About
Michael Dylan Welch
I've always had a sense
of poetry. Being named after Dylan Thomas may have had something
to do with that! I was born in 1962 in Watford, England, and
grew up there and in Ghana, Australia, and the Canada prairies.
In college I majored in communications/media and English, and
I received an M.A. in English in 1989. I focused my graduate
studies on twentieth-century poetry and fiction, and wrote a
thesis on Anthony Burgess and his sense of play with words--something
akin, I think, to the sense of play that pervades haiku. I delight
in the fact that "haiku," literally translated, means
"playful verse."
My path to haiku began in a high school English class, where
George Goodburn introduced haiku as a seventeen-syllable nature
poem. I've long preferred short, poetry, so I immediately gravitated
towards this form. For years all of my "haiku" were
rather ill-formed and ill-informed. About a decade later I bought
my first haiku book at a Japanese bookstore near St. Paul's Cathedral
in London, a collection of Basho's haiku translated by Lucien
Stryk. Shortly thereafter I started buying every haiku book I
could find (I now have some 3,000 haiku books and magazines).
When I encountered Cor van den Heuvel's The
Haiku Anthology, however, my perception of haiku shifted
radically, thanks most particularly to the work of Marlene Mountain.
No longer did I see "haiku" as whatever words I could
squeeze into an arbitrary cookie-cutter shape. Rather, the poems
in Cor's collection showed the value of content over the so-called
form.
Haiku and photography have much in common. Just as haiku are
often objective, image-based, and record an instant in time,
so too are photographs. Many of the best photographs succeed
because of contrast, juxtaposition, colour, subtle shades, or
through various compositional techniques. So too of haiku. I
first learned photography by seeing my dad's photographs from
his travels around the world. Often, when the whole family went
along on trips, as we often did, my brother and I got called
into service to carry a tripod or extra lenses--or to contort
our arms and bodies to create shadows around a perfect flower
so my dad could photograph it against a high-contrast background.
I worked on several yearbooks in high school, and was lucky to
have a camera of my dad's to use at that time. I discovered after
a few years that black-and-white darkroom work wasn't my cup
of tea, and decided to focus on taking colour slides. I mostly
shoot Kodachrome 64, and use a Nikon F3, primarily with a 35-105
and 75-300 Nikon zoom lenses. My photographs have appeared in
a few calendars, on the covers of a few books published by Press
Here, as well as on a couple of magazine covers. I'm a member
of the Peninsula Colorslide Club (http://www.slideclub.com/),
which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. It's a pleasure
for me to bring my two favourite forms of artistic expression
together here, and I'm grateful to Randy Brooks for this opportunity.
I have now enjoyed writing haiku poetry for nearly twenty-five
years. The genre continues to reveal its many hidden faces and
I find myself always learning. As I discover more of its Japanese
origin, history, and current developments, as well as its worldwide
changes and adaptations, I learn the heart of humanity itself,
for haiku shows and celebrates the world. Haiku is a window into
ourselves. I'm grateful that being named after Dylan Thomas has
led me, in a roundabout way, to this window's vista. It's a window
I look forward to keeping wide open for many years to come.
--Michael Dylan Welch
Foster City, CA
