A poetry night with Sophie Hannah on 25 July 2017

Poetry reading and conversation with Sophie Hannah: internationally acclaimed novelist and one of Britain's best-loved poets. Sophie read from her collection ‘Marrying the Ugly Millionaire’ – a droll yet disarming exploration of modern marriage and everyday experiences – and talked about her life and inspiration when writing in the space between poetry and crime fiction. Sophie was in conversation with SCC Overton of Hong Kong Writers Circle.


#HongKongBookFair #BritishCouncilHK #HongKongWritersCircle #SophieHannah

[BUKCOLLECTOR]

Enjoyed very much your poems and unique word choices that had an emotional impact and kept me engaged throughout.
I, too, am a poet ( I write mostly Japanese format poems i.e. haiku, senryu, tanka/kyoka, haibun etc. I hope you don’t mind me sharing a Tanka and a haiku dedicated to Matshuo Bashō’s frog with added insightful commentary by the late AHA founder and poet Jane Reichhold who considered my haiku among her 10 favorite haiku of all time! What an honor.
Here’s the Bashō poem with Jane Reichhold’s insightful commentary:


Bashō’s frog
four hundred years
of ripples


At first the idea of picking only 10 of my favorite haiku seemed a rather
daunting task. How could I review all the haiku I have read in my life and decide that there were only 10 that were outstanding? Then realized I was already getting a steady stream of excellent haiku day by day through the AHA forum.

The puns and write-offs based on Basho's most famous haiku are so
numerous I would have said that nothing new could be said with this
method, but here Al Fogel proved me wrong. Perhaps part of my delight in this haiku lies in the fact that I agree with him. Here he is saying one thing about realism–ripples are on a pond after a frog jumps in, but because it refers back to Basho and his famous haiku, he is also saying something about the haiku and authors who have followed him. We, and our work, are just ripples while Basho holds the honor of inventing the idea of the sound of a frog leaping is the sound of water

As haiku spreads around the world, making ripples in more and larger ponds, its ripples are wider–including us all. But his last word reminds us
that we are ripples and our lives ephemeral. It will be the frogs that will remain.

~~

Now the tanka:

returning home from
a Jackson Pollock
exhibition
I smear paint on my face
and morph into art.
~~