women’s experience

International Women’s Haiku Festival: It’s a Wrap

~ Jennifer Hambrick ~ 2 Comments

Thank You

Photo: Free for Commercial Use/www.gratisography.com/Creative Commons/Flickr

31 days. 27 poets. 48 poems.

The first International Women’s Haiku Festival on Inner Voices was a big success.  You sent me an overwhelming number of submissions from every corner of the English-speaking world.  With deep sensitivity, humor, and skill, your poems covered a broad swathe of women’s experience – the horrors of breast cancer, the nuanced relationships of mothers and daughters, marriage, divorce, domestic violence, singlehood and solitude, the glass ceiling, children, childbirth and motherhood, dementia, body image, age discrimination, cougars, and even the politics of lingerie.

Some of your poems tugged at the proverbial heart strings.  Some of them made me giggle.  All of them made me think and, I hope, will continue to make others think about the richness that women bring to the world, and about the ways in which the world does – and, in many instances, still does not – appreciate it.

In addition to your submissions, your support for the festival also came in the form of the comments you wrote on the festival’s featured posts, and in the many lovely comments you sent me privately.  I appreciate them all.

Thank you for entrusting me to curate your work in this festival.  I was an honor.

The poets of the 2017 International Women’s Haiku Festival:

Agnes Eva Savich (USA)
Anna Cates (USA)
Roberta Beary (USA/Ireland)
John Hawkhead (UK)
Terri L. French (USA)
Willie R. Bongcaron (Philippines)
Shloka Shankar (India)
Michael Dylan Welch (USA)
Martha Magenta (UK)
Stella Pierides (Germany/UK)
Lee Nash (France)
Eufemia Griffo (Italy)
Marietta McGregor (Australia)
Joshua Gage (USA)
Christina Sng (Singapore)
Julie Thorndyke (Australia)
Mary Stevens (USA)
Debbie Strange (Canada)
Amy Losak (USA)
Debbi Antebi (UK)
Michelle Schaefer (USA)
David Oates (USA)
Nicholas Klacsanzky (Ukraine)
Louise Hopewell  (Australia)
Tim Gardiner (UK)
Angela Leuck (Canada)
Valorie Broadhurst Woerdehoff (USA)

International Women’s Haiku Festival: Poems by Agnes Eva Savich

~ Jennifer Hambrick ~ 1 Comment

Summer Fades Away [244/366]

Photo: Tim Sackton/Creative Commons/Flickr

This month, in celebration of National Women’s History Month, Inner Voices is hosting the International Women’s Haiku Festival. Throughout the month of March, you will find here haiku about women, women’s experience, and women’s unique contributions, written by poets from around the world.

Launching the festival today are two haiku by Agnes Eva Savich.

rosy cheeks
she picks a fistful
of cherry tomatoes

This poem captures a double moment of joy: that of harvesting the juicy treasures of the vine, and that which the poetic speaker – perhaps in the role of mother or grandmother – experiences in watching the rosy-cheeked girl’s moment of discovery.  The mirror imagery of the rosy cheeks and the rosy roundness of the cherry tomatoes in the girl’s fist is delightful.

***

breast cancer
sprinklers on full blast
across a church lawn

Here, the “sprinklers on full blast” are a darkly clever amplification of a chemo drip.  That those sprinklers are flooding the lawn of a church emphasizes the depths of the fear that extends from the devastating diagnosis to the possibility that, in times of human desperation, even divine power has its limits.

Agnes Eva Savich lives near Austin, TX with her husband, two kids, and four cats. She has been writing poetry since she was 12. Her haiku are published in many modern haiku journals and have been translated into five languages. She has an early collection of poetry, The Watcher: Poems (Cedar Leaf Press, 2009) and is working on her first haiku collection.

Find more information about the International Women’s Haiku Festival and submit your work at this link.