Local poet Christy NaMee Eriksen recently started up her new word on the street venture, with a haiku stand on a table outside the Canvas Community Art Studio & Gallery on Seward Street. People rushing by on their lunch breaks can stop for a moment of respite and get instant personalized haikus. To start off the flow of words, Christy asks for a topic or theme.
"I think there's something exciting about giving part of the creation of the art to someone else and then just jumping off of that," she said. "You know, instead of just sitting in my living room and letting ideas originate in my own head, I think there's something 'community cool' about letting people be a part of the process."
One of her first customers couldn't come up with anything specific, so the poet wrote about love, the foundation for any of her work.
"I believe all my poems are love poems," she said.
Though her price is "pay-as-you-can," the suggested donation is $5.75, modeled after the number of syllables in a haiku. Proceeds go to benefit the Canvas, as well as a fledgling monthly poetry slam series Christy is developing with her friend Naa Haan. One of her goals is to put together a Juneau team for next year's National Poetry Slam competition.
She also receives other kinds of donations. At the Juneau Local Food Festival last month, people had left various things, including a jar of preserves, a cupcake and a religious tract heralding eternal damnation.
Christy didn't always have an appreciation for haiku. In fact, she hated it. She gets bored with nature, and felt the limitations of the word count can be restricting. During National Poetry Month in April she took part in the Poem-A-Day Challenge. Tired after a long day, she thought she would cut a corner before bed and write a haiku instead of a longer form poem.
"And I labored over that haiku for an hour," she said. "When you only have 17 syllables it's harder, you have to be so clear."
The idea of instant haiku came from Christy's friend Katie Ka Vang, who sold poetry at a booth at a Hmong arts festival in Minnesota.
Creating words on the fly isn't easy, though Christy said it does make the perfect poetry giveaway because it's small, like a trading card, or a sample from Costco.
"It's really semi-instant," she said. "That's what's hard about haiku, you have to know what you're writing before you start. But sometimes I pretend to be writing so people don't get impatient."
Once she's done scratching out the lines on a pad of paper, she uses an electric typewriter to punch it up. She picked up the old machine on Freecycle, the web-based group designed to keep junk out of landfills. She is still searching for one she doesn't have to plug in.
Though she has been performing and publishing her work since she was in college, Christy said her love of the written word started from an early age.
"I have copies of my first grade writing assessments and they include stories about some ordinary pencils that turn out to be magic," she said, "a dream that was a wish that everybody of every color could play together, and everything I think might be in the mysterious box sitting outside my door. I'm 25 and I'm still writing these stories."
Like all art, writing is an opportunity to share your perspective and candid thoughts, she said.
"I love that it's such an accessible form of expression, that it's cheap, that you can do it anywhere, that anyone can grab a pen and go," she said.
Writing can also be empowering, Christy said, allowing people to express and validate themselves. She organized her Writers of Color group to create a safe space to share pieces, in order to create an environment of education and support.
"The people in that group are amazing, talented writers, and I'm blessed to be in a community with them," she said.
The energy in the room at a spoken word event can't be matched on the page, she said. Her other poetry tends to be like a story, and the synergy created by a room full of people makes it a collective experience. Her piece about why she likes Korean dramas is dynamic with an audience of Asian people. She likes to perform her ode to the strong women she knows, entitled "Juneau Girls Do It in the Rain," to a local crowd.
"It's also rewarding to hear from people after a show that they identified with some of the poetry in the same way that I identified with some of the first spoken word artists that I heard and empowered me to write," she said.
When she's not tapping out haiku, working towards social justice writing projects or being a mother, Christy also runs her small craft business, Sunwoo Starfish, creating fun art on children's clothing. Her stuff is available at the City Museum and Annie Kaill's in downtown Juneau, as well as from her website.
In September, she will be headlining a show for Equilibrium at the Loft Literary Center, the award-winning spoken word series, in Minneapolis, Minn. She will also be doing a spoken word workshop for transnational and transracial adoptees.
More locally, Christy is discussing the possibility of putting on spoken word workshops for youth at the Canvas, and she was recently invited to be on Juneau Arts and Humanities' Poetry Out Loud planning committee.
The haiku stand has only been around for a few days now, and Christy said she has been blown away by the response by the community. She said she knew it would be joyful for her to create semi-instant haiku, but she didn't realize her patrons would share it with her as well. One of her customers almost started crying after receiving her haiku.
"For me, writing is like a gold ticket," she said. "I think there's something really magical about something as small as a haiku, made in minutes, from some stranger on a sidewalk, having the capability to make you feel rich for a moment. That's why the haiku are pay-as-you-can. Everyone deserves that kind of wealth."
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