Bio
iPhone Photograph by Betti Viereck, 2025
Statement of An Art by Donna Fleischer
I write free verse, haiku, haibun, and poems of ekphrasis on visual art objects. “November” is the freest free verse poem composed of images that color and frame each entitled section like still photographs. It is epic in its 16 typeset pages, dramatic in its several voices led by a narrator, and lyrical in its themes of Nature, Art, and Love as inspired by the English Romantic poet, John Keats, and the American Romantic poet, Emily Dickinson. It is also a personal-political soul-making account, written over a 20-year period. In short, it is a hybrid poem. Over time my kind of free verse became shorter and more minimal with my discovery of both the American Objectivist poet, Lorine Niedecker’s and the Black Arts Movement poet, Sonia Sanchez’s uses of white space. They also wrote haiku.
Haiku form while I walk, counting word-breaths in rhythm with my varied gait. Haiku is a very different kind of poetry which activates intentional white space within a poem as contemplative silence. I compose in my head, counting out syllables on my hand, as I step, writing them on a paper scrap at home. These brief poems are simple responses to rapid changes industrialization and technology bring to the Earth.
Haiku connect the length of one breath (about 11 English syllables or 17 Japanese onji) with the Earth and imagination. Because it is breath-based, it involves the entire body. This points back to our earliest relationship to poetry, when it was spoken aloud, shared communally, and experienced physically. Reading and writing haiku reconnects me to a felt closeness between self and world. Each of my haiku holds a single moment. They do not explain or interpret, but exist like the weather in a twinkle of shared experience with the reader.
Copyright 2026© by Donna Fleischer. All Rights Reserved.
Donna has eight poetry books since 1991, recently Baby in Space (Half Day Moon Press), FLANEUR, and Every Day Earth (Longhouse Publishers). Her poems are in over 70 journals and anthologies. She writes in Hartford and Bloomfield, CT.
Literary Bio
Donna Fleischer is the author of eight poetry books: baby in space (Half Day Moon Press, 2024), FLANEUR(Longhouse Publishers, 2024), Every Day Earth(Longhouse Publishers, 2024), from beyond my window: the Covid-19 Poems (Meritage Press, 2020), < Periodic Earth > (Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press, 2016), Twinkle, Twinkle (Longhouse Publishers, 2011), indra’s net (bottle rockets press, 2003), and Intimate Boundaries (1991, a self-produced collection). Her poems have been translated into the Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Welsh languages. Her poetry has appeared in the literary journals and anthologies, A Vast Sky, A) Glimpse) Of), Asahi Shimbun, Contemporary Haibun, Dispatches From the Poetry Wars, Double Horizon, EOAGH, Half Day Moon Journal #2, KŌ, Haiku 2025, Haiku 21.2, la piccioletta barca, Lilliput Review, Marsh Hawk Press Review, MayDay Magazine, Modern Haiku, Naugatuck River Review, Of Hartford in Many Lights, Otoliths, Password, Poet’ s for Living Waters, Spiral Orb, The End of the World Project in two volumes, The Fortnightly Review, The Solitary Plover, We Are All Japan, and others. She received the support of a Tupelo Press – Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA) residency and the University of Hartford’s Creative Writing Award for Poetry.
At the word pond blog, Donna posts curatorial content on the visual, literary, and performing arts. While a four-color process film journeywoman in offset publications printing, she earned a BA in English (1988) and in 2023 attended the 2023 Albertus Magnus College MFA Program.
More information may be discovered at Poets & Writers, The Haiku Foundation, and The Living Haiku Anthology
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