What has your writing journey looked like? How did you get started in poetry?

My path to poetry has been circuitous. I enjoyed writing when I was a kid up through college. Life got in the way, but, also the “muses” stopped speaking. My writing life became lost in the hustle and bustle of establishing a career and a family. Also, while I enjoyed writing poetry, I thought I would be a novelist. I remember being frustrated because I enjoyed writing scenes and vignettes, but I had trouble stitching them into a narrative. With hindsight, I now realize that I was writing flash fiction and prose poetry. This drive continues—but they typically become haibun, a prose poem or flash piece combined with haiku. That said, inspiration returned and I started writing again in my late thirties—a gap of over fifteen years. By that time, I had a career, a wife, and three kids. While my pen was still, I was busy developing the wisdom to have something to say—something worth saying—in my writing.

What inspired you to use clouds as a subject for your poem, “Cloud Haiku”?

I love looking up at the clouds! As a boy, I remember my mother pointing out interesting clouds and we still exchange texts and calls about them. I work as an accountant. My offices at work and at home both offer excellent views of the western sky—which constantly offers weather changes and a sunset each day. The diversity and drama of clouds offer many perfect metaphors for a poet.

I saw through your past work that you often write in haiku. What about haiku as a form are you most drawn to? 

Being a haiku poet was not on my bingo card. Like many people, I wrote a 5-7-5 haiku or two in elementary school, as part of a lesson on syllables. I had also heard of Bashō. I “discovered” proper haiku in 2021 when researching formal poetry in response to a call from a journal. I couldn’t “shake” haiku. They are deceptively simple and have hundreds of years of history, philosophy, and art. I have only begun to scratch the surface. Haikus demand extreme concision and effective, multi-layered imagery. This makes haiku a great teacher for poetry in general, as well.

There is a certain beautiful simplicity in haiku that really illuminates its subject. In the case of your poem, “Cloud Haiku”, what do you think is especially highlighted through your use of the form?

Have you even seen a cloud make something marvelous in the sky, you turn to a friend to point it out, but, by the time you both located the clouds, it has changed back into something amorphous or mundane? The quality of clouds that makes them so memorable for me is their transience—which also makes them so fraught with meaning. I would hope that my readers would take a few minutes to look at the clouds.

Do your surroundings often influence your poetry? I saw that you're from Pennsylvania--does this ever appear in your writing?

Absolutely.  I am blessed to live in a beautiful area of rolling hills with four seasons. On my days working in the office, I get to see the first fold of the Appalachians and I have to cross the Susquehanna River—two topics that are well represented in my poetry. I used to avoid specifically mentioning my surroundings because I thought it made my work more universal to be generic. I had a change of heart when I read John Ashbery’s “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” (a poem I greatly enjoyed, but can’t claim to understand) which mentions my local river, the Susquehanna. I figured if Ashbery could talk about a bunch of rivers he never saw, there is nothing stopping me from writing about the river I have been crossing and recrossing for the past few decades.

What do you hope for readers to take away from this poem, and your work in general? What impressions do you hope to leave?

First, don’t be afraid to look around you. You never know what you will see. There is a lot of beauty happening in the world that we miss.

Second, exploring haiku has been very valuable for me as a poet. If you are a poet reading this, I encourage you to try it out!

Read Joshua’s poem, “Cloud Haiku” in dulcet Literary magazine, vol. One, Issue No. 1.