pi & anne

Some news! (Some positive ones, at least for me. And let’s be honest, I need those. We all do, and there ARE positive things happening in my vicinity.)

I’ve been busy gathering, editing and preparing a new book with 95% tanka, and it is no easy task, as I want to make it right. At the same time (good news, Kati!) it has been joyful to read and revisit a lot of poems and to see their potential to become part of something bigger.

I see a book as an extended poem in the sense of that putting the right poems in the right order side by side creates a combined “greater” meaning. It’s almost like a sequence, almost. (Heck, let me take up the cudgels for sequences and lament the lack of them in short poetry journals. Yes, I know it’s in the name “short poetry journal”. I want to remind editors out there though that haiku wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been renga before, which is not quite known to be a short form…)

(That’s my inner little burning desire for others to learn about the brilliance of sequences… haha. I enjoy using the white space between the beads of short poems in a row.)

So. A new book! I came so far as working on a cover and that’s how far I got:

I’m pretty happy with it, I enjoy playing with expectations ;).

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Yesterday, the very important Password: the journal of very short poetry by Melissa Allen released its issue 2.1 (February 2025). This time including an essay on Japanese avant-garde haiku by Hiroaki Sato! Very interesting. Still devouring.

Here is my contribution to it:

and so kindness takes turns inside out

Kati Mohr

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Other good news: I’ve got some haibun accepted that I had submitted repeatedly, three to five times at least. I’m glad they will finally be in print/on screen for the public to read and enjoy in spring!

Also: I discovered a new green tea variation that I like, I can hear birds singing in the morning when I stand up and open the windows for fresh air. Scoop Ahoy ice-cream. Lego. Half-eaten bananas and reading “Butter” by Asako Yuzuki. Planning meetings with friends. A freshly re-oiled wooden kitchen table and collecting old photography for more cutout poems. Sounds good enough for me.