Watery poetics

This page acts as an open sketchbook for written experimentations with watery-poetics, with wet-language, rain-talk, ice-water-to-the-bone words.

Poem by Pearl Colette

I dig a hole and it fills up with water.

(All the flowers are open and filled with water. The site of the breakage leaks red.)

At dawn, an object washes to shore.

(A roll of paper, tied with string.)

Haiga

Watercourse Way is an exploration of watery approaches to image-making and word-speaking. Workshop participants and artists are invited to explore the interdisciplinary Japanese art of Haiga, in the knowledge that to be truly interdisciplinary is to embody a watery nature. Traditionally, Haiga are brush and ink paintings, created by haiku poets (haijin), and accompanied by a haiku poem. Like the poetic form they accompany, haiga are based on simple, yet often profound, observations of the everyday world. Stephen Addiss points out that “since they are both created with the same brush and ink, adding an image to a haiku poem was … a natural activity.”