Lunch Poemsby Allyson Whipple High/Coo Chapbook Award 2026 ISBN 978-1-929820-40-5 • perfectbound ~ ~ ~ Introduction My 2022 move from Austin to St. Louis meant not just saying goodbye to friends and my established poetry community, but also to my career in academia. Though I’d manage to climb the ranks to an associate professor of technical writing at Austin Community College, the nature of higher education means you don’t get to just get another job of equal rank at whatever local institutions are available. Going back to adjunct teaching wasn’t going to make me look good on a mortgage application, so back to the 8-to-5 office world I went, with more than a little grumbling. Fortunately, I had Frank O’Hara to serve as the inspiration to keep my haiku spark alive despite much more rigid constraints on my time. O’Hara spent most of his career working as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. His book, also called Lunch Poems, is a nod to the fact that many of his poems were inspired by—and often written during—his lunch hour constitutionals around Manhattan. While I had loved O’Hara’s poetry long before my career change, Lunch Poems became a creative touchstone, a reminder that constraints of my weekdays would change my haiku practice, but they wouldn’t be the end of it. Over the past four years, my haiku are primarily drafted during my own lunch walks around St. Louis, and for a long time now I have wanted to create a chapbook of my own called Lunch Poems as an homage to O’Hara and the lasting effect his small volume of poems has had on my life. In his preface to Lunch Poems, John Ashbery describes O’Hara as, “a kind, inquiring, deeply curious and attractive youngish man, passing a few minutes of speculative rumination before heading back to the office, like all of us” (viii). While haiku is not ruminative, certainly kindness, deep curiosity, and an inquiring personality are foundational characteristics a poet should have as part of their haiku practice. To my knowledge Frank O’Hara never attempted haiku, but his attentiveness to the world around him, and the inspiration he derived from everyday things, have inspired my haiku practice as much as Buson or Shiki. ~Allyson Whipple |
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals and publications in which some of these poems appeared: Akitsu Quarterly, Autumn Moon, Blithe Spirit, Cold Moon Journal, #FemkuMag, First Frost, Five Haiku Spoken, Frogpond, Haiku Dialogue, Haiku Summer Girl, Hauling the Tide (Haiku Society of America Members Anthology 2024), Mayfly, Poetry Pea Journal, Trash Panda, Wales Haiku Journal, and Zen Peacemakers. |
My Haiku Process My greatest influences are, oddly enough, two poets who to my knowledge never wrote haiku. You will see me reference Frank O’Hara and Bernadette Mayer (of the New York School and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement respectively) as poets I return to the most as reference points for my work. Although they both wrote longer-form poems, what draws me back to them above all else is the way that they so clearly embrace the ostensible distractions of the world and bring them into poetry. Frank O’Hara’s day job didn’t inhibit his poetry; in fact, it was the structure of the workday that provided the basis for Lunch Poems. My favorite Bernadette Mayer poem, the book-length Midwinter Day, was written while she was busy raising two small children; the toddlers were not a distraction from her art, but had their own place within her creative spectrum. More so than any spiritual teacher ever could, O’Hara and Mayer remind me that everything is a source of poetry: the first cherry blossoms and the past-due bills, the birth of a child and the destruction of wildfires, the glory of autumn leaves and foibles of human weakness. These poets remind me to attune to Jack Kerouac’s second rule of writing: “Submissive to everything, open, listening.” More than any haiku technique, my goal is to remain open to all that comes as a source for my writing. |
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