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 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.
Home of Denison University, Granville is a beautiful town full of cultural and historical riches. I am excited to be able to live on the beautiful grounds of Bryn Du Mansion during my term of residency, October – November 2019.
The role of Artist-in-Residence at Bryn Du Mansion emphasizes community engagement through the arts. To that end, this fall I will present a series of public events that will feature poetry alone and in combination with music and visual art.
Here’s the lineup:
Poetry reading and community open mic at Bryn Du Mansion
Words and Music – a performance of new works by Denison student composers setting my poetry. Performers include Denison University music students and the world-renowned new music string quartet, ETHEL, Denison University’s Quartet-in-Residence.
Jazz Haiku @ Bryn Du – a cabaret-style event featuring a professional jazz trio’s improvisations in response to my experimental haiku, alongside an exhibition of my urban photographic haiga (haiku + photography)
Poetry writing workshops for senior citizens and for intermediate school students.
It is an extraordinary opportunity to serve the Granville community as Bryn Du Mansion’s first Artist-in-Residence. I am deeply humbled to have been selected for this role, and I am excited to make Granville my home this fall to get to know my new neighbors throughout the community.
The poets, composers, and musicians of The Big SCORE: (L to R) Jennifer Jolley, Dionne Custer Edwards, Scott Woods, Barbara Fant, the musicians of the Columbus contemporary music ensemble CODE, Jennifer Merkowitz, Louise Robertson, Jennifer Hambrick, Charlie Wilmoth, Linda Kernohan, and Michael Rene Torres (Photo: Terri Collins/The Big SCORE)
I am extremely honored to have been part of an epic performance recently that marked the culmination of an exciting new poetry and new music project.
Six new works of texted music were given their world premieres May 22, 2019 as the first of two concerts culminating a year-long project. In The Big SCORE, the Johnstone Fund for New Music commissioned six Columbus poets to collaborate in pairs with six Columbus composers and create six new poems in musical settings.
The Columbus contemporary music ensemble CODE (Columbus Ohio Discovery Ensemble) performed the world premieres of all six new works – including my poem Circles Against the Spin in composer Mark Lomax, II’s setting for narrator and chamber ensemble – on May 22 on the Garden Theater’s New Music at Short North Stage series, in Columbus.
The whole concert was a tour de force. CODE’s performances of all six new scores were stunning, the poets who performed their poems with CODE were all totally on, and the energy in the Garden Theater – raw, real, hip, and overwhelmingly positive – was truly incredible.
Zoe Johnstone’s idea for The Big SCORE was pathbreaking – to pair six Columbus poets with six Columbus composers, commission each pair to write a poem set to music, and see what happened. Zoe and Jack Johnstone selected the 12 artists for the project and, working with their advisors, paired us up.
The Johnstones and their advisors avoided what might have seemed the obvious poet-composer pairings, in the name of shaking things up to see what the resulting unusual collaborative duos would create. For instance, a poet who had collaborated many times with one of the composers in the project was intentionally not paired with that composer for The Big SCORE. The racial and gender diversity of the group of artists was also taken into consideration in making the pairings.
Composer Dr. Mark Lomax, II (far left) looking on as Michael Rene Torres conducts CODE in a rehearsal for the May 22, 2019 world premiere of The Big SCORE. (photo: Jennifer Hambrick)
I was paired with Dr. Mark Lomax, II, the winner of a 2019 Governor’s Award in the Arts and a recent Artist-in-Residence at Columbus’ Wexner Center for the Arts. As I told the audience at the May 22 world premiere, Mark’s music for Circles Against the Spin “really found the heartbeat of my poem,” which is about how making a clover chain together weaves two girls into a childhood friendship that, in a very special way, survives the test of time and indeed grows stronger, despite distance and other trials of adulthood.
Mark Lomax’s score for Circles Against the Spin (photo: Jennifer Hambrick)
Mark’s music is playful and lovely and full of joy. And even in the poem’s middle section, where the trials of adulthood put physical distance between the two friends, Mark’s music never loses the youthful innocence that childhood friendships carried into adulthood often have. Listen to the world-premiere performance in the video above.
The other poet-composer duos of The Big SCORE consisted of Dionne Custer Edwards and Michael Rene Torres, the founder and conductor of CODE; Louise Robertson and Jennifer Merkowitz; Scott Woods and composer Jennifer Jolley (formerly on the faculty at Ohio Wesleyan University, currently on the faculty at Texas Tech University); Jeremy Glazier and Charlie Wilmoth; and Barbara Fant and Linda Kernohan.
These phenomenally gifted people are some of the artists who, along with creative pioneers Zoe and Jack Johnstone, are actually making new art happen in Ohio’s Cap City.
Kudos to my fellow artists of The Big SCORE, and deepest thanks to the Johnstones for making this incredible project happen for Columbus.
The next performance of The Big SCORE takes place Sept. 8, 2019 at the Columbus Performing Arts Center, on the Sunday at Central concert series.
Please come, and bring a poem to share at the open mic.
Named after a fictitious novel that features in Wes Anderson’s film Moonrise Kingdom, The Light of Seven Matchsticks blends literary class and sass with a mysterious vibe redolent of the 1920s Prohibition demimonde.
My husband and I are big, HUGE fans of Natalie’s and had heard tell of the speakeasy, so we decided to check it out one evening last summer.
True Prohibition-era speakeasies obviously didn’t have street signs, so we weren’t looking for one for The Light of Seven Matchsticks, either.
But we found the place, descended the charmingly nondescript outdoor staircase, peeked through the peephole in the frosted-glass front door (because you gotta), and stepped into one of the funkiest little places ever.
Inside, we made our way in the low, mysterious lighting to one of the velvet-lined booths, found the menu (that’s part of the fun), and enjoyed some nifty eats and drinks.
I was crunching on yummy duck fat popcorn when I said, “I’d love to do a poetry reading here.”
Fast-forward a few months: I message my friend Rikki, “There’s this great, funky place in Worthington I want to introduce you to.”
Rikki, who loves funkiness at least as much as I do, had heard of The Light of Seven Matchsticks but had never been there. So we met up for drinks and snacks after work.
“I’d love to do a poetry reading here,” I said.
“Let’s do a double feature,” Rikki said.
And here we are.
Please join us Tuesday, April 30 at 7 p.m. at The Light of Seven Matchsticks.
I am grateful to have another mini portfolio of my haiga published in the most recent issue of the journal Haigaonline. This issue. “Viewing Stones,” features haiga inspired by and depicting rocks, stones and earth.
All of the photographs in my haiga mini portfolio, “Ancient Days,” were shot in New Mexico, where earth is poetry in its own right. The haiga above, “waning summer,” shows a wall on a New Mexico pueblo crumbling “back to the earth.” The haiga below, “eroding hills,” depicts the skeletons of mountains that, eons ago, had been submerged in a vast inland sea, and that now stand, eroded and ghostlike, in the New Mexico desert.
My sincere thanks to Haigaonline editor Linda Papanicolaou for tirelessly catalyzing new work in the genre of haiga, and for again publishing my work in her journal.
I am extremely honored and humbled to have won First Place in the Haiku Society of America’s 2018 Haibun Awards Competition with my haibun “That Summer.”
The genre of haibun consists of the juxtaposition of prose and haiku in ways that allow the two genres to resonate uniquely with each other, creating multiple layers of meaning. Here is “A Brief History of English-Language Haibun” by Jim Kacian, founder and board chairperson of The Haiku Foundation and one of the leading exponents of English-language haiku and related genres. This essay was compiled from Kacian’s introductions, and with Kacian’s permission, by Ray Rasmussen, the present editor of the major haibun journal Haibun Today.
“That Summer” is published on the Haiku Society of America’s website. My haibun will also be published in the Haiku Society of America’s journal, Frogpond, one of the finest publications of English-language haiku and related genres. [Update, 2-29-20: “That Summer” was published on the Haiku Society of America’s website and in Frogpond.]
Sincere thanks to competition judge John Stevenson, and hearty congratulations to my fellow poets who also won awards in this contest.
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 