I’m humbled to have received four First Prize honors, three Honorable Mentions, and a Special Award for haiku recently in the inaugural Heliosparrow Haiku Frontier Awards.
All of the awarded poems and the judges’ fascinating and extremely rich commentary on them are published in Helioparrow Poetry Journal and in the flipbook at this link.
The awards were created by Dr. Richard Gilbert, professor emeritus of English, Kumamoto University, and one of the world’s leading theorists and critics of contemporary English-language haiku, “to present and praise leading-edge poems and poets illuminating inspiring directions in haiku poetics.”
All of the poems under consideration for the Frontier Awards were published in Heliosparrow Poetry Journal, the world’s leading publication of avant-garde English-language haiku and poems in related genres, which Gilbert founded and edits.
Gilbert, Heliosparrow co-editor Clayton Beach, and poet Michelle Tennison served as judges for the haiku, alterku (poems that expand the haiku form), sequence/collaborative poem, and short poem categories in the contest. I was also honored to judge the haibun category, and to join Gilbert, Beach, and Tennison in judging the alterku and sequences/collaborative poem categories, in which my own work was not in the running.
Far from traditional haiku rooted in the non-human seasons of the natural world, the poems recognized in the inaugural Heliosparrow Haiku Frontier Awards reinterpret the traditional haiku form through daring language, startling imagery, bold disposition on the page, and challenging subject matter and psychological nuance.
To read these poems is to look into the future of English-language haiku.
from director Pat van Boeckel’s film inspired by Marjorie Buettner’s haibun “Unremembered,” first screened at the Haiku North America 2023 Haibun Film Festival.
I had the tremendous pleasure recently to serve as program chair for the 2023 Haiku North America (HNA) conference. As a writer of haibun – a Japanese hybrid genre of haiku and prose – and inspired by the wealth of video poems, haiku films, and work in a rich array of other types of work joining poetic writing and visual art, I was inspired to create for HNA the world’s first festival of haibun films.
The HNA Haibun Film Festival took place 29 June 2023 in the beautiful eleventh floor Reading Room of the Mercantile Library of Cincinnati and featured screenings of nine original films inspired by the haibun of five authors. The films selected for the HNA 2023 Haibun Film Festival were posted on Moving Poems shortly after the conclusion of Haiku North America.
My reasons for creating the HNA Haibun Film festival were many. As I remarked in my introduction to the Haibun Film Festival session, “I hypothesized that not only could haibun films realize latent potential of written haibun texts in the filmic dimension, but also that doing so could bring a certain freshness to a literary genre still finding its footing in English and essentially defunct in its native language, Japanese.”
The text of my introduction to the HNA 2023 Haibun Film Festival outlines my rationale for creating the HNA Haibun Film Festival, details the collaborative two-round competitive selection process that led to the final slate of films screened in the festival, and lists the haibun authors and filmmakers whose work was selected for it:
Why haibun films? There’s the obvious ‘why not?’, especially when you consider that haiku films and other types of video poem are nothing new and are vibrant and seemingly limitless pathways for poetry into the stimulating realm of interdisciplinary symbiosis.
And the linking and shifting between a haibun’s haiku and prose – or a haibun’s non-haiku parts – can expand haibun’s narrative and expressive potential into the visual realm and the performative and temporal planes embodied in film.
In creating this, the first-ever haibun film festival, I hypothesized that not only could haibun films realize latent potential of written haibun texts in the filmic dimension, but also that doing so could bring a certain freshness to a literary genre still finding its footing in English and essentially defunct in its native language, Japanese.
The results of this project – which we’ll view this hour – will, I hope, inspire those who have not written haibun to explore this genre’s creative possibilities as seriously as they might explore other genres, like haiku, and to create haibun films as solo or collaborative enterprises.
The short haibun films you’ll see were catalyzed and selected though a multi-stage, internationally competitive process. Last year, Haiku North America sent out a call for submissions of unpublished haibun. We received 229 submissions in response. I asked Jim Kacian [founder and president of The Haiku Foundation and founder and owner of Red Moon Press] to serve with me as haibun co-screener, in light of his deep roots in the haibun soil, and also in light of his work in haiku films – thank you, Jim. A moment here also to thank Paul Miller [HNA director and editor of Modern Haiku] for anonymizing the submissions before sending the haibun texts to Jim and me, and also for communicating directly with the writers who submitted haibun.
In a “double-blind” screening, Jim and I first narrowed down the 229 submissions to around 40-50 haibun. We eventually selected ten haibun for their merits as pieces of writing in this genre – interesting stories told in vivid prose and well-crafted haiku. I was also interested in feeling a certain space where the actual words on the page left off and potential visual responses to the texts – not merely visual renderings or reenactments of them – might pick up.
The titles and contest entry numbers of the ten selected films were sent to Dave Bonta, founder of the video poem website Moving Poems and author of the haibun collection Failed State (Via Negativa Books).
I’d like now to acknowledge the authors of the ten haibun that Jim Kacian and I selected to send to Dave and Moving Poems, in alphabetical order by author last name:
The Gone Missing – haibun by Joseph Aversano, five different films by: Beate Gördes, Janet Lees, Peter Johnston, EnD, and Marilyn McCabe Circuition – haibun by Mona Bedi Unremembered – haibun by Marjorie Buettner, film by Pat van Boeckel Of Demons and Angels – haibun by Penny Harter The Chase – haibun by Bob Lucky The Longest Journey – haibun by Bob Lucky, film by Pete Johnston Table for One – haibun by Carol Ann Palomba, film by Matt Mullins *Film Awarded Best of Show Hypnic Jerk – haibun by Alan Peat, film by Jack Cochran, Pamela Falkenberg The Layout – haibun by Beth Skala Haven – haibun by Laurie Wilcox-Meyer
Dave posted a call for film submissions on FilmFreeway and formed a committee to screen the film entries. I’d like to thank Dave for organizing the film part of this project and for serving with the award-winning poets and filmmakers Jane Glennie and James Brush to judge the films that were submitted.
Dave, Jane, and James selected nine haibun films, which Dave will screen for us today.
Jennifer Hambrick reads during the Ohio Poets Welcome, Wednesday, June 28, at Haiku North America 2023, in the Pavillion Ballroom of the Hilton Netherland Plaza, Downtown Cincinnati. Also pictured: Patti Niehoff, Elliot Nicely, Nicky Gutierrez. (photo: Holly Brians Ragusa)
Okay, everyone, I did a thing.
For the last two years, I’ve been serving as program chair for the 2023 Haiku North America conference. Two weeks ago, the Program Committee, which I led, and a statewide team of poets brought the conference to fruition, June 28-July 2, 2023, in Cincinnati.
Haiku North America (HNA) is the world’s largest gathering devoted to English-language haiku and related genres. Since 1991, the biennial conference has taken place in cities across the United States and Canada. This year’s conference marked HNA’s Ohio debut and only its second appearance in the Midwest.
As program chair I was tasked with leading a committee of Ohio haiku poets to create the conference program, including devising the conference theme (City & Soil), ideating topics for conference sessions and other events, inviting presenters, selecting proposals from those submitted by prospective presenters, finalizing the conference program, and implementing the program over the five days of the conference at the beautiful Mercantile Library of Cincinnati and the historic Hilton Netherland Plaza, in Downtown Cincinnati’s Carew Tower.
Lew Watts (left) and I converse in the beautiful eleventh floor reading room of the Mercantile Library of Cincinnati before the start of Thursday’s sessions at Haiku North America 2023. (photo: Ben Gaa)
Serving with me on the Program Committee were poets Elliot Nicely (Lakewood) and Nicky Gutierrez (Akron).
The HNA 2023 Program Committee: Nicky Gutierrez, Jennifer Hambrick (chair), Elliot Nicely (photo: Joe McKeon)
Over a two-year planning period, the Program Committee worked in concert with local arrangements chairs Patti and Buck Niehoff of Cincinnati to bring about all aspects of the conference. I am extremely proud of the work the Program Committee did to create the conference program. Here are some highlights:
Haibun Innovationspanel. Haibun is a genre at once still finding its footing in the English language and poised for great things. As a haibun enthusiast and an award-winning haibun author, I wanted to showcase some of the exciting creative possibilities for haibun and, thus, ignite interest in the genre among the audience at HNA. I assembled a panel of some of the most important writers working in English-language haibun today to share thoughts about the present and future of this genre. In my presentation “Narrative Hybridity in English-Language Haibun,” I offered a new theoretical framework for narrative polyphony in haibun and explored the implications of kire and disjunction in the form. I invited Lew Watts, haibun co-editor of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America; Rich Youmans, editor-in-chief of Contemporary Haibun Online; and poet and video poem specialist Dave Bonta to join me on the panel and share their perspectives on new perspectives on the nuts-and-bolts elements of haiku and prose in the haibun genre, recent formal innovations in haibun, and the intersection of haibun and film, respectively. My thanks to Jim Kacian, founder and president of The Haiku Foundation and a poet with deep roots in English-language haibun, for agreeing to moderate the Haibun Innovations panel.
The world’s first-ever Haibun Film Festival. I wanted to take haibun to the next level as an art form in interdisciplinary conversation with the visual, temporal, and performative art form of film. To that end, I created the world’s first-ever Haibun Film Festival at HNA 2023. The initiative called for submissions of unpublished English-language haibun that could serve as the basis for original short films. I invited Jim Kacian to join me in adjudicating the anonymized haibun submissions for the Haibun film Festival session at HNA. And I invited Dave Bonta to publish a submissions call to his video poem community for short films based on the selected haibun and head up a committee to adjudicate the submitted films. Watch for the more about the HNA 2023 Haibun Film Festival, including the selected films themselves, in a future post.
The Higginson lecture by Tim Green, editor of Rattle, with a guest appearance by Katie Dozier, curator of the NFT Poetry Gallery. The HNA executive board selects the Higginson Lecturer, and this year’s speakers offered an intriguing rationale for publishing (minting) haiku in the virtual realm as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The Keynote Address, “Dissolving Boundaries: Haiku and Embodied Care,” by scholar and haiku poet Ce Rosenow. Dr. Rosenow’s talk explored the intersection of haiku and care ethics, and offered a path for extending haiku beyond the page and into the world as acts of care.
Cultural Journeys in African American Haiku Dr. Ce Rosenow and poet Crystal Simone Smith lead a fascinating and vitally important discussion of the various cultural elements that inform African American poets writing haiku today.
Ohio Haiku Poets Reading. Ohio boasts a large number of poets writing haiku. This reading featured and celebrated the haiku of dozens of poets from all corners of the state.
Me with Dr. Yalie Saweda Kamara, Cincinnati & Mercantile Library Poet Laureate
Creating HNA 2023 was a massive undertaking involving innumerable moving parts. It was incredibly gratifying to see so many in the global English-language haiku community come together in my home state for this conference – the first in-person HNA gathering since 2019.
I am extremely grateful to Program Committee members Nicky Gutierrez and Elliot Nicely for their creativity, spirit, and commitment to the project; to local arrangements chairs Patti and Buck Niehoff for their generosity as manifested in so many ways; to HNA Directors Michael Dylan Welch, Garry Gay, Paul Miller, and Deborah Kolodji for their support and guidance; and all conference speakers for their contributions.
My digs at the Hilton Netherland Plaza, Downtown Cincinnati (photo: Jennifer Hambrick)
Jennifer Hambrick performing as poet laureate of the 75th-anniversary season of the Chamber Music Columbus concert series, Southern Theatre, Columbus (photo by Antoine Clark)
The 2022-23 concert season recently came to a close and saw the culmination of a major poetry and music commissioning project in which I had the tremendous honor to be involved.
Jennifer Hambrick onstage in the Southern Theatre, Columbus, Nov. 2022 (photo by Antoine Clark)
Last season marked the 75th-anniversary season of the Chamber Music Columbus concert series, for I was honored to serve as poet laureate. The anniversary season unfolded in a year-long celebration involving the commissioning and public performances of seven new poems, the world premieres of more than a dozen commissioned musical works by internationally recognized composers, and seven concerts at Columbus’ historic Southern Theatre featuring some of the finest classical chamber music ensembles in the world.
My involvement in the project came about in early 2021, when Katherine Borst Jones, president of the Chamber Music Columbus Board of Trustees and professor of flute at the Ohio State University, invited me to serve as poet laureate for Chamber Music Columbus’ 75th-anniversary season. The laureateship came with a commission to write an original poem for each of the seven concerts on the season and to perform a different one of my poems at the beginning of each concert.
Detail from the Southern Theatre, Columbus (photo by Jennifer Hambrick)
With this commission, Kathy gave me rein to let my imagination soar. As I wrote in my artist’s statement for the project, I crafted all seven of my commissioned poems conceptually around the idea of the elements, or raw materials, of chamber music – wood, metal, air, hands, beginnings and endings, time, and space. These musical elements serve as guiding metaphors in my poems, and each element acts as a bridge connecting our experiences with music to our experiences in other aspects of life and the world around us.
For three quarters of a century, Chamber Music Columbus has brought the finest chamber ensembles in the world to Columbus to perform. The roster of artists who have performed on this series through the decades reads like a Who’s Who of classical music.
Backstage at the Southern Theatre, before a concert of the Merz Trio, May 2023 (photo by Jennifer Hambrick)
My deep thanks to Kathy Jones and the Chamber Music Columbus Board of Trustees for extending me the honor to serve as poet laureate of this remarkable anniversary season, and congratulations on reaching this milestone.
I’m delighted to announce the arrival of my most recent poetry collection, In the High Weeds, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Prize of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.
Competition judge Jared Smith describes In the High Weeds as “an extraordinary journey from youth to maturity,” and writes, “The imagery is concise and brilliant, and the craftsmanship is masterful.”
Read Smith’s full commentary on In the High Weeds and purchase copies of the collection here.
I am most humbled by the warm welcome Smith and others have extended to this collection, and most grateful to the National Federation of State Poetry Societies for supporting poets nationwide.
It’s been a rough year. Couldn’t we all use a joyride?
I am delighted to announce the arrival of my most recent book, Joyride, from Red Moon Press.
Hailed as “a triumph” and “a beautifully written book, fizzing with marvelous imagery, energy, joie de vivre,” Joyride: A Haibun Road Trip is a lively mashup of flash fiction, memoir, free verse poetry, and haiku – an expansive take on the Japanese hybrid genre of haibun – that unfolds in offbeat episodes from the road of life.
You’ll meet a colorful cast of characters, and motoring through the collection are the automobiles – food trucks, used cars, moving vans, and others – that take us where we want to go and bring us home again.
Read advance praise for Joyride and purchase your very own copy here.
I am deeply honored and humbled to have won the 2020 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies for my forthcoming full-length poetry collection In The High Weeds.
Here is competition judge and Colorado Poet Jared Smith’s commentary on my manuscript:
In The High Weeds is an extraordinary journey from youth to maturity through an immersion in art, mythology, and family memories that provide a path that glimmers and illuminates our lives through the darkness laid out beneath uncertain stars. It entrances me. The imagery is concise and brilliant, and the craftsmanship is masterful across a wide range of poetic styles as the poet explores the mysteries of childhood, the greater responsibilities and frightening shadows of adulthood, and the challenges of raising healthy children in an uncertain world. Even as, the poet writes, “Time rolls out and ebbs/and ebbs again until the shore is dry/as wasp’s wings,” we find ourselves lifted on the fragile latticework of those dry wings and transported through her words to a meditative understanding of the peacefulness of all things in balance. The poet nears closure with the magnificent poetic statement that “Now is the time to leave/and wander/to bow to the mountains/and breathe the wisdom/of saints and sages/to savor the sweet lantern light/of the pear tree/to shadow the river’s bending banks/and bathe in the petals/of the weeping cherry.” What a wonderful journey to take with a brave and compassionate guide.
To launch In The High Weeds, I will be featured in a reading from the book at the 2021 Convention of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies on Saturday, 12 June 2021 on Zoom. You can register for the conference here.
In The High Weeds will be published by mid-June. Watch here for more details.
My heartfelt thanks to Jared Smith for this honor, and to the NFSPS for offering this and other opportunities for poets across the U.S. to share their art.
I am honored and humbled to see one of my poems featured in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s newspaper and online column, American Life in Poetry.
“Starry night” came to me in a flash and fully formed. And if the poem is “about” anything, it is this: the safe embrace of oaks and maples and beech trees scaffolding their branches into a haven from the world beyond.
And up above leafless limbs, stars spattered across the heavens like duff dropped on the forest floor, the vastness of the universe expanding me with wonder, and the present living moment holding hands with millions of years ago in the graceful give of acorns underfoot and tiny points of starlight overhead.
The poem was first published in Modern Haiku. My sincere thanks to editor Paul Miller for publishing the poem and to Ted Kooser for republishing it with his thoughtful commentary.
I’m honored to have won the Fall 2020 Sheila-Na-Gig Press Poetry Contest and to have had my poems “Seed,” “Roots,” and “Cut” published in the Fall 2020 issue of Sheila-Na-Gig online.
I am beyond honored for my poems to appear along with those of the poets whose work also appears in this issue of Sheila-Na-Gig online.
Photo: Jennifer Hambrick
These distinguished writers hail from every corner of the U.S., and their poems traverse every field and canyon of the human condition – connection and lineage, brokenness and sorrow, the wonder of love and flowers, the rusty nails of our aching world.
Reading the work of these poets reminded me what a fearsome gift it is to know this thing we call the human heart.
My most sincere thanks to Editor Hayley Mitchell Haugen and Associate Editor Jessica Higgins. And congratulations of my fellow poets whose beautiful work also appears in this issue of the journal.
I’m delighted to announce the arrival of my most recent poetry collection, In the High Weeds, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Prize of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.
It’s been a rough year. Couldn’t we all use a joyride?
jenniferhambrick.com 