Allyson Whipple

Tag: haiku

  • Now in Preorder: Postcards from Texas

    Now in Preorder: Postcards from Texas

    I’m thrilled to announce the forthcoming publication of my third poetry chapbook, Postcards from Texas, now available for preorder from Cuttlefish Books. This chapbook is my first that is devoted exclusively to haiku, and represents the shift in my creative focus since 2020. You can find the preorder link here: https://cuttlefishbooks.wixsite.com/home/2023-summer-book-launch.

    The haiku in Postcards from Texas were mostly written in the second half of 2021 and the first half of 2022, the last 12 months I spent living in Austin. A few are older, going as far back as 2018. They were composed on hikes and camping trips, as well as dog walks around the city and picnics in local parks. My haiku address the changing political and physical landscape of a place I lived in, and deeply loved, for 15 years.

    I’ve now lived in Missouri for just over a year. I adore the city of St. Louis, I finally found a job I could enjoy, and there are gorgeous landscapes throughout the state. The past year has also been one of grief for a place I still adore with all my heart, a place I thought I’d live until I died. Putting this chapbook together this past spring was a way to find some resolution of those emotions surrounding my move.

    Postcards from Texas contains another form of grief as well. In 2015, I reconnected with my maternal grandfather for the first time in 20 years. (The reasons for that separation are complicated, and I have become wary of making family history public.) John and I are avid hikers, and I began sending my grandfather postcards from our hikes and camping trips all over Texas. He loved seeing the places we went. Four and a half years after my grandfather came back into my life, the universe took him from me again. He didn’t die of COVID, but I believe that he was a secondary casualty of the havoc the virus created around the world. There is no way to know fore sure, but I believe that if COVID hadn’t cause so many other problems, he’d still be here. I still feel sad that we didn’t get more time, and heartbroken that COVID protocols kept me from seeing him or even attending his funeral.

    Postcards from Texas is dedicated to my maternal grandfather, as well as all the other people I lost my last few years in Texas (all but one of them died before COVID). Putting this book together was a way to continue writing postcards could no longer go to their intended recipient. It’s not just a farewell to a place I loved; it’s a reckoning of the loss that I feel should never have happened when it did.

    Not only am I excited to be publishing a book, but I’m thrilled to be in the company of Lenard D. Moore and Julie Bloss Kelsey, the other two Cuttlefish authors included in the summer catalog. While you can preorder my book individually, I encourage you to get the bundle of all three authors. Lenard D. Moore is someone I consider a contemporary haiku master, with an incredible attention to detail. Julie Bloss Kelsey presents a compelling and humorous look at adolescence and the transition into adulthood, all in the short haiku form.

    Order Now!

    (Note: As of this writing, the preorder site is having some issues on mobile browsers. It’s easier to order from the desktop version of the site. If you are trying to order from a mobile browser and running into issues, email me or send me a DM on Instagram, and I’ll help you out.)

  • Buson Challenge Days 1-12

    Buson Challenge Days 1-12

    The Buson Challenge is, in short, an attempt to write 10 haiku a day for 100 days. If you want to know more, view this clip from Mike Rehling’s 2020 talk “Finding Yourself in a Poem,” presented at the 2020 HSA Conference. (In case the link doesn’t work correctly, the part about the Buson Challenge starts at 14:45.) This year is my third go-around, and hopefully my first successful attempt.

    At the moment, I can’t locate the spreadsheet where I tracked my initial efforts. Maybe it got deleted somewhere down the line. But either way, I tried in 2020 and 2021, and neither time resulted in me completing the challenge. I don’t think I even got halfway through. Even when you’re giving yourself permission to write downright terrible haiku, it’s not easy to write 10 a day. The first two times, my biggest issue wasn’t getting the haiku down; I gave myself permission to write some truly awful stuff, which meant I could meet the quantity requirement. (Thankfully there is no quality requirement.) My biggest issue was simply remembering to actually get in 10 a day. I might get 3 in one writing session, 4 in another, and then get distracted and forget the rest.

    This year, after I announced Haiku Girl Summer (my limited-run online haiku journal), a haiku friend asked me if I’d heard of the Buson Challenge. I had completely forgotten about it! 2022 was a terrible year for my creative life, and writing 10 haiku a day for 100 days was not going to work with everything else I was juggling. But now I’ve settled into a job I like, the house is getting more organized, and I have the brain space to actually write again.

    As of this writing, I’ve successfully completed 12/100 days. I’ve definitely written more mediocre and genuinely bad haiku than good, though since most of the haiku are still in my notebook and not typed up, I don’t have sense of the overall proportion so far. But I’m surprising myself; the overall quality each day is better than anticipating. Most days, I manage at least one haiku that has potential.

    Preferred notebook: Field Notes

    Notebooks filled: 1

    Places I’ve written:

    So far, I’m having a fantastic time with this challenge, and feel optimistic that I might actually get all the way through!

  • New Year, New Home

    In the season finale of the Culinary Saijiki podcast, I talked with Mark Scott of Naturalist Weekly, which was one of my favorite blogs of 2022. In the conversation, I had the idea of spending 2023 investigating the micro-seasons around me. I decided that since I wanted to find a way to write more consistently in this space, I would make that my project for 2023.

    Of course, the first month of the year is nearly over, and I’ve yet to get started! In part that’s because I’m balancing a full-time job, finishing my Pilates training, and my other haiku endeavors. But there was another challenge: it became clear to me that the micro-seasons Mark describes in his blog would have been developed over many years of watching and observing. An awareness of micro-seasons would also require one to be intimately familiar with the flora and fauna of their locale.

    Having lived in Missouri for just over six months, neither of these things are particularly ingrained in my consciousness.

    The North American House Hippo is, as far as I can tell, not related to any specific kigo.

    However, each of Mark’s blog entries ends with an invitation related to the micro-season that he is exploring. My plan is to use those to guide my explorations and writing for the course of the year. That will give me not just an opportunity for fresh poems, but also a way to help me connected to the geography of my new home. I look forward to seeing what transpires!

  • Introducing the Culinary Saijiki

    As they say in the current parlance, it’s been a minute. Last summer, after the writing intensive I was part of wrapped up, I just felt a need to stop. Stop pushing, stop trying so hard. Just be quiet and see what happens.

    And quite a bit happened. I earned my Level 1 comprehensive teacher certification from Peak Pilates. In the interest of diversifying my skill set, I also got a certification from POP Pilates. (So much for doing less . . .) In February, I started teaching Pilates part-time on the regular. And the biggest change is that my partner and I decided to leave Austin and move to St. Louis, Missouri. As of this writing, I’ll only be in town for about six more weeks, and I’m doing my best to soak up everything I love about Texas.

    While I was excited to focus on my movement practice after spending so much time on writing, and while I am also looking forward to a new city, my poetry life had gotten a little stagnant. I was still writing, submitting, and publishing haiku, and became an active member of the Austin Haiku Study Group. But I was looking for more.

    Cornmeal whole-wheat waffles. Definitely poetry-worthy.

    About a month ago, my waiting paid off. I got the idea for a new project: The Culinary Saijiki. As most people who read this blog probably know, I’m a big fan of food (eating more so than cooking). I’m also interested in the ways in which English-language haiku practitioners approach the seasons in their haiku practice. I realized that food is one way in which people can connect to the seasons, and decided I wanted to go deeper into exploring that connection. I launched the first blog post earlier in April. (I planned to announce it here that same week, but hey . . . I’m moving and wrapping up the semester. Things are a bit hectic.)

    In addition to the blog, I’ve also decided to start a companion podcast, where I talk to haiku practitioners about the ways in which food shows up in their work. I’m already in the process of sorting out my first guests, but I’d love to hear from the rest of the haiku community. If you are a haiku poet, or know a haiku poet, who might like to have a conversation with me, the Join the Conversation page has the information you need to get started. The podcast launches in June, and I’d love to have a few conversations recorded in advance so I can sustain momentum in the midst of my big move.

    I’m excited for this new facet of my creative life. I still prefer to keep this site more general, so I’ll only crosspost when I have major announcements. If you want to stay updated, head over to The Culinary Saijiki and subscribe!

  • Poetry in a Pandemic: My First Year of PoPoFest

    The beautiful assortment of cards I received

    I first heard about the Poetry Postcard Festival in 2014; I have several friends who participate every year. I never joined, largely because I was afraid to put up money and then not actually follow through with it. But since I didn’t get to attend any poetry festivals or go on vacation this year, when I saw in Submittable that the 2020 registration deadline was closing soon, I decided to give it a shot. This was a chance to connect with other poets, and to maybe get some postcards from places I’d never been.

    I didn’t actually struggle to get my poems out in the month of August. In fact, sitting down to write a tiny poem became the highlight of my month. I gave myself prompts by drawing a card from my Emily Dickinson tarot deck. I then had to tie the theme of the tarot card to the theme of the postcard. I knew that the reader on the other end would never actually see the tarot card I used, but my goal was to write each poem so that you wouldn’t need to know what had prompted me to start it. Usually I wrote my first poem of the day before walking Astrid. I would sometimes write three or four in a day if I was feeling especially inspired.

    I also developed an affection for vintage postcards. When I started PoPoFest, I had a sizeable stack of postcards, most of which had come from my various travels. Some, though, were vintage postcards I’d found in antique stores. I found that I had the most fun writing poems for the old-fashioned cards, and when my stack ran out halfway through, I ordered two dozen vintage postcards from an Etsy seller to get me through, with enough to spare for next year. I also found myself especially charmed by the vintage postcards I received. One of my favorites is an old postcard of a Tokyo hotel. Since I had to cancel my trip to Japan this year, that card had an air of serendipity to it. In a time when I’ve been unable to see my friends or attend in-person poetry readings, receiving tiny poems in the mail brought a regular sense of joy and gratitude to the long, stifling days of Texas summer.

    Some people in my group were ambitious and got their postcards out early, so I started receiving mail in July. Some people didn’t get their postcards out by August 31st (some people in my group had to deal with the fire situation), but I actually loved how the postcards trickled into September. I felt like it extended the celebration of poetry.

    I loved being part of PoPoFest, and I am definitely going to sign up again for 2021. Hopefully we’ll have gotten through this pandemic by next August, but I’ll still cherish the sense of connection that this festival brings.

  • Haiku of Leaves [IndieInk Challenge]

    For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, SAM challenged me with “Rewrite your favorite story.” and I challenged Kirsten Doyle with “Take the opening line from the book you’re reading. Use that somewhere in the middle of your piece.”

    ***

    The house is hungry.
    Johnny has gone exploring.
    The minotaur waits.

    ***

    For more info on the piece, click below the fold.

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