-buried plow
Brad Bennett
Second place goes to this masterpiece suffused with the feeling of wabi-sabi. While “rust” in the first line describes the color of the “bluebird’s chest,” it also symbolizes transience in the last. A chance perch to a bluebird in an overgrown field or small wood grown up around it, the abandoned steel plow represents a lost farm, its people, a way of life. Past, present and future merge in the reminder that nothing lasts. Although only twelve syllables, this is a weighty poem with eight moderate to full stresses that slow the cadence, befitting the plow’s heft. The effect of the “-st” endings in lines one and two creates a small stop, as in a plow biting through a spot of hard ground.
What separates the first prize poem from this one is that the first is experienced almost wholly through the senses, while in the latter the sensory detail is mediated by the intellect in terms of the reader’s associations to the plow. Both are strong haiku, and the second, in fact, is more representative of the haiku published in journals. In the end, the determinative factor for me is the former elicits a stronger emotional response than the latter.
Third Prizes
an albatross not an albatross what we love
Claire Vogel Camargo
the way inside forgiveness a blue heron
Debbie Olson
I discuss these two poems together, for they are structurally similar and both treat complex human feelings without sentimentality. In fact, it is unclear what each poet means in either, yet there is a felt sense that there is deep meaning to be found.
Let me take a stab at the first. What comes to mind is the saying, wearing an albatross around one’s neck. It means to carry a heavy burden or be subject to a significant barrier that prevents the achievement of something. The expression derives from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in which a sailor kills an albatross for which his punishment is to wear it around his neck. In the context of the haiku above, then, when is an albatross not an albatross? Or, when is a burden not a burden? It’s when that burden is love. It’s when how we love is so hard. Like a mother’s love for a wayward adult child, or a husband’s for his wife who is gravely ill. We do it anyway and because of. This is just my take and not by any means a definitive interpretation.
The second poem, too, is steeped in mystery of a different sort. What is the inside of forgiveness? Where is that place where a particularly grievous wrong lives, one that requires some sort of moral transformation to reconcile? How do you do it? The answer: a blue heron. When I think of these birds, I think of their exquisite grace, patience and determination. Perhaps these are some of the qualities the poet had in mind that might be required to make the journey toward forgiveness.
Lucas prized the kind of haiku that defied simple paraphrase or analysis, and as a psychologist I appreciate the depth of feeling and moral choices that these poets so artfully describe.
Commended
a color by no name horizon line
Stefanie Bucifal
This provocative yet elusive haiku is similar to the third prize poems, but it’s more abstract and the emotion is unclear. It reminds me of a tanka by Rebecca Drouilhet that included this footnote: “The color of nothing is a specially mixed color used to make realistic shadows in oil painting” (Skylark, 6/1, 2018). I don’t know if this is what the poet intended, but the idea provides some direction to the question, What does a color that has no name have to do with a point on the horizon that you can see but never reach? It’s a tantalizing mystery.
leaves on the turn—
bending to pocket
a rusting screw
Joanne E. Miller
This haiku is light, colorful, serendipitous and full of motion. From the galloping anapestic feet of “on the TURN” and “[BEND]-ing to POCK-[et]” to the concluding down and up cadence of the last line’s two iambic feet, mimicking the bending and rising to pick something up. There is an interesting relationship, too, between the leaves and the screw. Not only do they share similar colors, but they share dissimilar purposes that in the end amount to the same thing—after their work is done, they both fade away; a different time scale for the screw perhaps, but it fades nonetheless.
buffeting wind
a child blowing bubbles
from her wounds
John Hawkhead
I single out this last poem for the sheer pathos of the image, a wounded girl with a blank expression expelling perhaps her last air through blood-tinged saliva, cradled in the arms of her bewildered and helpless mother or father. In war suffering is always personal and largely borne by the innocent. Sadly, this is a poem for the times, if not for all times.