This is me and it's all you're going to see of me this week.

 

Down for several days with food poisoning, I asked my friend and fellow poet Susan Benoit McDonough to take over the enterprise this week with her Haigas.

 

Sue is a poet, gardener, a sometimes entrepreneur, and lover of laughter which, she says, helps her keep her sense of humor about her golf game. She can be found in Cave Creek, Arizona in the the fall, as soon as  the  rattlesnakes go back to sleep, and at the coast of Maine in time to see the tiny "bells" of the Solomon's Seal bloom in her garden. Her work appears in a variety of print journals and online poetry sites.

 

She says she has been writing poetry over the last decade or more and, from time to time, likes to explore forms. She spent the last month taking photographs with her cell phone of whatever she encountered during her day. Then she worked with her photos and what they inspired in the creation of Tanka. She says this gave her a way to see her world anew and brought joy in the editing and manipulating of her photos and joining them with her poetry muse. This photo/poetry combination are similar to Haiga, which combine Haiku and paintings. The prose in Haiga is dependent, yet independent.

 

She says her goal was to bring the two arts of photography and poetry together in a way that made the two arts more  satisfying together than the are independently.

 

Here she is and here they are.

 

 

 

 

 

I return, brief and tiny, to  thank Sue for stepping for me this week with her Haigas.

 

I suffered several days of incapacitation and wasn't able to do any work on the post myself. Lucky for us all that Sue was available to present her photos and poems.

 

Thanks to you, my Blueline housemate.

 

And, of  course,  I still  have books to sell.

 

And here's where I  sell them: