This collage by Annette Makino is made from painted and torn Japanese washi papers. Featuring a view of the Klamath River, it incorporates her winning one-line haiku.
BY HEATHER SHELTON, TIMES-STANDARD, EUREKA, CA, APRIL 25, 2021
April 17 was International Haiku Poetry Day and, on that day, artist and poet Annette Makino received exciting news.
Makino, of Arcata, was awarded one of the highest honors for English-language haiku, a Touchstone Award from the Haiku Foundation. The annual award recognizes the best individual poems published each previous year.
“I’m thrilled that my haiku has won this award,” Makino said. “You should have heard the whooping from my house! I’ve been studying and writing haiku for 10 years now, and this feels like the ultimate affirmation that I’m getting the hang of it.”
This year, there were 1,302 poems nominated from 31 countries for the Touchstone Award.
“The Touchstone Award is unique as far as I know in that the poems must have won an award or been selected for publication before they can even be considered for nomination,” Makino said. “And most of the nominations come from haiku editors, not the poets themselves. So, it’s really the creme de la creme of all the haiku written in English that year. My husband refers to it as the Nobel Prize for haiku.”
Makino says her haiku was eligible to be nominated because it won the Porad Haiku Award sponsored by Haiku Northwest last fall. To read all of the Touchstone Award for Individual Poems winners for 2020, go to https://thehaikufoundation.org/touchstone-awards-for-individual-poems-2020.
Makino — whose work regularly appears in the leading journals and anthologies of haiku in English — wrote her Touchstone Award-winning one-line haiku while on a recent creative retreat at the Klamath River in Orleans. It reads:
long before language the S of the river
“I was walking along Ishi Pishi Road with my husband during a weeklong vacation/art retreat last summer. I looked down at the Klamath River, which parallels the road, and saw a beautiful S-shaped curve,” Makino said.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has gotten me thinking about big questions like human existence and mortality,” she added. “It occurred to me that the river was flowing long before our species came along, and will continue to flow long after our extinction. When I feel too caught up in our human dramas, there is something comforting in that knowledge.”
Artist and haiku poet Annette Makino is at work in her studio. (Photo by Brandi Easter)
Makino — whose haiku have won many other awards — first got involved with writing haiku in 2010 when her friend, Amy Uyeki, gave her a book that she and her mother had produced featuring poems by Uyeki’s Japanese grandmother.
“This introduced me to haiku and senryu, haiku’s humorous cousin,” Makino said. “From Amy, I also learned about the Japanese tradition of haiga, art combined with haiku. I soon started experimenting with writing my own poems and painting haiga.”
Makino says she loves how a haiku can convey so much in three lines or fewer.
“It’s a deceptively simple art form with great depth that rewards re-reading,” she said. “And in describing a unique personal experience or observation, a good haiku can connect to something universal. There is an intangible exchange between the poet and the reader.
“Most of us are sadly mis-taught that an English-language haiku needs to follow a five-seven-five syllable pattern,” she said. “In fact, that formula is based on a misunderstanding of how Japanese sound-syllables relate to English. Most serious haiku poets don’t follow this syllable count, writing shorter poems that more closely match the feel of Japanese haiku. There are other aspects of a haiku that are much more important and harder to master, such as the juxtaposition of two images or ideas.”
For the past decade, Makino has also run her business, Makino Studios, through which she sells her art (both Japanese watercolors and Japanese-inspired collages) and haiku in the form of cards and calendars in stores and online. She hopes to participate — as in years past — in some fairs and festivals in late 2021 if it is safe to do so.
“This past year, I have focused on creating collages using Japanese washi papers that I paint and other found papers like old letters, book pages, vintage stamps and maps,” she said. “I’m also having fun incorporating natural objects like feathers or sand dollars. And most of my pieces include an original haiku.
This collage by Annette Makino includes her original haiku: “bright green needles/on the fire-scarred redwood—/what we’ve each survived.” It is made with hand-painted rice paper printed with redwood twigs and ferns, sumi ink, acrylic paint, vintage Japanese letters and glue on illustration board.
“When I’m creating, I love how things can come together unexpectedly,” Makino said. “There is a lot of serendipity involved, especially in collage. For instance, I recently created a collage to go with a haiku about a fire-scarred redwood. I was happy to find a piece of rice paper with a big streak of black sumi ink on it to represent the burnt tree, and I came across some other papers that I had printed on a gel press using redwood twigs and ferns. I tore a couple of hand-written letters from 1920s Japan into vertical strips to represent trees in the background. It was a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Makino is now at work on her first full-length book with the working title “Water and Stone,” to be published in the early summer. The book, a culmination of a decade of painting and writing, will feature 50 of her haiga, painted with Japanese watercolors and sumi ink.
“I’ve always been a bookworm and a writer. Even as a kid, I wanted to publish books — about what, I had no idea,” she said.
“My art business, Makino Studios, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. As I mark a decade as a working artist and haiku poet,” Makino said, “it struck me that I could capture the best of my creative work over this time in a full-color book.”
She added, “It’s been a satisfying process to go through all my art and haiku and decide what to include. After I chose 50 pieces, I felt that the rhythm of so many haiku in a row was a bit monotonous. So, I drew from the past 10 years of Makino Studios blog posts and wrote 15 haibun, a Japanese literary form combining autobiographical prose with haiku. These are short vignettes or essays that will weave through the book. It was a challenge to learn a whole new writing technique, but I’m happy with the results, as I think these pieces add a lot of texture and depth to the book.”
For more information about Makino and her work, visit www.makinostudios.com or call 707-362-6644.