Jeffrey Winke: BOOKEND HAIBUN: AN EXPERIMENT USING MIRROR PROSE

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As a playful exercise I took the haiku in Jeffrey Woodward’s haibun, “Evening in the Plaza” and used it as a pivot for creating a mirror prose version of the piece. In my version, “Plaza in the Evening,” I pulled in the elements, echoed the sentiments and followed the narrative structure of the original. I wanted a companionable pair without striving for an identical twin. I also wanted the mirror prose to be strong enough that it could steal the haiku from the original and be able to stand on its own. The strength of mirror prose is that the positions – original, mirror – could be swapped and the overall effect would still be strong. This experiment is successful if the reader finds that the mirror prose adds, rather than detracts, from the impact of the original haibun.

I’d be interested in receiving reactions (jeff_winke (at) yahoo (dot) com) and I’d encourage you to boldly go ahead and hijack someone’s perfectly innocent haibun and create a bookend version.
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JEFFREY WOODWARD: EVENING IN THE PLAZA

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….

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the water comes back
to itself with a sound ─
a plaza’s fountain


JEFFREY WINKE: PLAZA IN THE EVENING

the water comes back
to itself with a sound ─
a plaza’s fountain
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The 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….

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by Jeffrey Winke

Milwaukee, Wisconsin