Library announces 2019 Haiku Laureates

Two locals hold new titles in the community as of this month, they are the 2019 Haiku Poet Laureates of San Marcos.

Every April for four years, the library has celebrated National Poetry Month by putting together a month-long Haiku contest that culminates in the naming of two Haiku Laureates and one runner-up. And this year, hundreds of submissions poured in from all corners of the community – from Jo on the Go and Wake the Dead to Showdown and the Price Center.

Participants vied for the title of San Marcos Haiku Laureate by submitting up to three Haikus in collection boxes located at various locations around the city, and on April 30 library staff collected all the boxes of submissions to be judged. After an expert panel of judges sorted, sifted and scrupulously surveyed hundreds of Haiku submissions from all around the community, two expertly-crafted poems emerged as the winners – Adult Haiku Laureate Jerry Whitus and Youth Haiku Laureate Melanie Wright.

Judges included librarians that sifted and poured through the submissions to choose winners among the poetic offerings. According to Public Outreach Librarian Deborah Carter, the poems were given merit based on content, nature and their appeal.

“We looked at the content, the nature of them, the beauty of them and they went through lots of rounds because there was a lot of variety of haikus,” she said. “Some of them were about nature, some were personal, some were about people, some were about events and some were silly and some were profane. There was a whole Gambit.”

Adult Haiku Laureate Jerry Whitus is a published writer. His works have been featured in MĀNOA, an award-winning literary journal with international fiction, poetry, artwork and essays; as well as American literary journals Ploughshares, Chicago Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review and The Literary Review. As he puts it, he doesn’t “write for the drawer.” Whitus studied fiction writing as a graduate student at University of Texas and has been a teacher, administrator and teacher-trainer in universities in the U.S., Japan, Singapore, Vietnam and Columbia.

Whitus’ winning poem was based off a longer tongue-incheek poem that he wrote about the kitsch of bluebonnets in Texas art.

“spring’s first bluebonnets

climb the long hillside to drink

color from the sky.”

“I wrote the poem as sort of satire about how bluebonnets aren’t accepted in the high art world...So when I saw the requirements, I rewrote this poem to match the 5-7-5.”

He said he wrote his entries this year to appeal to the judges, who he noticed have a penchant for picking poems that center around San Marcos and Central Texas — a move that paid off.

“I saw prior winners had some sort of theme that connected with San Marcos or Texas,” Whitus said. “I figured I had a better chance of winning if I put it in a setting that was more like Texas.”

Whitus and his wife moved to San Marcos 12 years ago to be closer to their son and family that live San Antonio.

The 2019 Youth Haiku Laureate Melanie Wright. Photo courtesy of Wonderland School

Youth Haiku Laureate Melanie Wright is a second grade student at Wonderland School. Wright’s Language Arts Teacher Vicky Kepler said she is a fun and bright eight-yearold who loves to travel, especially her family’s trip to Mexico last summer. She has two dogs, and enjoys playing with them and cuddling on the couch.

“She has a large imagination and spends a lot of her time at home making up fantasy worlds for her toys to live in,” Kepler said. “She's always got a positive attitude and shows unending empathy and kindness towards others. Thank you again for giving this award to Melanie, she is so proud of herself and we are extremely proud of her.”

Wright’s poem is about a volcano made of sun light.

“Sunshine volcano

It explodes with yellow light

Sun is amazing.”

Haiku Laureate Runner-up Cynthia Juniper of Wimberley wrote her poem on the library’s Haiku Hike, at the Spring Lake Preserve led by Michael Hannon on April 13. They met on the trail head off of Lime Kiln Road and walked for an hour, writing haikus inspired by the wealth of nature. Her poem was inspired by San Marcos’ prehistoric past preserved in the area’s fossiliferous limestone — that comes from shallow seas, which covered Central Texas during the Mesozoic era.

“Dirt, rocks, flint, fossils:

Remnants of an ancient sea

Worthy of wonder.”