Prompt: Haibun Combines Prose and Haiku

This month we look at a short Japanese poetry form called the haibun.  The haibun (translated as "haikai writings" is a form that combines prose and haiku.

Matsuo "Basho" Kinsaku 
1644-1694

Haibun poems are used to write autobiography, diary, essay, prose poems, very short stories. It was used as a kind of travel journal when it was first used by the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. It was a form he popularized. He wrote haibun as travel accounts. The most famous are in  Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior).

Haibun continued to be written by later haikai poets such as Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa and Masaoka Shiki. 

Not all of Basho's haibun are devoted to travel. They also are character sketches, landscape scenes, and occasional poems to honor a specific patron or event. His "Hut of the Phantom Dwelling" is a quite long prose essay followed by the haiku:

Among these summer trees, 
a pasania- 
something to count on 

(A pasania is a tree species of Asia, sometimes called in English a "stone oak" because of its very hard acorn-like nuts.)


Traditional haibun typically took the form of a short, precise prose description of a place, person or object, or a diary of a journey or other events in the poet's life, followed by a related haiku.

Haibun is now wriiten worldwide and the form has been adapted into different variations. The basic rules for the haibun are simple.

1. Unlike haiku, they begin with a title. 
2. The prose portion is terse, descriptive and written in the first person singular. 
3. It is in the present moment. Imagine the experience is occurring now, not in the past.
4. Although this is prose, it is poetic, understated, with all excessive words eliminated. 
5. The accompanying haiku follows the traditional rules of that form. 
6. The subject of the haiku does not repeat, quote or explain the prose, but reflects some aspect of the prose with a detail that is more juxtaposition - different yet somehow connected. That connection can be a surprising revelation for the reader.

I was in a workshop this past year with the poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil where we wrote haibun, Aimee has written several articles on haibun and gives a more detailed look at the rules of haibun - although she admits that she is "not one to stay close and straight to any particular poetry 'rules' (the haibun form especially and brightly lends itself to experimentation if one desires)."

She told us that although Basho coined the word haibun for the form as it is today, it already existed in Japan without that name as a kind of preface to poems and as mini-lyric essays. He wrote a guideline for the form and Aimee points out that he was quite concerned with aware (pronounced ah-WAR-ay), a term for the spirit of haiku or the "quality of certain objects to evoke longing, sadness, or immediate sympathy."

In "Don�t Bring Me to the Fireworks, The Fox-Wife Asks," by Jeannine Hall Gailey, we have a modern day haibun. I discovered Gailey's poetry in an article Nezhukumatathil wrote which includes another one of her fox-wife poems.

Don�t Bring Me to the Fireworks, The Fox-Wife Asks

They hurt my ears, make me run in circles. Under their chemical light you might see my non-human face, the tail I hide beneath skirts. In the city, under mercury vapor, you never see me clearly. I prefer the woods, the quiet howl of mosquitoes, of cicadas. Build me a hut of mud where we never see the stars, too bright. Bring me fans painted with cranes and peonies, poetry folded into birds. Don�t leave me in the crowd, my nose assaulted by too many scents. Let us stay far from others tonight, my love. Our celebrations will be fur and paw, hand to chest. Let the fireworks with their dizzy ghost spiders whine in the distance, keep me here, bring me silk kimonos the color of bark and dirt to nest in.

Keep the copper smoke
and saltpeter, the dim trails
of chrysanthemums in the sky.

That poem is from Gailey's collection, She Returns to the Floating World, which explores motifs in Japanese folk tales:, persona poems spoken by characters from anim� and manga, mythology, and fairy tales. The story of the kitsune, or fox-woman, is one that occurs throughout the book.

This month's prompt is a haibun following the simplified and traditional six rules stated above.

The submission deadline is the night of the New Moon, August14, 2015.




Further Reading On Haibun

• haibuntoday.com has a good selection of contemporary haibun. Two you might look at are "Night Fishing" and "Frozen."
  
• naturewriting.com has a good article on writing haibun

Writing the Day

Writing the Day was the name I chose for a new daily practice I started for 2014. It wasn't a New Year Resolution, and it wasn't totally original.  I want to write a poem each day.

William Stafford is the poet who inspired this daily practice the for me. Stafford wrote every day of his life from 1950 to 1993. He left us 20,000 pages of daily writings that include early morning meditations, dream records, aphorisms, and other �visits to the unconscious.�

It�s not that I don�t already write every day. I teach and writing is part of the job. I do social media as a job and for myself. I work on my poetry. I have other blogs. But none of them is a daily practice or devoted to writing poems.

When Stafford was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning and what he did when it didn�t meet his standards, he replied, �I lower my standards.�

I like that answer, but I know that phrase �lowering standards� has a real negative connotation. I think Stafford meant that he allows himself some bad poems and some non-poems, knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I decided to create my own form for this project.

I call the form ronka � a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

And that will be our short prompt for this short month.

These poems are meant to be one observation on the day. It might come upon waking. It might come during an afternoon walk, or when you are alone in the night.The poems should come come from paying close attention to the outside world from earth to sky or from inside � inside a building or inside you.

People know haiku as three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. But that�s an English version, since Japanese doesn�t have syllables.

The tanka form consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when Romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7.

For my invented ronka form, there are 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Like traditional tanka and haiku, my form has no rhyme. You want to show rather than tell. You want to use seasonal words - cherry blossoms, rather than �spring.�

It's hard for Western writers to stay out of their poems - lots of "I" - but ronka have fewer people walking about in the poem.

The poems are just 5 lines, but you can certainly write several on a single theme and chain them together renga style.

For examples, there are some on our main site and all my ronka poems so far are on the Writing the Day website. I look forward to you outdoing me at my own form.

Submission deadline: February 28, 2014

Cherry Blossom Haiku and the Seasons

HAIKU BY ISSA

Under the cherry-blossoms
none are
utter strangers.

Cherry blossoms in evening.
Ah well, today also
belongs to the past.



Kigo is another aspect of traditional Japanese haiku, although it is not always present in modern and non-Japanese haiku. Kigo words are those associated with a particular season. It is a tradition that goes back to the mid-8th century in Japanese poetry and culture.

Rather than say the name of a season, it would usually be alluded to by kigo words, such as cherry blossoms to indicate spring.

In haiku, winter is traditionally the time of grief, distance and serenity, and might be indicated by "snow," "ice" or "bare tree."

Summer haiku often invoke warmth and heat, love and also rage or lust. Kigo words like rice planting, peonies, moths, fireflies, ants and mosquitos or fireworks or swimming could all indicate summer.

crossing the river -
how pleasing with sandals
in my hand!

even after falling
its image still stands -
the peony flower

clinging to the bell
he dozes so peacefully
this new butterfly
                ~ Buson

Autumn in haiku often depicts decay, the paranormal (ghosts and such), suspicion, regret, loss, and endings. The Moon, shadows and seasonal plants like persimmons and apples or insects like crickets could all indicate autumn.

In an old pond
a frog ages
while leaves fall

goodbye, will go
alone down Kiso road
old as autumn
              ~ Buson

In the Japanese calendar, seasons traditionally followed the lunisolar calendar with the solstices and equinoxes at the middle of a season. So, the kigo words traditionall used may not match your own calendar of seasonal events in nature. The traditional Japanese seasons are Spring: 4 February�5 May; Summer: 6 May�7 August; Autumn: 8 August�6 November; Winter: 7 November�3 February.

Spring haiku is often written with words that connote youth, innocence and infatuation.Animals used in spring haiku include frogs, skylarks, swallows, and songbird songs. Plants for spring haiku could be azalea, wisteria, and especially cherry blossoms. In fact, cherry blossom viewing (hanami) is so common that just mentioning blossoms (hana) would probably mean cherry blossoms.


HAIKU BY BASHO

The oak tree stands
noble on the hill even in
cherry blossom time

Temple bells die out.
The fragrant blossoms remain.
A perfect evening!

Unknown spring --
Plum blossom
Behind the mirror.

With plum blossom scent,
this sudden sun emerges
along a mountain trail

Very brief -
Gleam of blossoms in the treetops
On a moonlit night.

From among the peach trees
blooming everywhere,
the first cherry blossoms.

A lovely spring night
suddenly vanished while we
viewed cherry blossoms

From every direction
cherry blossom petals blow
into Lake Biwa

Kannon's tiled temple
roof floats far away in clouds
of cherry blossoms
            (Kannon is the Bodhisattva of Compassion)

From all these trees �
in salads, soups, everywhere �
cherry blossoms fall

But not all blossoms come in spring, so when Basho writes:

Along the roadside
blossoming wild roses
in my horse�s mouth

he would mean it is late spring, possibly early summer.

Referencing a lily, lotus flower, orange blossoms, or sunflowers would mean summer.

Colored leaves would mean autumn and fallen or dry leaves would indicate winter.

SPRING HAIKU BY BUSON

When Yosa Buson writes about plum blosson we know it is spring and the cold that remains tells us it is early spring.

In nooks and corners
cold remains -
flowers of the plum

no bridge
and the sun going down -
spring currents

A woman
Reading a letter by moonlight -
Pear blossoms

Drinking up the clouds
it spews out cherry blossoms -
Yoshino Mountain.

In the moonlight,
the color and scent of wisteria
seems far away.

Pure white plum blossoms
slowly begin to turn
the color of dawn

National Haiku Writing Month

This month is the third annual National Haiku Writing Month.  National Haiku Writing Month takes place every February�the shortest month for the shortest genre of poetry.

The logo on the event website is a �No 5-7-5� sign to emphasize that haiku in English does not need to be syllabic lines of 5, 7 and 5.

I came across a post by John J. Dunphy. He owns a used book store called Second Reading Alton, Illinois. He was looking into a copy of The Best American Poetry 1991.

There were some haiku in the collection. Well, poems called "haiku."  A group of haiku by David Trinidad really bothered him. They were haiku based on 1960s TCV comedies like The Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan's Island. That sounds pretty lame but that's not what bothered him.

Each haiku is just declarative sentence that has been broken into that three-line, 5-7-5 false form. As Dunphy says, "Cramming a sentence into a 5-7-5 straitjacket does not a haiku make."

I'm with Dunphy. Here's a Trinidad sample:

�Island Girls�
Mary Ann dons one
of Ginger�s dresses, but it
falls flat on her chest.

Japanese haiku poets do use a 5-7-5 format, but it applies to sounds, not syllables. Unfortunately, our syllables do not match our sounds. (Dunphy says that many translators believe that about 12 English syllables approximate the duration of 17 sounds in Japanese language.)

Haiku also don't have titles.

And they do focus on certain themes - especially nature - and imagistic language.

Dunphy provides some haiku of his own as examples, and they are good ones.

ant
on a tree stump
scurrying across decades


spring
the Inuit village
closer to the sea

You should give haiku a try this month. The NaHaiWriMo site has writing prompts. They are also on Facebook, so like them. And if you write haiku, post it on Twitter with the hashtag #nahaiwrimo.

Crescent Moon

Crescent moon -
bent to the shape
of the cold.

    ~ Issa   translated by Robert Hass The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa