Alan Pizzarelli

Our guest speaker for the 2014 Seabeck Haiku Getaway

Since the early 1970s, Alan Pizzarelli’s output of authentic English-language haiku and senryu has received worldwide acclaim and popularity. He has been much-publicized as a pioneer of English-language senryu, and as a leading poet and spokesman for Western haiku and senryu. Pizzarelli has published more than a dozen limited-edition chapbooks of haiku and related poems, including City Beat (Islet Books, 1991), which won the Haiku Society of America’s first place Merit Book Award in 1992. His work appears in many anthologies worldwide, including each of the three editions of The Haiku Anthology edited by Cor van den Heuvel (1974, 1986, 1999). From 2005 to 2009, he was the senryu editor for the online journal, Simply Haiku. He was also a consultant for Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus (Penguin Poets, 2003) edited by Regina Weinreich.

twilight

staples rust

in the telephone pole

Tom Lynch writes of the preceding Pizzarelli haiku that it is “as profound and literal an evocation of sabi, the incessant rusting of existence wrought by time, as exists in Western haiku.” Pizzarelli is currently cohost and coproducer with Donna Beaver of the popular poetry podcast, Haiku Chronicles. We look forward to having Alan and Donna with us for the Seabeck Haiku Getaway in 2014.