Founding Haiku Festival

In December 2000, when the Illinois Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks passed away, I was hurled back to the day we met. I was seven years old. Ms. Brooks was hosting a poetry reading for kids. She gave some of us cash awards for our poems. I mailed a thank-you note to her home at 7428 South Evans, Chicago, 60619. She replied.

Fond memories of reading my poem to Ms. Brooks stayed with me. I sent her more poems.

She replied each time. We became pen pals, then she mentored me through my high school, undergrad, and grad school years.

In my first teaching job I read aloud to my junior high homeroom class. Students loved Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” Emily Dickinson’s “314” (Hope is the thing with feathers) Langston Hughes’s “Dream Variations” and “I, Too”. I read Jewelle Gomez’s “Swimming Lesson,” Toni Cade Bambara’s “Lesson” from Gorilla, My Love, and J. D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Students discussed Henry David Thoreau’s Walking, and other classics I read to them.

Reading aloud helped sharpen students’ listening skills. Students escaped the day’s rigors and enjoyed literature without the burden of being tested for a grade.

When I invited Ms. Brooks to do a poetry reading for my 100 students, the audience grew to 800 K-8 students and teachers. We planned a thirty-minute reading followed by Q&A. Ms. Brooks recited “We Real Cool,” “Song in the Front Yard,” “Life of Lincoln West,” et al. When a student requested an autograph, Ms. Brooks asked, “Would anyone else like an autograph?”

Every hand in the assembly was raised. During the first hour of signing autographs, parents who had come to collect their kids scurried to bookstores and bought books to be signed. Passersby joined the line stretching outside our school. I asked Ms. Brooks if she wanted to rest. She sipped water and vowed, “As long as kids want my chicken scratch, I’ll keep writing.”

Ms. Brooks had a distinctive penmanship that reflected her big heart. Her 1:30 to 2:30 visit ended well after 7:00 pm. She signed the last autograph as cheerfully as she had signed the first. I offered to increase her fee to reflect her extended stay. She graciously declined. I will always remember her generosity. For years Ms. Brooks fondly recalled the afternoon she spent signing notebook paper, books, and one girl’s diary.

Inspired by Ms. Brooks, I founded Haiku Festival in 2004. Haiku Festival’s mission is to “celebrate youth through poetry and promote literacy.” This mission is important to me and my co-founder, Greg Baiocchi. We are avid readers, as were our parents and grandparents. Haiku Festival is our heart child. I am responsible for the arts. Greg is our IT brainiac.

This year marks Haiku Festival Chicago’s 20^th anniversary. Each year a panel of judges blindly names winners from submissions we receive. In April, National Poetry Month, 8-to-14-year-olds present their winning haiku, nōtan, and essays; and 13-to-18-year-olds present essays at Haiku Festival’s awards program. Winners receive cash awards, books, and bragging rights. Our programs also feature young musicians, taiko drummers, and a guest poet.

Our first year we received original haiku from 75 Chicago poets. By 2005, 150 youth replied to our Call for Poetry. Each year the number of submissions grows exponentially, and hails from more states and countries. In 2014, we published Haiku Festival’s 10^th Anniversary Anthology and hosted haiku master, Prof. Sonia Sanchez from Temple University.

This year nearly 1,400 poets submitted haiku. We published Haiku Festival 20^th Anniversary Anthology, dedicated “to Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks Blakely, Illinois Poet Laureate, and Pulitzer Prize Winner.” Our anthology features 107 award-winning haiku, 3 essays, 1 prose poem, and 12 nōtan designs. In two decades, Haiku Festival has received over 37,000 haiku from around the world.

When I began writing poetry at age seven, my teachers introduced haiku and other forms. I gravitated toward haiku. I love haiku’s brevity, subtlety, and that it is a contraction of the phrase haikai no ku (“light verse”). “Hai” is Japanese for “amusement” and “ku” means “verse” or poem. (Haiku is often called ku.)

Haiku are generally 3-line unrhymed nature poems of up to 17 syllables (5/7/5 form). Haiku use irony, or an aha moment. Early haiku introduced longer poems called renga. My love for reading and writing haiku led to six related forms.

Like haiku, senryū are 3-line unrhymed poems up to 17 syllables (5/7/5). Haiku are about nature; senryū are about human nature.

Renga is linked poetry written by 2 or more poets. The first poet writes haiku; the second replies with two lines of seven syllables each: 5/7/5 followed by 7/7, another 5/7/5, then 7/7, etc. Some renga chains go on for years, across different countries.

Tanka is a 5-line poem of up to 31 syllables: 5/7/5 (upper poem: concrete ideas) plus 7/7 (lower poem: emotional aspects). Tanka is written by one person.

Other haiku-related forms include haibun, hybrid of prose (paragraph) and haiku; cherita, a 6-line poem in 3 stanzas; and monoku, 1-line horizontal, vertical, or diagonal ku up to 17 syllables. (NB: “haiku” is plural and singular, like its related forms. No “s” is used.)

Haiku Festival Chicago offers workshops to teach participants how to read, write, and publish haiku, senryū, renga, tanka, haibun, cherita, and monoku. For samples of all 7 forms, to book a reading, workshop, or to answer our Call for Poetry, visit www.HaikuFest.com or email regina@haikufest.com

Regina Harris Baiocchi is a composer, author, and poet. Her music is recorded and performed by renowned orchestras and acclaimed artists. Her byline appears in Modern Haiku, Obsidian, Fire This Time, and elsewhere. She wrote urban haiku, blues haiku, and at the gate of the sun. Regina’s fiction includes Indigo Sound, Finding Déjà, and Scuppernong.