-Special Feature-

  
Grant Hackett was born in Missouri in 1955. He currently resides in Great Barrington, a town in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. He works as a freelance indexer of books.

Asked about how he came to haiku and short poetry, as well as his views on them, Mr. Hackett wrote:

“In 1974, in a small transcendental bookshop in Columbia, Missouri, a book opened my hand and put Ippekiro’s poems there. Cape Jasmine and Pomegranates. Reading his poems, I began writing poetry. Depending on how one defines haiku, what I wrote was haiku, or not. Like this:

this boy
could be the everlasting one
vernal sky

I wrote for a long time listening to Ippekiro. Sometime later I found Robert Bly’s Tiny Poems, as well as his Silence in the Snowy Fields. Also, Santoka Taneda’s Mountain Tasting and Makoto Ueda’s Modern Japanese Haiku.  Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. Each of these having a profound influence. Later still, I came to Jack Kerouac’s haiku. Then the music and sensibility of James Schuyler. Lorca. Neruda. Oliver.”

&

“The poems I write inhabit the borderlands of haiku. There are many definitions of haiku. I don’t want to create a definition of haiku that will  umbrella my work though. Others can create definitions. And yet, if I am a weed, then haiku is my soil.

I began writing the one line poem about a year and a half ago—the day I found the double colon. The double colon is there to create an unweighted pause. A pause in the breath, a pause in thought. A pause that is different than the weighted or directional relationship our standard punctuation indicates. And that is also    different than a hard line break. The two sides of the thought-pause may exist in harmony or in ambiguity. At the moment of the pause there may be peace or there may be tension. The thought-pause is a poetic tool, a poetic device, used poetically.

The clearest voice I have to speak in this world speaks in one line poems.

The path to the one line poem is not reduction but distillation. The path through the one line poem should not be simple or straight.

I passionately believe that a single one line poem creates a universe of poetry.

Forgive these words, they are not birds.  (Cora Brooks)

Perceiving itself, my mind is the path of birds  (Grant Hackett)”

Readers are invited to visit his poetry blog, Falling Off the Mountain.

With a title of his choosing, here follows a selection of recent poems by Grant Hackett:

tiny mortal drums