Bare Necessities: Selected Haiku of Francine Banwarth
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Excerpt from the Author's Preface: Weaving Toward the Center Whether I’m creating haiku or reading the haiku of others, I try to pay attention to the way language is used and how it sounds; to explore moments of heightened awareness that resonate on more than one level; to discover sudden realizations and stark realities through imagery and juxtapositions linked to sensory perceptions; to interweave intuitive insight and response to our ever-changing personal and universal lives. In seventeen syllables or less, relayed in a breath of composition, the process of recording and shaping a moment of awareness unfolds. And then, the work of editing begins. If we’re lucky, and sometimes we are, a haiku presents itself “whole.” While I was editing Frogpond, after a long day of reading submissions, and as night was falling, I got up to lock the door:
A month after my husband was admitted into a long-term care center, I was making dinner for one:
I write a lot of haiku “on the move,” while engaged in the seemingly mundane . . . dusting, vacuuming, driving, running. Motion frees my mind and helps me find a starting point to anchor some silk, let the wind carry it to wherever it can grab on, and then spiral to the center, the heart. Much like a spider weaving its web, the process seems deceptively simple, but the result, when done well, is layered in complexity. Reflecting on the insight of Jane Hirshfield, I find myself thinking about the evolving universe of English-language haiku in the same way: to not become too settled on what a haiku “might consist of or know, or where it might reside.” The possibilities are endless. When I judged the 2016 Peggy Willis Lyles Memorial Contest, I wrote in my introductory remarks: “Take a few minutes to remember your own haiku mentors, those who said yes to you, who promoted your early and ongoing efforts in the art and craft of haiku, who asked you to participate in some way along the haiku path. Embrace the lessons you’ve learned from them and pass them on.” Getting back to that first haiku attempt in 1988, I recall it as:
During a break, I’d gone outside to sit on a stone step in the sun and absorb all that was presented in the morning sessions. Now, thirty-six years later, I reflect on that moment and wonder, am I on the haiku path, or has my life become a haiku path. ~ Francine Banwarth |
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Samples from BARE NECESSITIES:
brushing,
dandelion down to the bare necessities
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Short Biography of Francine Banwarth Francine Banwarth was born on June 29, 1947, in Los Angeles, California. She was the second of four siblings born within five years to her parents, Myrtle (Carol) Irene Schultz Buda and Rocco Salvatore Buda, Jr. Both were “transplants” to the city of LA, her father from Cirella, Italy, in 1936 at the age of 16, and her mother from Schapville, Illinois, in 1942 at the age of 17. In 1950 her family traveled back to the Midwest and settled in Dubuque, Iowa. Located along the bluffs of the mighty Mississippi River, Dubuque’s hills are often compared to those of San Francisco, a setting that has inspired many artists and writers. As a child she ran the alleys, climbed the bluffs, swam the river, and made weekly trips to the public library to check out fairy tale books and folk tale collections. Imagination and introspection were seeded and nurtured. Piano and cello lessons followed in grade school. The cello was a brief affair, but piano lessons and the study of music theory continued through college. In 1969 Francine graduated from Clarke College in Dubuque with a BA in sociology and elementary education. She taught fourth through sixth grades for seven years, married Jim Banwarth in 1971, and their sons Abe and Noah were born in 1975 and 1978. She became a “stay-at-home mom” and their daughter, Sophie, was born in 1982. These years provided opportunities to begin running and to write the newsletter for the Dubuque running club, volunteer with local and national peace and justice groups, and plant her feet on the haiku path. In 1993 she reentered the “world of work” as a freelance proofreader and copy editor of college textbooks for a variety of local publishing companies until the autumn of 2013. Francine joined the Haiku Society of America in 1989. She helped organize Haiku Overview, a haiku study group, with Bill Pauly in 2001and has participated in and presented at haiku workshops and conferences in Dubuque; Mineral Point, Wisconsin; and Chicago, Illinois. She served as HSA second vice-president from 2008 through 2010 and as editor of Frogpond from 2012 through 2015. She was one of the featured poets in New Resonance 5, a Touchstone Award winner in 2014, and The Heron’s Nest Poet of the Year in 2015. In 2017, with Michele Root-Bernstein, she co-authored The Haiku Life: What We Learned as Editors of Frogpond. She has been a member of the editorial staff for The Red Moon Anthology since 2018. Those who have enriched and nurtured Francine’s haiku life are countless. If you’ve met her along the haiku path, you’ve influenced her in some way: poets, editors, and leaders who serve and offer opportunities to become involved in the haiku community. In 2003 Francine met Charlie Trumbull at the HSA quarterly meeting in Evanston, Illinois. Within a few years he encouraged her to become a member of the HSA board. In 2007 Gayle Bull opened her heart and her home at The Foundry Books in Mineral Point for haiku workshops and meetings that continued until her death in 2019. The first Cradle of American Haiku Festival in 2008 was the brainchild of Gayle, Charlie, and Jerome Cushman, all warm, magnetic personalities who inspired the haiku mind and spirit. The Cradle Festivals are still held every two years. Bare Necessities is Francine’s first published collection. The idea for this collection was seeded quite a few years ago. It came to fruition with encouragement from other haiku poets and the patience, guidance, and contributions of Randy and Shirley Brooks and Michele Root-Bernstein. ~ ~ ~ HAIKU JOURNAL CITATIONS Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals in which these poems appeared. Acorn ~ ~ ~ JOURNALS & BOOKS EDITED Banwarth, Francine and Michele Root-Berstein, Editors. Frogpond: the Journal of the Haiku Society of America issues 35.2, 35.3, 36.1, 36.2, 36.3, 37.1, 37.2, 37.3, 38.1, 38.2, 38.3; 2012-2015. Bull, Gayle and Francine Banwarth, Editors. Tommy Knockers: Mineral Point Retreat Anthology 2011. Ottawa, Canada: Editions Des Petits Nuages, 2011. Cehota, Cynthia and Francine Banwarth, Jayne Miller, David McKee, Bill Pauly, Editors. Haiku Dubuque: The River Knows the Way. Dubuque, IA, 2010. Root-Bernstein, Michele and Francine Banwarth. The Haiku Life: What We Learned as Editors of Frogpond. Lincoln, IL: Modern Haiku Press, 2017. ~ ~ ~ HAIKU & SENRYU AWARDS Anita Sadler Weiss Memorial Haiku Award, sponsored by The Haiku Poets of Central Maryland Betty Drevniok Award, sponsored by Haiku Canada Brussels Sprout, Editor’s Choice Award Frogpond MHL, Best of Issue Award sponsored by the Museum of Haiku Literature Hawaii Haiku Education Association awards Haiku Poets of Northern California awards Haiku Society of America Haiku Award in Honor of Harold G. Henderson Kaji Aso Haiku Contest, sponsored by the Kaji Aso Studio Mayfly best of issue cover haiga award Modern Haiku favorite of issue award Manitou Shores Haiku Contest Midwest Haiku Traveling Rock Garden Peggy Willis Lyles Haiku Award Penumbra Haiku Contest Pinewood Haiku Contest, sponsored by the North Carolina Haiku Society Robert Frost Poetry Festival Haiku Contest Shiki Internet Kukai (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010) The Heron’s Nest Editor’s Choice award White Lotus Haiku Contest Washington Poets Association Contest Yuki Teikei Haiku Society Memorial Contest |
Reader's Introduction: OH-SO-NECESSARY HAIKU How delighted I am to write this introduction to Bare Necessities by Francine Banwarth. I first got to know Francine in the years 2009 to 2011 at various haiku conferences in Ottawa, Chicago, and Mineral Point, Wisconsin. We just talked, at first, but her tall, warm presence and the attentive grace with which she read and performed her poems immediately struck me as a necessary inspiration. When she asked me to edit Frogpond with her I seized the chance to absorb haiku, its ways and means, from a stream still close to its source. I mean this more literally than not. Francine is very much a midwestern haiku poet—more specifically, she is a Dubuque, Iowa, haiku poet. For decades she studied formally and informally with Bill Pauly, a generous and intuitive soul who studied in much the same manner with Raymond Roseliep, one of the most refreshing, innovative, one might even say visionary spirits to be found in midcentury English-language haiku. In creative work, tacit understandings learned firsthand, passed on mind to mind, retain much of their purity. Dubuque sits along the Mississippi, as outsize a presence for these poets as the minimal poetics and subjective expression flowing through their haiku veins. ... Given the waters she drinks from, Francine has taken for her own a poetic license tending toward the highly personal vision. Hers is an original voice, an authentic sensibility. Consider some of Francine’s earliest poems: a circle of light first night of snow dogwood in bloom water calls them In these haiku, all from around 1990 to the early 2000s, Francine approaches line break, layout, the leap between images, and empathic insight in fresh and effective ways. In “first night of snow” and “dogwood in bloom” she pairs natural imagery with unusually observed moments in domestic life. A sensual likeness between unlike things and processes hovers between the lines and words. Aptly chosen images speak. In “a circle of light” something unsaid begins to vibrate when we recall that swans mate for life. In “water calls them / out of the sky” the conventional point of view shifts from human to “wing-worn” bird. We are surprised by a sudden feel for the reciprocity, the interpenetration of things. All of this expressed with a masterful control of rhythm, sound, and unfolding language that is also Francine’s hallmark. These early haiku are normative in the best sense of the word, and beautifully so. Yet already Francine is moving toward her true strength—what Charles Trumbull has called the tanka-like haiku—one that juxtaposes a concrete, objective image with a subjective emotion, a feeling, or a “mentation” that I take to mean a fragment of verbal thought. In the following haiku, written in the years 2009 through 2011, Francine begins to explore her psychological experience as an embedded thing in the natural world: solace April rain . . . enough said . . . This last poem, dating from 2011, has always seemed a watershed to me. That an idiom or an unfinished utterance might resonate with natural processes or things struck me as a revelation. Take the juxtaposition where you will, to personal resignation or resolution, the moon that “rises out of the sea” speaks its own inevitability. A dozen or so years on, as I write these words, it may be hard to fathom the risk in these highly subjective haiku. But Francine has never been afraid to make herself vulnerable—either to haiku preconceptions or to self-examination. The poet sees herself without blinders. She fathoms the daily slings and deeper sorrows with bone-deep honesty: fallen leaves me with my grudges I leave him newborn's death date no wind to speak of winter In his poem “The Real Work,” Wendell Berry refers to the rigors of writing while living a “baffled” life. “[T]he impeded stream,” he writes, “is the one that sings.” How true this is for Francine. Working her way around the rocks of heartache, she opens herself up as well to the smallest joys of natural and human communion: to know the light swallowtail first star giving itself In “The Real Work” Berry also speaks of “the real journey,” the one that engages us most deeply with our human condition. Francine’s real journey with and through haiku humbles and inspires me. She and I worked on Frogpond together for four years, from 2012 to 2015. From her I learned that no matter how brief the poem on the page, each haiku has a foreground, a background, and underground—an image, a context, and an elusive atmosphere of suggestion and meaning. From her, I learned to consider haiku in the most generous light, as a window or a two-way mirror opening to vistas within and without. From her I learned that the most memorable haiku touch not just the mind, not just the heart, but heartmind. In the years since, we have remained fast friends. I have wandered her backyard, full of carefully tended milkweed and other pilgrim blooms come to stay awhile. She has wandered mine where the white pine’s needles soften the sun. Not too long ago, we locked our little fingers in a pinky swear. Along with one other poet friend, we promised each other to “get a book out” of our work. It pleases me to no end that Francine should fulfill the pledge with this volume of selected works. In all their quiet complexities, her oh-so-necessary haiku fill the spirit as surely as rain, drop by drop, fills a river. ~ Michele Root-Bernstein |
