Oxford community shares love for fall season with ‘Harvest Haiku’ project

Located in the windows of 18 Oxford businesses, people can see window clings on display featuring fall-inspired haiku poetry from community members. These seasonal poems are the result of a project by the Public Arts Commission of Oxford (PACO).

The Harvest Haiku project had 78 contestants and 130 total submissions, according to Amber Franklin, an Oxford City Council member and chair of PACO. It follows a previous project of the same nature, Haiku in Bloom, which took place in the summer of 2023.

In addition to the winning entries being displayed on windows, all of the submitted fall-themed haiku were released in a booklet found on the City of Oxford’s website. The winning entries are bolded, italicized and in color.

“The most rewarding part is celebrating our community and hearing the voices of our community members through poetry,” Franklin said. “That’s really enjoyable to me.”

PACO initially framed the project as a call for haiku poetry. Once the community sent their submissions, members voted on their top 10 entries and discussed what they liked about each piece. From there, the winning pieces were selected.

When selecting which haiku to display, Franklin said the commission members worked to  ensure that the winning poems covered a variety of subject matters and themes, rather than poems that convey the same message. 

In the past, the project has had entries from youth participants. However, due to the timing of this call for haiku, the youth participation ended up being significantly less.

“We have people across the lifespan who submit haiku,” Franklin said. “For the spring Haiku in Bloom, teachers had their students submitting haiku, so it became a project that teachers could incorporate in their classroom in the Talawanda schools … This time around, we had fewer youth submissions because it was right as school was getting started.”

The haiku projects were first proposed by Joe Squance, a member of PACO. Squance’s background is in writing, so he suggested a haiku competition.

“The inspiration was just wanting to have writing in the public sphere to promote the written word and poetry in particular, which most people don’t interact with very much at all in their lives,” Squance said.

Both Squance and Franklin said that this is something they would like to see continue in the future, either with more seasonal collections or different themes.

Out of all types of poetry and written work, Squance said they picked haiku for a variety of reasons, including both length and traditional meaning. Haiku are three lines in length, which he said makes writing one less intimidating than writing a longer poem.

“It’s such a short thing,” Squance said. “And also they traditionally celebrate simple things, the natural world, the beauty of the things around you in nature.”

Squance said that one of the advantages of the haiku project is that it gives people an opportunity to share what they think makes the Oxford community special. He also said that when they first started doing haiku, they reached out to business owners to ask about displaying the poetry in their windows. This time, they had businesses reach out to them.

Shana Rosenberg is the executive director of Uptown Threads, one of the businesses currently displaying a haiku. Rosenberg said she was contacted directly by the city about hosting one, and she’s glad to be a part of a public art experience in Oxford.

“It’s pretty cool that we have so many businesses with these really delightful haikus,” Rosenberg said. “I think just from an entertainment standpoint, or a window shopping standpoint, that it provides a lot of interest to the Uptown area right now.”