"Cradle": Winding down ...

by Melissa Allen

Okay. This will be my last bulletin from the Cradle of American Haiku Festival. I hope my coverage hasn’t been too exhaustive (or exhausting). I’ve just found the whole experience so much fun and so fascinating that I wanted to give everyone who’s never been to a haiku conference some sense of what it’s all about. Also, I learned so much that I didn’t want to forget and that I thought was worth sharing.

So. We’ve reached the end of the “mostly educational” phase of the conference and are moving on to the “mostly social” phase. By this point I had met enough people and felt comfortable enough in the group that instead of cowering in a corner, I actually found myself having lots of lively conversations and making new friends. It was an amazing feeling to be in the presence of so many other people who were passionate about haiku, especially since before this weekend I’d never met another haiku poet in person. Now I know so many I can’t even remember all their names.

While sitting on the porch of Foundry Books, reviving myself after a long day of lectures and workshops by scarfing down several more of the fantastic chocolate chip cookies that I had developed a serious addiction to the day before, I had a nice conversation with Gayle Bull about her amazing garden, songbirds, and life in a hundred-and-sixty-year-old house in Mineral Point (tip: dress warmly in winter). Gayle also invited me to meet with her haiku group in Mineral Point — I may take her up on that (although I am still thinking of starting a group in Madison, if that doesn’t require too insane a time commitment).

At cocktail hour and the picnic following, Charlie Trumbull and I discovered that we had shared an undergraduate university and major and compared notes on the one professor in our department who was there at the same time as both of us. I talked to a guy from Madison whom I’d known in another context many years ago and got caught up. I had a lot of fun talking to a librarian — my current subject of graduate study — and her husband who is in (more or less) the same line of work as my husband. I got to know Lidia Rozmus, a wonderful haiga artist who is originally from Poland, and bonded with her over discussions of life behind the Iron Curtain (I spent a semester studying in Moscow before the collapse of the Soviet Union).

A haiku reading ended the evening once again. One of the highlights of this for me was Jerome Cushman’s sign language interpretations of haiku — I have a special interest in this since my sister works at a school for the deaf and is a fluent signer. He started by signing Basho’s famous frogpond haiku, asking us to guess what we thought it was (I got it — the hop of the frog into the pond and the splash were unmistakable).

Randy Brooks’s undergraduate student Aubrie (apologies to Aubrie, I don’t remember her last name*) entertained us with her haiku:

haiku conference
I’m everyone’s
granddaughter†

Some of us indignantly retorted that we were only old enough to be her mother, not her grandmother! But it’s true that Aubrie was the youngest person there by probably at least fifteen years. I’m still trying to ponder the significance of this — is haiku something that people generally come to later in life? Or does the younger generation mostly have no interest in haiku? Are we dying out, like the classical music audience?

I read my “Seasonal Mathematics” sequence, which I thought got a slightly warmer reception than my full moon sequence of the night before. (It turns out that Lee Gurga was an undergraduate math major, so he appreciated it.) Still, I felt kind of like the freshman on the team, trying with limited success to hit the ball the way the upperclassmen do.

I was sad not to be able to attend any of Sunday’s events, which included a ginko walk and the results of the haiku kukai that was held over the weekend. It was hard to say goodbye to everyone. (Though I got lots of email addresses, so I’m hoping to keep in touch with some.) But I’m already making plans to attend the Haiku North America conference that the Brookses are holding in Decatur next summer … it’s just too much fun to be surrounded by real live haikuists.

Not that I don’t love you guys … why don’t you come too, so I can finally meet some of you?

autumn beer —
haiku poets
can’t stop talking

__________________

*Cox! Her last name is Cox! I knew that, really I did.

†Revised to remove the word “first” from the beginning of the ku, since Aubrie tells me I imagined that part.