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Year of Haiku and Other Collected Works
Year of Haiku and Other Collected Works
Year of Haiku and Other Collected Works
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Year of Haiku and Other Collected Works

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Written in 2012 and composed of 366 separate haiku-- one for every day of the year-- the ambitious poetry suite Year of Haiku serves as the centerpiece for the author's first anthology of shorter works, all of which were written in the period from 2005 - 2017. Also included is a second poetry suite, a set of celestial sonnets collectively titled Poesis Universalis; the James Thurber-inspired short story, The Night Colored Dog; and fourteen other poems. The included works range widely in tone and subject, from quiet, emotive freeform verses about night, to darker material about grappling with depression, mortality, and the unspeakable tragedies which have become so much a sign of these troubled times.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 25, 2017
ISBN9781370538393
Year of Haiku and Other Collected Works
Author

Mitchell Van Duzer

Mitchell Van Duzer (b. 1985, Greenville, South Carolina) is an American writer, fine artist and graphic designer. At the age of four, his family moved from Sparta, New Jersey to the shores of Lake Lanier in Georgia, where he spent the rest of his childhood and adolescence. He spent three years in Sarasota, Florida, attending Ringling College of Art and Design, before relocating to Vancouver, British Columbia, and earning his B.F.A. in Visual Art at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and a certification in graphic design from British Columbia Institute of Technology. He currently lives in Bellingham, Washington.

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    Year of Haiku and Other Collected Works - Mitchell Van Duzer

    Dear Reader,

    To sum it up: what you hold now in your hand, roughly, is my twenties, in a convenient bite-size format. The pages of this publication contain the products of my toil and my angst, spread out over a period of over a decade. Enumerated, they include two poetry suites, fourteen stand-alone poems, and one short story. The earliest among these date back to about 2005, when I was 19 years of age— a young college student living in Florida and studying to become an artist. The most recent, on the other hand, was written mere months before publication, in 2017, at the age of 31. The bulk of them, though, were written in the interim, during my third decade of existence, which was a fairly eventful period in my life. Because of this, I am very excited to be able to share this work with you, and truly honored to have you read it.

    However, before jumping into the work itself, I believe a little context would be helpful here.

    All I can really say about my childhood is that it was not a particularly happy one. I spent most of it, from the time I was 4 to my high school graduation at 18, living in suburbs of northern Georgia, in the thick of the Bible Belt. I never felt especially welcome there; I was a northern transplant, my family was neither wealthy nor overtly religious, and I esteemed academia and the arts, while the culture around me was far more concerned with athleticism. I had very few friends as a child. What I did have, however, was an innate ability to articulate myself— if not through my spoken words, then at least through my writings and my visual art. When I was in high school, my primary goal became to escape Georgia before the place could do any more irreversible damage to my self-esteem than it already had, and I realized that my art and my writing could be just the ticket I needed.

    No sooner than had I graduated from high school in 2004, my parents and I moved south to Florida, finally breaking free of the repressive hold of Georgia. From 2004 to 2007, I was a student at Ringling College of Art and Design, in Sarasota, Florida. I was a computer animation major— a rather prestigious position, because of the college's industry ties to Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks. However, it was also an incredibly demanding field, and one where I found I did not have as much freedom to experiment as I had hoped initially. The other majors called computer animators Cave Dwellers, and for good reason; most of us rarely ever went outside, because we were expected to spend every waking moment working on our projects in the labs, while eschewing sleep, meals, and social interactions— which meant that, even in this new place, I still didn't really have many friends. It wasn't the life for me, and truthfully, I believe that atmosphere played a significant part in the development of my clinical depression. After three years in the major, I washed out, completely burnt out on having devoted so much of my time to an endeavor that rewarded me so little.

    Knowing that I no longer had any desirable path forward in Florida, I of course came to the extremely logical conclusion that my best course of action was to move to Canada.

    So that was exactly what I did. In fact, I spent the bulk of my twenties in Canada, coaxed there by my friends Laurie and Becky, whom I had originally met online, and with whom I had built two of the deepest relationships I've ever had. By the time I was done at Ringling, I was so fed up with being alone and deprived of a social life, that I convinced my parents I was ready to live on my own, in British Columbia. In October of 2007, I moved to Surrey for a few months to get situated. In January of 2008, I moved to an apartment in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver and resumed my studies, this time as a general fine arts major at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The change of location and focus worked wonders for me, and I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2010, which was later supplemented with an Associate Certificate in Graphic Design from the British Columbia Institute of Technology in 2013.

    Finding a way to earn a degree, however, turned out to be the easy part. Unfortunately, after graduating, I ran into some difficulty actually translating the degree into a job. The economy was not particularly good, my specific degree and skill set were not in high demand, and most companies where I submitted applications for employment apparently were more interested in hiring native Canadian applicants rather than some unknown American. My residency status in Canada ultimately ran out of time, and I was forced to relocate back to the US. In June of 2014, I found myself in Bellingham, Washington, just south of the Canadian border— close enough to visit whenever I want. And of course, that brings us to the present.

    Or, to put a finer point on it: some of these poems are from my years in Florida, most are from my years in B.C., and at least one is from my time here in Washington.

    Resolving which of my many poems during this period of time were worthy of publication here was a challenge. My criteria ultimately came down to selecting

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