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| John A. Grossman
works as a Project Manager for a large construction company in Chicago, where
he lives with his wife and two daughters. He has a BA in Philosophy from UCLA
and an MA from the University of Illinois, Chicago, in English and Creative Writing.
While a Graduate Student he taught English Composition, Creative Writing, and
Short Story. He has also studied with the novelist John Rechy in a private class
in his home, and has written several books of lyric poetry, a collection of short
stories (some of which were published in literary magazines), and two novels (not
published). Last year he finished a book of free haiku inspired by a year spent
at Lake Michigan building a dormitory for the Naval Base. He is also an artist
who has worked in various media, and he has been involved in music.
Artist's notes: Over the last three years I've been working in CorelDraw. I've worked in other media such as oil and acrylic painting, watercolor, ink, pencil, sculpture, etc. I had a couple of shows when we were living in LA. I chose to work on the computer for many reasons. One, I like the flexibility of adjusting format, the ability to continue to work on a piece, the possibility of reusing objects created in one picture in another one and so creating a subtle ontological theme with reoccuring images through different pictures. In terms of traditional genres, computer art is like a print and wire sculpture. Another attraction for me, having a musical background, is that because objects can be copied, augmented, diminished, transformed, etc., I have the chance to develop pictures, images, compositions musically. I approach a subject for a picture phenomenologically, that is, something, some event in the real world is the starting place. But I'm also aware that I'm working within a medium, that it is art, and so as the subject develops, I also allow the medium to suggest to me new possibilities and it becomes part of the process. In doing that, I explore how the subject can be expressed in many forms from realistic rendering to abstract impression creating what I call 'atmospherics'. These images and the approach in making them are related to the haiku I write and the same discipline, attitude and receptivity, is used in each image.
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He
started writing haiku after reading Harold G. Henderson's book Introduction
to Haiku, discovering Basho at age fifteen, and then devouring the books
of Blyth. In part, this is his philosophy of haiku: "Like the tiny musical
pieces by Anton Webern, the shorter poems of Emily Dickinson, the later work of
Samuel Beckett, haiku fascinated me because of its absolute concision. And there
was something about the deeper intent of haiku that I was attracted to, the poem
a moment of meditative attention, an attitude of receptivity, where phenomena
become metaphors (in the word's etymological meaning) 'to carry over' into the
silence of the noumenal, and then dissolve into a deeper awareness beyond the
epistemological mode of perception, beyond the merely aesthetic, Shunyata, into
the realm of living, the ethics of conversation, conversing with all forms of
life in human and non-human communities. Each poem is a postcard from the world
of impermanence. The very form of haiku as defined in the practice of Basho, used
and developed by Issa and other poets, male and female, is a poem that presents
itself as a question, being nothing more than the beginning of a poem whose vanishing
point is in the reader, inviting each reading to complete it but knowing it can
never be finished. Like Buddhist 'skilled means' (upaya), the poem negates itself
within its experience."