Pop Goes the Haiku. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Pop Goes the Haiku

Pop Goes the Haiku is M. L. VanBlaricum’s collection of “American Pops,” three-line poems related to haiku and senryu but intentionally free from strict syllable counting. In the preface, VanBlaricum frames the book through Jack Kerouac’s idea of American haiku: simple, direct, image-driven poems that capture a moment without poetic overworking. The collection is organized around emotional and observational clusters: love and feelings, moons, observations and happenings, questions, birds, nature and seasons, and travel.

The strongest through-line is a mature attention to fleeting experience. VanBlaricum writes about marriage, parents, grandparents, surgery, old friends, frogs, birds, weather, childhood embarrassments, aging bodies, memory lapses, travel landmarks, and small jokes hidden in ordinary life. Many pieces lean toward senryu because they focus on human foibles, irony, and humor rather than formal seasonal nature imagery. The poems are often plainspoken, but the best ones leave interpretive space: an empty playground, a wife still sleeping beside an absent partner, crosses marching on Normandy Beach. Murf O’Dean’s drawings and VanBlaricum’s photographs give the book a scrapbook-like visual rhythm, supporting its central idea: remembered moments, sharply seen, can become concise poetry for readers. It is accessible, domestic, comic, elegiac, and deliberately modest in scale.

This is VanBlaricum’s second book of poetry. His first, Reflections in a Boomer’s Eye, was published in 2016.

M.L. VanBlaricum, better known as Mike, Daddy, Pops, Grandpa, and Duckman, unless he is in trouble and he is then invariably called Michael, lives in Santa Barbara, California, and Urbana, Illinois, with his wife, Pam. He was educated in public schools in Momence and Princeton, Illinois, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received three degrees in Electrical Engineering. He has been an earthworm and a Kool-Aid salesman, a paperboy, a lawn mower, a lifeguard, a deliveryman, a musician, a steel worker, a house painter, an appliance repairman, a Boy Scout, a ballet dancer, a lead smelter, a printer's assistant, a Girl Scout leader, a collector of books, a rare book dealer, a columnist, a dramaturg, an author, a lecturer, a research engineer, an inventor, a CEO, and, maybe once, a spy.