Board of Directors
Chapter Chairs
James Raby, Chair, Santa Fe Poetry Trails
Susan Paquet, Chair, Bosque Poets (Corrales & Rio Rancho)
Andrea Watson, Chair, Walking Rain Poets (Taos)
Carol Borsello, Chair, Turtleback Mountain Poets (T or C)
For further information please contact Shirley Blackwell, President, at president@nmpoetry.com or membership@nmpoetry.com.
Each quarter the NMSPS website features an interview conducted and written by former NMSPS President Bonnie Rucobo. This quarter's interview is with Albuquerque poet Hilda F. Wales.
In 2009 and 2011 she was named New Mexico's Senior Poet Laureate by the Amy Kitchener Foundation for her poems "Out of Storm" and "Purple Clouds." These poems were included in the anthologies, Golden Words.
The former NMSPS Treasurer has had approximately thirty-five poems published in publications such as "Sage," "Voices Along the River," "Adobe Walls," "Persimmon Tree," and "Gifts of the Great Spirit." Her work has appeared in the Texas Poetry Society's Book of the Year, "Encore," "Galaxy of Verse," "San Antonio Poetry Fair," and "Along the Rio Grande."
Wales has written the majority of her poetry while residing in Albuquerque since she and her husband retired in 1995. The wordsmith estimates that over one hundred of her poems have won or placed in various contests and/or appeared in anthologies, some multiple times. She tracks the status of her poetry on a spreadsheet.
The soft-spoken woman of words says that she has been writing poetry all her life. She had the solitude and silence that she requires to write when she grew up in the Colorado countryside without a radio or record player. "I had time to think," she says.
She wrote a limited amount of poetry in college, but she was encouraged to continue when both a poem she wrote and an article she penned about the family's foster children were published while she lived in San Antonio, Texas.
The poetic forms Wales most enjoys are the haibun, a mixture of prose and haiku, the triolet, the sestina, and the cinquain. She loves the search for precise words that express the exact meaning that she is seeking, and she likes finding the metaphoric connection between two unlike things.
She enjoys lyric poetry and won $100.00 for her lyric poem "Mortality," which compared a cup and life.
The poet was born in Durango while her parents, some of the last homesteaders in southwestern Colorado, lived in a one-room log cabin which she describes as being located "at the end of the road," south of Mesa Verde National Park. Her parents met when her mother was a schoolteacher and her father played fiddle at town dances in Bayfield.
After attending elementary school in various three-room schools where her mother taught all the high school classes, the family moved back to Bayfield, Colorado so she and her siblings could go to a "slightly" larger high school. Her father, originally a rancher, became a well respected real estate broker. Wales had an older brother and younger sister.
She attended Cornell College in Iowa and spent a year at graduate school at San Francisco Theological Seminary where she met her husband, Don Wales, a Presbyterian minister. Years later, she earned a masters degree in Multicultural Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Soon after their marriage in 1958, the couple moved to the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico where they lived for four years. Their two oldest daughters were born there. One day when she was hanging out diapers under a cottonwood tree, her husband asked, "How would you like to go to South America?"
"Why not?" was her reply.
The couple, with children in tow, spent a year in Costa Rica learning Spanish. Then they traveled to Chile where the last two of their four children were born. They lived in Copiapó, a small mining town in the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world. This is the same town on which the world's attention was riveted in 2010 when thirty-three miners, "Los 33," were trapped in an unstable mine. (All thirty-three men survived.)
The couple spent four years in Chile and four years in Monterrey, Mexico. Then they set off for San Antonio, Texas where they lived for ten years and where Wales joined the Texas State Poetry Society, another NFSPS affiliate, of which she remains a member.
While living in San Antonio, Wales worked as director of a foster care program for children who had run away from home but were not involved in serious crimes. During the years when their own children were teenagers, she and her husband housed eleven foster children.
In 1982, the couple moved to Las Vegas, New Mexico. The United World College (UWC), an educational movement now comprising fourteen high schools around the world, had just opened near Las Vegas. Wales worked at the UWC for fourteen years as both a Counselor and Student Services Coordinator. She also planned programs including introducing students to Las Vegas families and coordinating sizeable events such as graduations and a visit by the current President of the UWCs, Queen Noor of Jordon. South African President Nelson Mandela is a Co-President of this international movement.
Don Wales was Pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Las Vegas. Both he and his wife retired on the same day in 1995 and moved to Albuquerque. The couple has seven grandchildren.
Wales' poetry is not without use of personification to express the mystical:
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.
Interview with NMSPS Poet Hilda F. Wales
Tonight I Weigh Gray
Sleepwalker,
windows latched
bolted doors and craving sleep
I crawl into the hollow tube of night.
Instead
doubt dances
off the circling walls and qualms,
like mice
who know the daylight hiding places,
use the night to play.
Balance-scale mentality
splatters midnight pro and con.
I yearn to guarantee
an iridescent dawn, but fear
drifts through misty nights
untouchable as smoke.
My wadded pillow squeezes out new riddles.
Doves don't fly at night, do they?
Hilda F. Wales
In 2009 and 2011 she was named New Mexico's Senior Poet Laureate by the Amy Kitchener Foundation for her poems "Out of Storm" and "Purple Clouds." These poems were included in the anthologies, Golden Words.
The former NMSPS Treasurer has had approximately thirty-five poems published in publications such as "Sage," "Voices Along the River," "Adobe Walls," "Persimmon Tree," and "Gifts of the Great Spirit." Her work has appeared in the Texas Poetry Society's Book of the Year, "Encore," "Galaxy of Verse," "San Antonio Poetry Fair," and "Along the Rio Grande."
Wales has written the majority of her poetry while residing in Albuquerque since she and her husband retired in 1995. The wordsmith estimates that over one hundred of her poems have won or placed in various contests and/or appeared in anthologies, some multiple times. She tracks the status of her poetry on a spreadsheet.
The soft-spoken woman of words says that she has been writing poetry all her life. She had the solitude and silence that she requires to write when she grew up in the Colorado countryside without a radio or record player. "I had time to think," she says.
She wrote a limited amount of poetry in college, but she was encouraged to continue when both a poem she wrote and an article she penned about the family's foster children were published while she lived in San Antonio, Texas.
The poetic forms Wales most enjoys are the haibun, a mixture of prose and haiku, the triolet, the sestina, and the cinquain. She loves the search for precise words that express the exact meaning that she is seeking, and she likes finding the metaphoric connection between two unlike things.
She enjoys lyric poetry and won $100.00 for her lyric poem "Mortality," which compared a cup and life.
The poet was born in Durango while her parents, some of the last homesteaders in southwestern Colorado, lived in a one-room log cabin which she describes as being located "at the end of the road," south of Mesa Verde National Park. Her parents met when her mother was a schoolteacher and her father played fiddle at town dances in Bayfield.
After attending elementary school in various three-room schools where her mother taught all the high school classes, the family moved back to Bayfield, Colorado so she and her siblings could go to a "slightly" larger high school. Her father, originally a rancher, became a well respected real estate broker. Wales had an older brother and younger sister.
She attended Cornell College in Iowa and spent a year at graduate school at San Francisco Theological Seminary where she met her husband, Don Wales, a Presbyterian minister. Years later, she earned a masters degree in Multicultural Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Soon after their marriage in 1958, the couple moved to the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico where they lived for four years. Their two oldest daughters were born there. One day when she was hanging out diapers under a cottonwood tree, her husband asked, "How would you like to go to South America?"
"Why not?" was her reply.
The couple, with children in tow, spent a year in Costa Rica learning Spanish. Then they traveled to Chile where the last two of their four children were born. They lived in Copiapó, a small mining town in the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world. This is the same town on which the world's attention was riveted in 2010 when thirty-three miners, "Los 33," were trapped in an unstable mine. (All thirty-three men survived.)
The couple spent four years in Chile and four years in Monterrey, Mexico. Then they set off for San Antonio, Texas where they lived for ten years and where Wales joined the Texas State Poetry Society, another NFSPS affiliate, of which she remains a member.
While living in San Antonio, Wales worked as director of a foster care program for children who had run away from home but were not involved in serious crimes. During the years when their own children were teenagers, she and her husband housed eleven foster children.
In 1982, the couple moved to Las Vegas, New Mexico. The United World College (UWC), an educational movement now comprising fourteen high schools around the world, had just opened near Las Vegas. Wales worked at the UWC for fourteen years as both a Counselor and Student Services Coordinator. She also planned programs including introducing students to Las Vegas families and coordinating sizeable events such as graduations and a visit by the current President of the UWCs, Queen Noor of Jordon. South African President Nelson Mandela is a Co-President of this international movement.
Don Wales was Pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Las Vegas. Both he and his wife retired on the same day in 1995 and moved to Albuquerque. The couple has seven grandchildren.
Wales' poetry is not without use of personification to express the mystical:
Through a small cloud hole
one star watches lightning
examine the night.
March 4, 2012
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.