Japanese Poetic Forms: Haiku and Martial Arts

Professor Emeritus from Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA. As a music educator, and specialist in the Carl Orff Music for Children, she has authored several source books published in this creative approach to teaching music. It combines speech, music, drama and dance. Poetry and the rhythm of words are of particular emphasis. She has presented workshops throughout the United States and has been a guest lecturer at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and the University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada, as well as for the South African Orff Society. Since retirement, Elizabeth has divided her time between performing on Native American flutes as “Grandmother Flute Player” and writing poetry, particularly haiku. Until recently she was plains and mountains coordinator for the Haiku Society of America. She has launched two haiku groups, High Country Haiku in Colorado Springs, CO, and Heartland Haiku in Topeka, KS. Her poetry has been published by many small presses, including one in Japan which selects haiku from world submissions for the book commemorating the annual Basho Festival. Cuurrently, Elizabeth's haiku is included in an international collection of haiku, HERMITAGE, edited and published in English by Ion Codrescu of Romania. As a poetry technician, she has presented haiku workshops for children and adults in haiku, concrete poetry and EYE-KU, a new from in which the images of the poem become visual. A show featuring framed EYE-KU has been presented at Smoke Brush Art Center in Colorado Springs, CO. Invented for children, these poems are often utilized by music educators in workshops combining art, music and language arts. Elizabeth is also versatile in writing senyru which is a form that places the focus, not on the natural world, but on human nature, encouraging humor, wit and sarcasm. Her production includes sequence of both and printed as frame-able posters over relevant backgrounds. A sequence of these poems have been printed as “Voices of the Ocean,” “Opera Haiku,” and for specific geographical areas, such as “Monument Rock”. Other Japanese poetic forms embraced by Elizabeth feature and which have been accepted and published in international books and journals.