Haiku Demystified
Haibun: The Joy and Journey of Poetic Engineering, part 3
By Pravat Kumar Padhy
Haibun in English
The classic novel Kusamakura, (lit. “Grass Pillow”) by Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), was published in 1906 and was later translated into English in 1965 by Alan Turney as The Three Cornered World. The novel is written in a poetic style with a haiku.
The haibun in English can be dated back to the ‘1950s or ‘1960s considering the symbiosis of prose and verse of Jack Kerouac or Jack Cain as the starting point. Jack Kerouac’s “The Town and the City” (1950) is classical poetic prose.
Bill Wyatt in an interview with Diana Webb says, “As far as I am aware, Kerouac didn’t know of the haibun as a genre but many passages from his prose, for me, certainly fit that mode.”
Carolyn Kizer’s “A Month in Summer” was published in Kenyon Review in 1962. The Canadian writer Jack Cain’s “Paris” (1964) is considered the first formal modern haibun in English published in the Haiku Society of America book, A Haiku Path.
Gary Snyder’s travel diary, “Passage through India”, written during the mid-sixties, is one of the memorable modern haibun-like genre. The work, “Paris” (1964) by the Canadian writer Jack Cain is considered the first formal modern haibun in English. James Merrill’s “Prose of Departure”, from The Inner Room (1988), is one of the finest examples of haibun. Poet Maureen Thorson’s “Time Traveler’s Haibun: 1989 ” is an interesting poetic creation. Bruce Ross’s “Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun” (Tuttle) published in 1998 is the first anthology of English-language haibun. Ken Jones, Ray Rasmussen, Bruce Ross, Jeffrey Woodward, Stanley Pelter, Paul Conneally, George Marsh, Patrick Frank, Nobuyuki Yuasa, John Brandi, Miriam Sagan, Bill Wyatt, William M. Ramsey, Judson Evans, William J. Higginson , Patricia Prime, James Norton , Seán O’Connor, Jim Kacian, Michael McClintock, Lynne Reese, Jim Norton, Richard Straw, Robert Wilson, Peter Butler, John Stevenson, Cor van den Heuvel, Tom Lynch, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, David Cobb, Charles Hansmann , Janice M. Bostok, W F Owen, Dru Philippou, Michael Dylan Welch, Ruth Holzer, Tish Davis, Jeffrey Harpeng , Diana Webb, Glenn Coats, Owen Bullock, Rich Youmans and others have contributed a lot to enrich the haibun literature in English.
The journal “American Haibun and Haiga (AHH)” was published in 2000 and was renamed “Contemporary Haibun” and subsequently “Contemporary Haibun Online” (CHO) in 2003. Prior to AHH, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Lynx Kyso Flash and others use to publish a few haibun. Haibun Today, a premier journal of haibun and tanka prose, was founded in 2007 by Jeffrey Woodward. Journals namely Haibun Journals Under the Basho, Drifting Sands Haibun and a few others publish haibun and related genres.
There are some prominent literary pieces written besides Americans, namely the New Zealander Richard von Sturmer’s A Network of Dissolving Threads (1991); the Russian Alexey Andreyev’s Moyayama, Russian Haiku: A Diary (1997), the Croatian Vladimir Devide’s Haibun, Words & Pictures (1997); and the Romanian Ion Codrescu’s A Foreign Guest (1999) and Mountain Voices (2000).
Makoto Ueda has written that “a haibun usually (though not necessarily) ends with haiku. The implication is that a haibun is a perfect prose complement to the haiku. . . . The word haibun means haiku prose, a prose piece written in the spirit of haiku. The essential qualities of haiku are seen in the haibun in their prose equivalents, as it were. A haibun has, for instance, the same sort of brevity and conciseness as a haiku” (Matsuo Bashō, 121).
(Ueda, Makoto. Matsuo Bashō. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1970, 1982).
Ken Jones in his Haibun: An Introduction writes, “The essential feature is the interplay of haiku and prose. As with haiku, the “haibun prose” should be concrete and economical, free from abstraction, crisp, light handed and rich in imagery. The haiku serves either to intensify the feeling conveyed by the prose or to take the reader a step beyond it. Either way it provides some kind of shift in the flow of the prose.”
The prose section, the verse section or haiku and the title comprise the main components of haibun. Haibun can be a simple one with one paragraph and one haiku at the end. If haiku is written in the beginning followed by prose , it is termed as ‘inverted haibun’.The prose comprises wide topics such as biographical episodes, short stories travel writing, conversations, personal experiences, etc. Depending on the relative placement of verse with respect to the prose section, haibun can be classified as a prose envelope (haibun starts with a prose paragraph followed by haiku and finally followed by a prose paragraph), verse envelope (starts with a haiku followed by prose and ending with a haiku) or can be alternating with prose and verse elements. In such a complex association of the two different elements, it is prudent to maintain the poetic sentiment, tonal quality and rhythm with internal comparisons. There are some examples of writing haiku sequence within the haibun. Sometimes the usages of an epigraph or short quotation at the beginning of the haibun have been observed. This adds a special relevance to the prose section and to the haibun at large. Jeffrey analysing deeply the identity of prose, haiku, prose poem etc. opines: “Haibun is haiku-like prose with or without one or more haiku. “Haiku-like,” of course, is susceptible to wide interpretation as it is quite subjective, though in general one might anticipate “haiku-like prose” to avail itself of ellipsis, paradox, understatement and other qualities familiar to the reader of haiku” and emphasis in haibun instead of “prose accompanied by one or more haiku” needs to be “heightened (or poetic) prose accompanied by one or more haiku.” Jeffrey Woodward – Haibun Minus Haiku.
The title could be imaginative (connotative) or something related to the essence of the haibun (denotative). A suitable title can be borrowed from memorable lines by renowned poets or writers with a note of the relevant source.
The haiku associated with the prose is the cornerstone of this genre and needs to be imaginative and meaningful with a creative twist of fulfillment rather than a narrative continuation of prose. The haiku is the soul of the literary piece. In the art of link-and shift, it dwells as if in the prose (link), but it has its own shape and sound (shift).
Professor Nobuyaki Yuasa, in the introduction to his classic translation of Basho’s Narrow Road, maintains that “the interaction between haiku poetry and haiku prose is haibun’s greatest merit …The relationship is like that between the moon and the earth: each makes the other more beautiful.”
Richard von Sturmer’s A Network of Dissolving Threads (1991); the Russian Alexey Andreyev’s Moyayama, Russian Haiku: A Diary (1997), the Croatian Vladimir Devide’s Haibun, Words & Pictures (1997); and the Romanian Ion Codrescu’s A Foreign Guest (1999) and Mountain Voices (2000) have added the historical perspective to haibun literature. Jack Kerouac experimented haibun-like narration in novel as enumerated in his Desolation Angels (1965) that contain prose segments with relevant haiku. Rod Wilmot Ribs of Dragonfly (1984) is written in prose style (fiction form) with haiku at the end of each chapter. D.D. Lliteras’s trilogy of novels (1992-1994) is written in the haibun form. William Ramsey and Michael McClintock portray brilliantly as haibun story-tellers. Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore by David Cobb is a classic haibun consisting of 5,000-word haibun.
Man tries innovative experimentation out of curiosity and inner urge in the field of art, culture and science. Over the years, experimentations, thematic variation, presentation style, subtle interaction of prose with haiku collaborative experimentation, imagistic style, splitting of haiku with the art of link and shift added literary values and freshness of this genre.
Nobel Laureate, Professor Jennifer Doudna says “The more we know, the more we realise there is to know.”
Analysing the haibun literature, it is interesting to see the way illustrious poets did carry out innovative combination for enlightening the genre. It is like flying kites with colours. There has to be a subtle energy to make it flow like breeze, offering the reader enough space to revisit again to have the cathartic experience. In this essay it is attempted to make a chronological attempt to record the style, language, texture, poetic symbiosis, rhythm and resonance in haibun literature through time and gifted as a joy of reading of such a hybrid and pragmatic genre, Haibun. I feel it is like ‘Poetic Engineering’ in art and culture to arrive at the best of literary evolution with time. The respective examples have been cited from the available resources.
The following is an excerpt from the work, “Paris” (1964) by the Canadian writer Jack Cain.
Paris
by Jack Cain
Lips that turn from mine.
Poor little one
Whom I pay.
How insistent this urge that recurs and to which satisfaction brings momentary rest. I lie on my bed, alone. . .
There is a short letter that asks in tones that tear, please, oh please, come home.Volume 63, a biannual of poetry, October 1964, No. 2, Board of Publications, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, pages 32-35
In the cafe’s light
harsh and bright
faces talk.
To be continued
Cafe Haiku 