Culture
Award winning poet brings her talents to the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio for haiku workshops for children and teens
By: Emily Votaw
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Award-winning poet, well-known Columbus-based public broadcaster, and Ohio Arts Council Teaching Artist Jennifer Hambrick will bring her talents to the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio in Lancaster (145 East Main Street) early next month for the purpose of exposing children and young people to the art of haiku.
Hambrick said her love of haiku evolved out of her established relationship with free verse lyric poetry.
“As I have continued to write haiku and study haiku and as I’ve gotten to know the genre more deeply, I’ve just kind of fallen in love with the challenge of writing a poem that is one to three lines long, 17 syllables or fewer that makes use of striking imagery that works in juxtaposition in surprising ways to reveal something that maybe we hadn’t considered about universal human experience,” said Hambrick.
The Haiku Rocks! Class will not only teach children what haikus are and how they can write them, it will also give each child a unique opportunity to share what they’ve learned with their community. During the workshop, each child will be given a smooth, small rock to scrawl their haiku on. After that, whether the child keeps the rock or leaves it out someplace for an unsuspecting stranger to find is completely up to them.
“The idea for the workshop came from the sort of rock painting craze that’s become popular — taking a rock and painting it and just leaving it out in the community for somebody to find. [During the workshop] children can write a haiku and then they can take some brightly colored paints or Sharpie markers and write their haiku on the rock in those colored markers, maybe add a little drawing or two, and then they can either take the rock home and keep it as a souvenir, or take the rock out into the community and leave it for somebody else to find and be surprised and enlightened by,” said Hambrick.
The workshop the following Sunday, aimed at children ages 12 to 18, will be a more general lesson in the basics of haiku and how the mode of writing can be utilized for self-expression.
Both workshops are being produced in conjunction with the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio’s “Hindsight: the Art of Looking Back” exhibition. The exhibition, which is on display through April 24, simultaneously celebrates Ohio’s memory painters and challenges visitors to consider the links and discrepancies between memory, nostalgia, and history.
Following the “What is Haiku?” workshop, Hambrick, alongside fellow award-winning poets Chiquita Mullins-Lee, Pat Snyder Hurley, and Linda Fuller-Smith, will take part in a poetry reading featuring poetic works inspired by the “Hindsight” exhibition.
On Sunday, April 3, Hambrick will lead “Haiku Rocks!” a workshop aimed at children ages 9-12 from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, April 10, Hambrick will lead a workshop aimed at teens ages 12-18 entitled “What Is Haiku?” from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Starting at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 10, Hambrick will take part in a poetry reading event featuring poems inspired by the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio’s Hindsight: The Art of Looking Back exhibition.
Register for these events at decartsohio.org.