Introducing Ameriku

Ameriku is the art of poetry, a trademarked form of fine art that fuses haiku (and sometimes senryu) with visual art, such as nature photography.

You might think of Ameriku as shorthand for American haiku Art.

My name is Rae Hallstrom, and Ameriku is my art and my business and my brand.

I've been working on this art for well over ten years—close to 15 years, actually. It began at a difficult time in my life when I needed some space for reflection. I began taking walks along wooded paths in the state park near my home.

Sometimes the call of a bird in the trees would help me forget my troubles. Sometimes it was simply the sight of the sun trickling through the leaves to splash on a May apple, or the creek that kept moving in spite of the rocks in its path.

I always came away from these walks feeling refreshed and a wee bit stronger, even though none of my problems had gone away. The only thing that changed was my outlook, but that was a big thing, an important thing. There was something about connecting to nature in a calm and peaceful manner that rejuvenated me and gave me hope. Ameriku is my way of sharing that sense of peace and possibility with others.

I had always been a writer. As a child I was writing poetry for my friends while in grade school, and making silly little childish books with crayons and paper towels and string to tie the pages together.

A poet makes a poem. Did you know that a poet is sometimes called a maker?

Life is a beautiful thing, but living is not always fun. We have the good times, and then we get knocked down. We fall in love, and then we break up. We learn to drive a car, then after we think we've mastered the roads, have an accident. It's during the painful periods that we need poetry the most.

When I needed a way to deal with some of the blows and losses of adult life, I returned to the Japanese form we all learn in school—the deceptively simple 5-7-5 rule of haiku.

I wrote a lot of really bad haiku. Writing bad haiku is easy! Writing better haiku, haiku that I am not ashamed to share, that's a different story. In those first few years I wrote more than 300 haiku. Only a few made it into Ameriku.

I began taking a camera along on those walks, and experimenting with a macro lens. Even on my worst days, I was able to see beauty all around me, and I wanted to share this beauty with others.

One day, I put the two forms of art together—my poetry and my photography—and a whole new world opened up, and I called it Ameriku. More in a future post.

Meanwhile, please keep in mind that Ameriku is the registered trademark of my art company, Ameriku Ltd. Whenever you see the Ameriku trademark, you are assured that the work meets my high standards of quality.