Board of Directors
Chapter Chairs
James Raby, Chair, Santa Fe Poetry Trails
Susan Paquet, Chair, Bosque Poets (Corrales & Rio Rancho)
For further information please contact Shirley Blackwell, President, at president@nmpoetry.com or membership@nmpoetry.com.
To see photos, check out the News page.
Each quarter the NMSPS website features an interview with one of our members. This quarter's interview is with Roswell poet, Jim Applegate.
Interview with Former NMSPS President Jim Applegate
one star seen through fog
bids the world not to mourn
for the sky still is
grandma's hollyhocks
greet me and early autumn
without her
deer crosses road
velvet horns
through trees
The poet recalls that the Roswell Chapter spent 1996, its initial year, as a chapter of the Pennsylvania State Poetry Society. Then Joe Shaffer and Victor Benton invited the chapter to become part of NMSPS, and the Roswell Chapter accepted.
Applegate, a retired research engineer and chemist, has published over one hundred poems and four short stories since his retirement. He is Southwest Regional Coordinator of the Haiku Society of America.
The Haiku Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the writing and appreciation of Haiku poetry in English. Membership is open to all readers, writers, translators, and students of the poetic form. The Society has 663 national and international members at present.
Applegate coordinates the region including Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah. He has published six volumes of his small canyons anthology which accepts Haiku from any poet in the region.
In November 2009 he was the poet featured in SciFaikuest, a magazine devoted to Haiku related to science fiction. He has had "SciFaiku" published in it several times.
The former engineer says that he began writing poetry in speech class in high school when he forgot to bring a Christmas poem he was to read. The teacher called his recitation "a nice selection." He was not published in a nonstudent publication until after he retired and had more time to devote to writing.
Applegate graduated from Southern Utah University and went to graduate school at Brigham Young University.
He plans to teach a class in short poems at the Roswell Museum and Art Center at the end of this month. Aside from Haiku, the poet writes sonnets, villanelles, and rhyming poems.
Applegate and his wife Beth Ann, also a poet, have four grown children and thirteen grandchildren. He is a docent at the Roswell Museum and Art Center.
The poet was born in Cedar City, Utah, near Zion, Cedar Breaks, and Bryce Canyon National Parks. His father worked for the Forest Service. His mother Kathryne Murie Applegate wrote poetry and was a member of the Utah State Poetry Society. Applegate sponsors an annual poetry award in his mother's name in the school poetry contest HPP sponsors.
He says that he uses the word "haikuesk" to refer to any short form of syllabic poetry. Haiku, senryuu, tanka and renku are Japanese forms that have become popular in English in the 20th Century.
Traditionally Haiku was a poem about nature or man's relationship to nature with three lines with five-seven-five syllables. It also had a "kigo" or word relating to the season. Modern or Contemporary Haiku has three lines of seventeen syllables or less; the kigo is optional. Haiku is untitled, and many Haiku poets do not use capital letters or punctuation in their poetry.
Several Haiku poets in New Mexico have influenced Haiku enormously. These include Elizabeth Searle Lamb of Santa Fe, former President of the Haiku Society of America and editor of the Society's journal, "Frogpond." William J. Higginson, also of Santa Fe, wrote The Haiku Handbook, The Haiku Seasons, and Haiku World.
Two other contributors to the world of Haiku reside in New Mexico, John Brandi and Charles Trumbull who edits "Modern Haiku," the oldest and most prestigious journal for Haiku outside of Japan.
Applegate says a trip to Japan is on his "bucket list," though he has no idea when or how he will get there.