Last Bite

haiku by Robert Moyer
art by Guntram Porps & Mona Wu
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“Just touching this book will make you a better person…

The images in the book are the best I have seen in any book on haiku or calligraphy ever.

The reproduction of their fine art work makes you reach out and touch it to see if it is an ‘original’…

Anyone who wants to see some of the best haiku, presented with images that would make Buson’s chest swell with pride, should own this book.”

review from Cattails, United Haiku and Tanka Society by Mike Rehling

LAST BITE: One Poet, Two Artists — the exhibition

Guntram Porps and Robert Moyer met over many games of boules (and more than a few beers)
in Kassel, Germany. Guntram recalls the beginning of the collaboration:

“The initial spark was when you handed me your green business card with the frog
and I asked you about the meaning of the frog… I have collected frogs … for many years,
and I had done a series of frog drawings… Basho, haiku, old pond, haiga, zen, Japanese calligraphy
— basically the appreciation for Japanese and zen aesthetics — brought us together for this fun
venture of haiku and haiga.”

While planning an exhibition of Guntram’s drawings evoked by Robert’s poetry, Robert showed Mona Wu some of the works Guntram had produced. She asked if she could join in. Robert, who has admired and collected Mona’s work for years, was delighted.

See the results in our beautifully-designed, hand·bound edition, and at the exhibition,
opening April 5, 2013 at the Inter_Section Gallery and Art Space in Winston-Salem, NC.

Haiga: haiku + art = much more!

In a single breath, a haiku poem can make the reader smile, nod their head, say “Ahhh,” even gasp.
Ever since Basho in the seventeenth-century, poets have also taken up a brush to enhance haiku, in the form of haiga. These paintings do not comment upon, illustrate, or repeat the poem. They extend the meaning, heighten it, bring it closer to the reader — a few strokes from the brush, a few words from the pen.

In Last Bite, two painters, applied brush to paper: Mona Wu, steeped in the tradition of Chinese calligraphy, and Guntram Porps, trained in Japanese calligraphy. The brush strokes do not directly represent the images presented in the haiku, yet they add depth.

In picture after picture, lines swirl, paint spreads, colors explode, as the artists’ brushes find a symbolic expression of the moment marked by the poem. Thanks to that skill and spontaneity, the viewer and the artists do not merely meet in the moment — they now dance!

Last Bite — Fine Edition — 9x12 in. hand-bound softcover — 26.95
English Somerset & Japanese Echizen Washi cover, Echizen Washi flyleaves, archival, 2013.

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Last Bite Matted Print

haiku by Robert Moyer
art by Guntram Porps

A Lover’s Sensuous Message Printed on Striking Papers

a thumb and finger
slip into her mouth
the last bite

Last Bite Matted Print — 11x11 in. mat with 6.5 in. diameter window, ready to frame, archival — $21

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About the Author

Robert Moyer, after a long career of acting, directing and teaching, took up performance poetry. In 1999 he won a Head to Head Haiku Slam, and won the Poetry Council of North Carolina poetry slams of 2011 and 2012. He is also slammaster of the Piedmont Slam.

Moyer has published hundreds of poems in major haiku journals, including, Modern Haiku, simply haiku, frogpond, bottle rockets, and many others. His work is archived at Haiku News, and anthologized in The Haiku News Anthology 2009-2011, the tenth anniversary of acorn, and in the seventh cycle of Dailyhaiku.

Robert edited Rosenberry’s Chasing the Sun and contributed to The Stone House and Beneath the Willow Tree. All these books were published in association with the North Carolina Haiku Society.

About the Artists

Guntram Porps
Born in Germany, Guntram immigrated to Canada in 1952. He studied fine arts in Canada, and did his graduate work in Germany at Universitat Kassel. There in Kassel, he became the paperconservator and restaurateur for Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel. For the past fifteen years, Guntram has studied brush work with calligraphy master Kas Tanahashi in Berlin.

Mona Wu
“I was steeped in Chinese traditional art while growing up in Asia. I am also deeply interested in the ancient art form of Chinese written language… My work deals with surface design with emphasis on Asian motif.”

Mona was North Carolina’s Artist of the Year and the Winston-Salem Sawtooth Center for Visual Art
Artist of the Year in 2003.

A native of China, Mona studied Chinese painting and calligraphy in Hong Kong, studies printmaking
with David Faber and taught Chinese brush stroke painting at the Sawtooth Center for Visual Art.
Mona has also been a coordinator of the Older Adults Art Discovery Program at Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

Mona’s work is represented by the Hawthorne Art Gallery of Winston-Salem.