Honorary Curator Terry Ann Carter
Terry Ann Carter
Honorary Curator, 2024-2025
Appointment Announcement
The American Haiku Archives advisory board is pleased to announce the appointment of Terry Ann Carter as the 2024-2025 honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in Sacramento (www.americanhaikuarchives.org). This honor recognizes Terry Ann’s long commitment to haiku and related arts. She founded the KaDo Ottawa and Haiku Arbutus Victoria haiku groups and served for many years as president of Haiku Canada.
In addition, she has published dozens of poetry books, anthologies, and guidebooks. Three notable nonfiction books include Lighting the Global Lantern: A Teachers Guide to Writing Haiku and Related Literary Forms (Wintergreen Studios Press, 2011), Haiku in Canada: History, Poetry, Memoir (Ekstasis Editions, 2020), and Moonflowers: Pioneering Women Haiku Poets in Canada (Catkin Press, 2020). She also coedited Carpe Diem: Anthologie Canadienne du Haïku / Canadian Anthology of Haiku (with Marco Fraticelli, Les Editions David / Borealis Press, 2008) and Erotic Haiku: Of Skin on Skin (with George Swede, Black Moss Press, 2017).
Terry Ann is a longtime member of the League of Canadian Poets and her work in haiku exists firmly in the context of longer poetry, which she has published as much as she has haiku. She is also known for her musical, dance, and theatrical performances, as well as her book artistry. She chaired or cochaired five Haiku Canada conferences and two Haiku North America conferences. Terry Ann was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but lived most of her life in Canada, especially in Ottawa, where she was a music and English teacher for 34 years. After retiring in 2000, she traveled extensively and in 2012 she and her husband moved to Victoria, British Columbia. Terry Ann continues to publish her haiku and longer lyric poetry in numerous journals and anthologies and is active with teaching, readings, performances, exhibits, and other aspects of literary citizenship. Her website is https://www.terryanncarter.com/.
We are pleased to celebrate Terry Ann Carter, and to bestow this honor from the American Haiku Archives, which seeks to preserve and promote haiku and related poetry throughout the North American continent. The following are five of Terry’s Ann haiku:
alone in Tokyo
even the chopsticks
in pairs
in the glass case
of skulls, a reflection
of my own face
street kids
my camera
brings them home
deep space
what we keep from our children
what they keep from us
killing fields
the wind carries a butterflly
bone over bone
The AHA advisory board is delighted to pay tribute to Terry Ann Carter as the twenty-eighth honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives. To search the collections of the American Haiku Archives online, please visit http://www.library.ca.gov/. For information on donating material to the archives, or other information about its history and past honorary curators, please visit the American Haiku Archives website at www.americanhaikuarchives.org.
~Michael Dylan Welch, American Haiku Archives Advisory Board Co-chair
2024-2025 Honorary Curator Zoom Reading
January 25, 2005
The American Haiku Archives (official archives of the Haiku Society of America) in a special reading by Terry Ann Carter. This Zoom event celebrated Terry Ann as the 2024–2025 honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in Sacramento. Terry Ann read and showed selections of her work, with appreciations by friends, followed by a Q&A session. Please join us!
American Haiku Archives Honorary Curator Reading
See the Zoom Meeting Recording
Passcode: %fZ3ua$L
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Biography
Terry Ann Carter is a poet and paper artist who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. She is the author of eight collections of long-form poetry, three haiku guidebooks, and seven haiku books. She has also edited three haiku anthologies, as well as two books on the history of haiku in Canada. As past president of Haiku Canada, founder of and facilitator for KaDo Ottawa (2001–2012) and Haiku Arbutus Victoria Study Group (2014–present), Terry Ann has given hundreds of haiku and book arts workshops around the world. A Crazy Man Thinks He’s Ernest in Paris (Black Moss Press) was shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman Award. Day Moon Rising was shortlisted for the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award. And Tokaido (Red Moon Press) won a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. As a 2017 community fellow at the University of Victoria’s Centre of Study in Religion and Society she studied Buddhist influences on contemporary English-language haiku and lectured on this topic.
In 2019, she was a judge for the first International Haiku Contest for the city of Morioka, Japan. Haiku in Canada: History, Poetry, Memoir (Ekstasis Editions) and Moonflowers: Pioneering Women Haiku Poets in Canada (Catkin Press) were both published in 2020. Her latest editions include Blue Moon: The Ono no Komachi Poems, Jackpine Press, 2021 (with book artist Heather MacDonald), First I Fold the Mountain, Black Moss Press, 2022, and In the Spaces Between Bonsai, Aeolus House, 2024. Terry Ann has chaired five Haiku Canada conferences at Carleton University, in Ottawa, and chaired the Haiku North America conference in 2009 at the National Library and Archives, also in Ottawa. With Lynne Jambor, she cochaired the 2021 HNA conference, held online that year because of the pandemic.
In a 2022 interview, Terry Ann Carter said “I first heard haiku chanted by a Japanese monk at the University of Toronto many years ago [1998, while attending a League of Canadian Poets conference]. I was simply enchanted and stopped to listen. Later I did some reading and discovered William J. Higginson’s book (which became my bible), The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate Haiku. I was thrilled to meet Bill at the Basho Festival in 2005 in Ueno, Japan. He became a mentor for me, and I was always so grateful for his kindness and generosity.”
Born in 1946 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father was studying at M.I.T., Terry Ann Carter later moved to Bala Cynwyd, a suburb of Philadelphia, for middle school and high school. Her family moved to Ottawa in the mid ’60s where she completed her B.A. in English and music and later an M.Ed. in psychopedagogy. She married Darryl Carter in 1975 and started a family—two boys, Dylan and Barrett. As a music teacher for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, Terry Ann had an opportunity to study the Kodaly Method at the Kodály Institute in Kecskemet, Hungary. She later taught English and retired after 34 years in the classroom.
Retirement in 2000 gave her an opportunity to travel to Southeast Asia where she discovered an organization in Cambodia that needed her help. The Tabitha Foundation assisted young women recovering from sex trades. She travelled to Phnom Penh five times to help with house building and training young women to sew. On one visit she visited the grand temples of Angkor Wat. In the summer of 2005, Terry Ann accepted an invitation to teach at the International Educational Exchange Center of the Dongzhou Middle School (summer language school for teachers) in Haimen City, China. She shared this experience with poet/teacher friend, Claudia Radmore (they often used haiku to help teach English vocabulary).
A move to Victoria, British Columbia in 2012 (for her husband's health) brought her new experiences in poetry and art. The year she turned 70 (in 2016), Terry Ann lost her husband and was blessed with a granddaughter. Sophie and her brother Logan now live with and mom (Jen) and dad (Dylan) in Sandefjord, Norway. Barrett continues his work as an addiction counsellor in Vancouver, British Columbia with his wife, Ceri Brophy, an elementary school principal.
In Lighting the Global Lantern, her 2011 book about teaching haiku poetry, Terry Ann wrote that “Haiku is more than a form of poetry; it is a way to read the text of the world by responding to nature, including our human nature.” She explains that “students, as well as teachers, need to balance their busy lives with moments of introspection, with moments of aha! beauty, with dimensions of art-making that give sustainable purpose and commitment to creative activity.” Through her haiku, longer poetry, music, dance, and paper art, Terry Ann Carter demonstrates her commitment to lifelong creativity.
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Selected Haiku by Terry Ann Carter
The following haiku and senryu appeared in Tokaido, Red Moon Press, 2017. This book won a 2017 Touchstone Distinguished Book Award from the Haiku Foundation.
alone in Tokyo
even the chopsticks
in pairs
book maker
first I fold the mountain
then the valley
in a dream
the girl tattoo
on the owl's wing
my new island home
everything
rain-rimmed
making mountains
out of molehills
my first push-up bra
first glimpse
of my son's tattoos
the overhead screeching of crows
night of no moon
I empty my bowl
of green tea
day moon
the imaginary string
of the mime's balloon
fingers
of the kite master
flying
deep space
what we keep from our children
what they keep from us
The following poems appeared in Day Moon Rising, Black Moss Press, 2012. They were previously gathered into a sequence, A Monk’s Fine Robes: Haiku from Cambodia, which won the Origami Crane Award for Best Poem of the Year (2010) sponsored by the Tree Reading Series in Ottawa, Ontario.
temple doorway
all our shoes
in one pile
even
a monk’s fine robes
dry in sunlight
water urn
a candle’s flicker
drowns itself
cloudless
the outstretched palms
of begging children
killing fields
the wind carries a butterfly
bone over bone
in the glass case
of skulls, a reflection
of my own face
Buddhist nun
without hair
her eyes blacker
street kids
my camera
brings them home
traveling in Asia
homesick
for peanut butter sandwiches
Angkor Wat
finally, stone
has the last word
Haiga by Terry Ann Carter
Haibun & Other Work
Station Nineteen: Fuchu
Where the Printmaker Stops Work in Summer Due to Humidity and Heat
At Fuchu Station, Hiroshige, you layer mountains and rivers enough for loneliness. Generous as rain. I wish to bathe in your Berlin blue. Use pomegranate ink to tattoo my lips.
wild roses
the way she ties back
her hair
(from Tokaido, Red Moon Press, 2017)
Ode to Haiku City (excerpt)
(after Robert Hass)
When you go down to Haiku City
with its fluttering wings and alleys of pine,
its avenues of gingko trees and midnight
cicadas, its crowded corridor of herons,
ravens and crows—poets appear in all directions
having left their sea-side walks, their jam jars,
their closets with hangers clacking—laying aside
their occupations of blossom viewing,
These whale watchers and arbourists, newly arrived,
curious and in debt to the seasons.
(from In the Spaces Between Bonsai, Aeolus House, 2024)
Bibliography
For more information about most of the following publications, see https://www.terryanncarter.com/books.
Haiku Books
Now You Know — King’s Road Press, 2011
A Monk’s Fine Robes: Haiku from Cambodia — Leaf Press, 2011
Day Moon Rising — Black Moss Press, 2012
Hallelujah — Buschekbooks, 2012
On the Road to Naropa: My Love Affair with Jack Kerouac (a haibun memoir) — Inkling Press, 2015
Tokaido — Red Moon Press, 2017
Blue Moon: the Ono no Komachi Poems (with book artist Heather MacDonald) — Jackpine Press, 2022
Lyric Poetry Books
Anapanasati — Cranberry Tree Press, 1997
Waiting for Julia — Third Eye Press, 1999
Transplanted — Borealis Press, 2006
A Crazy Man Thinks He’s Ernest in Paris — Black Moss, 2010
Speak Easy 20: Canada in Five Voices — Bellingham, Washington, 2017
First I Fold the Mountain — self-published for a book arts exhibition at the Gage Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia, November, 2019
First I Fold the Mountain — Black Moss Press, 2022
In the Spaces Between Bonsai — Aeolus House, 2024
Nonfiction & Art Books
Haiku in Canada: History, Poetry, Memoir — Ekstasis Editions, 2020
Moonflowers: Pioneering Women Haiku Poets in Canada — Catkin Press, 2020
The Endangered C: Playing With Language, Typography, Space (with Jim Kacian and Claudia Brefeld) — Red Moon Press, 2021
Guidebooks
Lighting the Global Lantern: A Teachers Guide to Writing Haiku and Related Literary Forms — Wintergreen Studios Press, 2011
Hue: A Day at Butchart Gardens — Leaf Press, 2014
Deep Breath: A Book of Haiku Evolutions — Leaf Press, 2017
Anthologies
Among Poppies (editor) — Catkin Press, 2003
Carpe Diem: Anthologie Canadienne du Haiku / Canadian Anthology of Haiku (editor with Marco Fraticelli) — Les Editions David / Borealis Press, 2008
Erotic Haiku: Of Skin on Skin (editor with George Swede) — Black Moss Press, 2017
Awards
Second Place, Valley Writer’s Guild Poetry Contest, 1997
Honorable Mention, Betty Drevniok Award, 1998
Finalist, Sandburg/Livesay Award, 1998
Finalist, Acorn-Rukeyser Chapbook Award, 1998
Honorable Mention, Ray Burrell Award for Poetry, 1999
First Place, Montreal International Haiku Festival, 2001
Honorable Mention, Betty Drevniok Award, 2001
First Place, Canadian Authors Association (haiku), 2002
Honorable Mention, National League of American Pen Women, 2002
First Place, “People’s Choice,” R. H. Blyth Award (haiku), Japan, 2002
First Place, Basho Festival Contest, Japan, 2002
First Place, Hawaii Education Association Haiku Contest, 2003
First Place, Toronto Vegetarian Association Tofu Haiku Contest, 2007
Honorable Mention, Haiku International Association (Japan), 2007
Best Canada Poem, Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational, 2007 (carved in stone at VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver)
Lucy Maud Montgomery Award (haiku), 2008
Origami Crane Award, “Best Poem,” 2010
Touchstone Distinguished Book Award from the Haiku Foundation for Tokaido, 2017
Selected Websites
https://www.terryanncarter.com/
https://thehaikufoundation.org/poet-details/?IDclient=389
https://haikupoetinterviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/01/terry-ann-carter/
https://livinghaikuanthology.com/poets-on-haiku/poets-on-haiku/3723-carter,-terry-ann.html
https://www.eventmagazine.ca/2020/10/rob-taylor-interviews-terry-ann-carter/
https://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-shadow-element-interview-with-terry.html
http://www.haikucanada.org/about/documents/newsletters/BC-Territories-newsletter-08.pdf (features an interview with Terry Ann Carter)
https://www.modernhaiku.org/issue52-1/MH52-1-CarterEditor-review.pdf (review of Haiku in Canada)
https://thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/files/original/aab71514f2aebb19f341980eb167a13b.pdf (a history of haiku in Canada)
https://chaudierebooks.blogspot.com/2020/11/six-questions-interview-44-terry-ann.html
Selected Videos
https://youtu.be/qIndmMDt6Ak?si=clxBTft4Bq6Vu9EM (featured video; 9:30)
https://youtu.be/HEfHnoc_GuA?si=eFnb9b1WG3-WBB4Y (performance video; 5:06)
https://youtu.be/evUPa4HjCkI?si=cYNG2ujzp9B6s5qq (haiku workshop video; 49:47)
https://youtu.be/yTeG3P2Z7BI?si=DN2-rh1VRizHGgXm (poetry reading video; 2:30)
https://youtu.be/B94ljiOjds0?si=8ZGQrLzUJEBqjPI4 (poetry reading video; 25:41)
https://youtu.be/FLRaTHf1xj0?si=RrL0LU0ARKSjIEnB (poetry reading video; 26:50)
https://youtu.be/cUF-vNpyfSs?si=eL7xMTyWyWJ6PzOp (Zoom poetry reading video; 30:57)
https://youtu.be/dmFhROSb9PI?si=QoI4pZKZzJgn69Ig (interview; 7:42)
https://youtu.be/DWDpWRX1IIw?si=ey0DPn3eHp91uzPL (performance poem; 6:00)
https://youtu.be/xKQLPsc7wqY?si=oFLhgf6bVonh-h1S (poetry reading video; 19:29)