Haiku Demystified
Haibun: The Joy and Journey of Poetic Engineering, part 5
By Pravat Kumar Padhy
Poetry Section and Experimentation
Like variation in prose section, the poetry section has also witnessed some articulations and structural manifestation. Use of haiku sequence, and surprising omission of haiku in haibun (haikuless haibun as written by Kurita Chodō (1749-1814) have been noticed. In contrast to haiku at the end, some preferred to start haibun with haiku at the beginning (Inverted haibun) to guide the prose that follows it. At times, some preferred writing 3-line haiku in horizontal style.
In haibun, haiku sequences have been often composed like in Miriam Sagan’s Everglade Haibun (Santa Fe Poetry Broadside 54, 2007). Ruth Franke in haibun, Summit Ice (Blithe Spirit 18/1, 2008) also experimented with writing haiku sequences.
Eric Burke in Losing A Thumb, Charles Hansmann in Birthday Hike and in Rash preferred 2-line haiku instead of 3-line. Instead of conventional haiku, Ingrid Kunschke’s One Step Aside ends with a poem. Generally haibun is interspersed with haiku. Poets did experiment in writing haiku sequences strengthening the poetic narration in haibun. Jeffrey Woodward in Imago, Dru Philippou in Gauze in the Wind and others used haiku sequences in their haibun.
Later experimentations have been done writing each line of normative haiku alternate with short prose section and christened it as ‘Braided haibun’ (discussed in later part). Recently P H Fischer introduces a novel idea of writing haiku in binary language, offering tribute to Cor van den Huevel in his haibun, Oh, the Places! published in CHO, 18.1.2022.
Haikuless Haibun
Takeshi Imamura writes: “A haibun is a short prose piece written in haikai style.” He further adds: “if the haibun itself bears haiku characteristics, a haiku need not be attached.”
(Missing the Moon: haikuless haibun by Michael Dylan Welch, CHO 14:4, January 2019)
The haikai style of the prose section takes care of the haiku itself. 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).
Hansmann has written haibun published Haibun Today and Paul Conneally defines it as haibunic prose: “Prose that has many of the characteristics associated with haiku—present tense (and shifts of tense though predominant voice ‘present’), imagistic, shortened or interesting syntax, joining words such as ‘and’ limited maybe, a sense of ‘being there’, descriptions of places people met and above all ‘brevity'” (from “Haibun Definitions,” in Contemporary Haibun Online).
Characteristics of Contemporary English Language Haibun.
The Whole West
By Charles Hansmann
We play cowboy so long our canteens go dry and when our mother gives us root beer we call it sarsaparilla. We wear matching six-shooters but when we play frontiersman we take them from their holsters and pretend they are flintlocks. We have a steer’s sawn horn and when they are flintlocks we say it’s for powder. But when we play cavalry and need reinforcements we raise it to our lips and blow it like a bugle. Then my sister snags
onto that holiday word and calls it Cornucopia like naming a doll. We’ve had hats and vests all along but now I get chaps and she a fringed skirt. Girls sometimes pretend they are boys, she says, but boys never pretend they are girls.
First published in bottle rockets #17, V9, N1, Summer 2007 in different form
Untitled Haibun
The haibun generally contains a title. The title has immense importance as it serves as the lighthouse of the genre. The title could be something related to the content of the haibun. Ray Rasmussen classified the title as ‘Denotative’ i.e., words or phrases having a direct and obvious context for the prose and haiku, and ‘Connotative’ as a title of imaginative and creative nature. A suitable title can be borrowed from memorable lines by renowned poets or writers with a note of the relevant source. A few, namely Richard Krawiec, Dana-Maria Onica, Marco Fraticelli, however, wrote some untitled haibun. Marco uses an epigraph instead of a title. This adds a special relevance to the prose section and to the haibun at large.
Untitled
By Richard Krawiec
The slow mist of morning. House empty. Birdsong and engine rumblings drift like haze, present yet not fully defined. I sit and stare, unfocused, out the window. My mind wanders.
These Spring days, I daydream a lot about baseball; my 11-year-old son has a coach who criticizes, publicly humiliates, screams at the children. “Get your heads into the game!”
My lips move. I start to speak out loud. Then I catch myself, stop, and stare out the window again.
yelling at the coach
in my mind …. the deep trill
of a wood thrush
Other Experimentation
Ray Rasmussen beautifully explored transformation of haibun writing in the form of The Role of Modeling in Haibun Composition. (Haibun Today, Vol. 7 No 2, June 2013) The following haibun is based on free verse poetry of Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty Tu Fu’s poem, Day’s End (trans. David Hinton), from David Hinton, The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, New Directions Publishing, 1989. Ray says “Tu Fu’s piece again reminded me of Utah’s long-abandoned sandstone canyons and I penned my own Day’s End. In this case, I employed a haiku containing phrases from Tu Fu’s closing lines: “good fortune over and over—and for what?”
Day’s End
By Ray Rasmussen
Oceans once filled this arid land and then receded, leaving deposits of salt and layers of hardened sand.
Tonight a wolf moon rises left of Orion. My tent sits where the Anasazi grew crops. Their stone shelters look as if they were built yesterday, empty but for the occasional pack rat or black widow. Painted handprints float like ghosts above entryways. Pottery shards and corn cobs are scattered about.
Here and there, in meandering canyons and sandstone pinnacles, I find springs too small to nourish the Old Ones. I’ve brought food and shelter with me. All this sufficient to sustain one man.Day’s End, Modern Haibun and Tanka Prose #2, January 2009
winter wind
in my silvered hair
good fortune, and for what?
In a parallel way, Jeffrey Winke borrowed the haiku from Jeffrey Woodward’s haibun, Evening in the Plaza and used it as a pivot in the haibun titled as Plaza in the Evening. He followed the narrative structural style, major elements of the haibun of Woodward. It appears like a mirror prose version, but not a twin and the haiku befits the overall haibun with its own identity. Winke writes in introduction, “The strength of mirror prose is that the positions – original, mirror – could be swapped and the overall effect would still be strong.” It has been an interesting experiment.
Evening In The Plaza
by Jeffrey Woodward
Cobblestone of which former century, red again with the last rays of the sun; elongated shadow of a sign illegible in silhouette or that of an attenuated and hushed passerby; a mind intent, in the face of horror vacui, upon leaving no nook unfilled while racing vainly to make several discrete phenomena cohere. A tremor of baleful leaves, perhaps, or a tardy pigeon come to roost….
the water comes back
to itself with a sound ─
a plaza’s fountain
Plaza In The Evening
By Jeffrey Winke
the water comes back
to itself with a sound ─
a plaza’s fountainThe last rays of the sun catch this joker’s bright red Mohawk like an electric shop sign and broadcast a sense of menace to the elongated shadow of a mute passerby preoccupied with the forlorn nature of this open space. The futile spin of a skateboarder, perhaps, or a caustic collapse of global inertia….
To be Continued
- The Elements – news from beyond
- The Elements – prayer garden
- The Elements – dandelion egret
- Submission Call – Cityscapes
- The Elements – first rain
Cafe Haiku 