Jim Kacian: fire

.

centers us in the dark, bakes us orange — an excuse for staying up late, for extending the day for something not useful, for fun, for stories, for the hell of it

................................night clouds gone the supply of infinity

by Jim Kacian

Winchester, Virginia

first published in Modern Haiku 36:1 (Best of Issue)

Jim Kacian: GYPSY

.

.........................................Went to see the gypsy,
.........................................Stayin’ in a big hotel.
.........................................He smiled when he saw me coming,
.........................................And he said, “Well, well, well.”
.........................................His room was dark and crowded,
.........................................Lights were low and dim.
.........................................“How are you?” he said to me,
.........................................I said it back to him.

between the animus of his angry period and the bookishness of his latter years collecting memoirs there was the chant stage, intoning Blake songs and simple self-composed ditties with nursery rhyme melodies and the most basic chords, breathing exercises really, chi in, chi out, and while an honor to play guitar for him I sat on the stage wondering whither genius, or if you just had to be, twenty years earlier, there . . .

........................................I went down to the lobby
........................................To make a small call out.
........................................A pretty dancing girl was there,
........................................And she began to shout,
.......................................“Go on back to see the gypsy,
........................................He can move you from the rear,
........................................Drive you from your fear,
........................................Bring you through the mirror.
........................................He did it in Las Vegas
........................................And he can do it here.”

and after intermission his greatest hits and now in the audience with friends glugging the jug and testifying, howling to his howl and whorling into Wichita on the vortex of his mind, a kind of jazz arises, antiphon of poem and witness, an outsider’s gospel, the good news sung out loud . . .

.......................................Outside the lights were shining
.......................................On the river of tears,
.......................................I watched them from the distance
.......................................With music in my ears.

and after that the party where we arrive jazzed but quickly dowsed and politely listen to the importance of finding the Way he had found, Miles Davis low in the background . . .

.......................................I went back to see the gypsy,
.......................................It was nearly early dawn.
.......................................The gypsy’s door was open wide
.......................................But the gypsy was gone,
.......................................And that pretty dancing girl,
.......................................She could not be found.
.......................................So I watched that sun come rising
.......................................From that little Minnesota town,
.......................................From that little Minnesota town.

and the next night at the student union coming upon him speaking tenderly to his entourage to avoid the wild fetch of the previous night with its rants and hoots and alcohol, that had once been his way to the Way, and to find peace directly, as though one could eliminate the middleman, and I turned away down the stairs to the dark room where a handful of the unsaved had gathered to blow a little jazz

.......................................daybreak riffs on last night’s tunes

by Jim Kacian

Winchester, Virginia

Jeffrey Winke: LIKE MANNEQUIN GAMS

.

Even before the blazing sun can tuck the last of its fiery rays inside its hip pocket, the gnarly bespectacled old man with the marble knob mahogany cane smiles leeringly at the slim French actress sipping the chilled chardonnay with pouty, pursed lips and crossing her shapely tan legs that look too perfect, like mannequin gams used for selling fashion-forward nylons to the trendy and in vogue.

her goodbye
breasts linger
on my chest

by Jeffrey Winke

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Review of David Cobb's BUSINESS IN EDEN

Business in Eden by David Cobb. Equinox Press: Braintree, Essex, England, 2006. ISBN: 0-9517103-5-4. Perfect Bound, 5” x 6 1/2“, 96 pp., £7.95 UK (Available, also, through British Haiku Society Bookshop at www.britishhaikusociety.org).

Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward

Positioned like bookends at the front and back of this, David Cobb’s newest book, are two long and ambitious haibun from previous collections. “The Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore” (1997) and “A Day in Twilight” (2002), approximately thirty and twenty text pages respectively, share not only a certain measure of ambition but a compositional method as well. A dozen haibun of more common length – one or two pages – form the centerpiece of this triptych.

What is Cobb’s method? He outlines it clearly, in the second paragraph of “The Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore”:

Early one morning in spring, towards the end of a millennium, I try to forget I own two cars, sling a leg over the crossbar of a bicycle, prepare to set out from the ‘lower part’ of Essex … for a cottage on the Norfolk coast…. No companions along the way but the living I may chance to meet and the dead who haunt it. (1)

The poet’s unabashedly Romantic project is to evade the present (“I try to forget…”) and evoke the past (“the dead who haunt it”). Even the “living” who are met “along the way” are invested with a symbolic significance and spectral air. While the ghost of Bashō and his travels may flutter dimly behind these pages, Cobb’s tone and atmosphere are distinctly contemporary.

The ‘poetic places’ (utamakura) -- the topos famous for having inspired ancient poems ― formed an itinerary for Bashō’s journeys. Cobb seeks out or happens upon the same in his cycling tour, though the “the dead who haunt” his English countryside are often obscure writers or local historical personages of the 18th or 19th centuries. He brings these dead back, he revives them, with his vivid descriptions and lively detail:

Outside Hedingham a crossroads. Here they drove rivets through the joints of Old Poll, the local witch.

blackthorn in bloom
worming underground
its seven-league roots

Out of the sloe bush the pewtery chinking of a wren. The panoply of spring praises this day. The lark ascends for the first time, glossy cuckoo-pint leaves and glistening celandines take the eye away from daffodils, wallflowers scent walls, violets bloom both mauve and white, cheery-eyed speedwells are there, primroses, poplars quick to follow weeping willows into tint. (5-6)

The village of Honington houses the ghost of Robert Bloomfield, forgotten author of The Farmer’s Boy, whom Cobb promptly recognizes in the form of a “slip-smock style shirt” that “waves…from a washing line” (9), a discovery that leads to an interview of the dead by the living poet.

Attleborough brings Cobb, by chance, in touch with the living -- a young schoolgirl with notebook in hand – and an opportunity for a rather witty metaphysical digression:

“Do you believe in heaven and hell, sir? It’s all part of our homework, see? We gotta find out what everyone thinks and put it in a bar chart for Mrs. Scattermole.”

“Well, yes, I do believe in heaven and hell, but not as a place somewhere else, not as somewhere to go to…. Have you got space in your chart for someone who thinks heaven and hell are the same place?”

“Don’t think Mrs. Scattermole will have that,” the child answers mournfully, and then more hopefully, “What about the Devil? Do you believe in him?”

“Or her. Yes, but not as someone else or the same individual all the time….”

My young interlocutor turns away and, pausing by the next street corner, I see her take out a rubber and erase the scribble she has taken down from me. (17)

At journey’s end, under a vision of the Hale-Bopp Comet, Cobb reflects: “At bicycle speed, events from long ago come into sharper focus out of obscure memory, happenings of today drift away into the uncertainty of fable…. Never do we need words more than when we are alone, not for communication with others, but to talk to ourselves and define our own peace of mind” (32).

The twelve shorter haibun that follow “A Spring’s Journey” further display the breadth and originality of Cobb’s talent. The inevitable faux pas of a school nativity play, the black comedy of the burial of an emeritus professor of philosophy, the speculation on the poet’s own grave-to-be, and the nightmarish fable of a society that sanctions and glorifies euthanasia – Cobb assays each motif with a confident hand.

“A Day in Twilight” – the latter third of this collection – revisits the mode of “A Spring Journey” as Cobb hints in his introduction:

Mythical beings share intuitions with us and desire our company?

Taken with this idea and feeling sure their need would be greatest when days are short, I determined, as it was winter solstice, to seek some of those beings out….” (60)

Cobb’s characteristic wry humor is amply evident:

I dress before dawn, no very unlikely thing to do on December’s twenty-second day, night making way slowly for the gloom which at this time of year we are pleased to call daylight. (61)

As is his gift for the crisp and condensed turn of poetry:

Even on a day of modest wind there is a chill in the air across the small-scale ridgeland prairie where I now find myself. Set against a line of dark lime trees, like a lace jabot on a black collar, the eastern end of Little Sampford church. Mouldering. Its floor made of damp uncemented yellow bricks.

honey for sale –
my loose change clinks
on a silent hive

Unfortunately, Cobb’s peregrinations in “A Day in Twilight,” with his seeking out of the likes of highwayman Dick Turpin and merry King Coel, rings in the end, despite many brilliant passages, as emptily as Cobb’s “loose change.” It lacks the inner coherence of “A Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore” and comes close to lowering itself to a parody of that earlier achievement.

Such misgivings are easy to put aside, however, in a book that is otherwise rich in achievement and confirms, yet again, Cobb’s position in the front ranks of those poets who have mastered the difficult art of haibun. The detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights that adorns the cover seems particularly apropos and the price, modest. Business in Eden is that reviewer’s cliché: a must for your bookshelf.

review by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Lynx, February 2008

Tad Wojnicki: MOAN TRAIL

.
In Monterey , or "Moan Trail," as jokers quip, seals moan in the Fisherman's Wharf. Living close, I hear it through the wall. At midnight, it breaks my heart, and I bolt out of bed. I breathe the brine, rot, and diesel watching the fishing boats steal out like Christmas trees without the gifts.
.

wharf wind –
oyster shells
pried open

squatty boats
garland bulbs
what if fish spoke?

.
Under the public deck, the Wharf has a stinky, barnacled deck for the crews. Seals like the deck. The salts throw them heads and tails. They roll in dung, crying love. I hear yelps of kicked curs, groans of kneaded muscles, whimpers of delight, snickers of pleasure. They cuddle, wrapping necks, flapping fins, knocking off. The brine washes gaping wounds. Each cackle, sigh, and moan drives me nuts. Often, I hear my lover coming, making me moan. I cringe at the show, yet I stay. Neighbors are drawn to bedroom noises.

.

after moaning
listening to
the heartbeat

mist soakes me
did it think
I was on fire?

Sometimes I hang out till morning, shunning my bed. "Why did she leave me?" I puff. Falling off my feet, I fail to quit. I watch the surf hugging the barnacled pillars. I thud the empty deck, full of moans, waiting for the boats. What gift do I expect? Other life?

.

When I finally head for the Squid Row Cafe, the other life already burdens the boards, hugged by crushed ice -- blushing crabs, thigh-sized bonitos, every rainbowing thing. The wharf grows gray with fish scales.

fish market
in cod’s eye
sun rises

drizzly dawn
moans fade out
into idle chat

.

by Tad Wojnicki
Hsinchu City, Taiwan
first published in Tattoo Highway, #9

Bill Wyatt: DRAGON'S BREATH & MOUNTAIN MADNESS

.

We eventually arrived at the Pyrenees to be greeted by Red & Black Kites & Griffon Vultures. Elated we found a nearby campsite and brewed up. It started to rain, not heavy, so we set off for a local restaurant & had an evening meal. Weather beginning to break up, dragon's breath rolling down mountains.

After breakfast we walked round some of the Cirque de Gavarnie. Very dramatic treading along wood edges, finding endemic plants including Dragonmouth, Pyrenian, Columbine, P.Squill, P. Cranesbill, P.Valerian & P. Saxifrage. Also a snowfinch, not more than ten feet away, happily eating seeds. Maybe a Golden Eagle too, high up in the sky.

After a wet evening, we broke camp and pushed on through the French & then the Spanish Pyrenees, rain following us as we climbed up & then down the mountains. Dragon’s breath not far behind us.

Once we reached the plains, clouds disappeared, opening up into vast clear blue sky. We stopped off for Spanish bread. I'm sure that by then we were all suffering from mountain madness. Too many late nights of endless rain & that French Old Lady Gin, leading to big bluesy Jack Kerouac hangovers.

Mountain madness –
soaking wet, like tattered rags
laughing at ourselves

.

Steve spoke to the shop owner, in English, "Hello mate, a loaf of bread please." This had brother Tony in stitches, & I had to help him out of the shop, before he finally flipped. It turned out that Steve had thought the shop owner was speaking to him in English.

We drove off & stopped again for cheese and bread, Tony in fits whenever we mentioned the bread shop. As we ate, relaxing in the heat, a quail walked indifferently past us.

Sweltering sun
"wet my lips" – the quail seems to
have the right take on things

.

After further adventures in Spain, only to be rained off, we made our way back to Gavarnie & found an ideal campsite on a farm. Rain holding back as we put up our tents. We explored the countryside, finding in the meadow above us five different orchids, Tunic Flower, & Carthusian Pink. We had a cook up, tin of beans, lentils & sausages, onions, garlic & carrots. Just as we finished the meal, the sky opened up & off to bed. Woke up around 4am. to find that the tent was awash with water. Tony soaked right through in his sleeping bag. I wasn't too badly off, as I had a camp bed, which kept me off the wet floor. But rain coming in through the sides of the tent. Tony disappeared into Steve's car until daylight.

So, enough was enough & we broke camp in the morning. In dismal rain we headed back for the coast & England. Followed by dragon’s breath, always on our tail.

Dragon’s breath
covering the morning sun –
muffling birdsongs

by Bill Wyatt
Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, England
first published in Presence 31, Jan. 2007

Ynes Sanz: THE MAN IN BLACK

.

jam nite at the havana bar but none of the punters will step up to the mike though the prize is a bar tab and drink is what's mainly on their minds and the mc's playing ani di franco on his national guitar but the ladies want it danceable so he grins and gives them brown-eyed girl trying to squeeze a show from a crowd that's just happy to dance as long as he's happy to play

no takers for the open mike so a mate steps up with a black hat on and a borrowed guitar and they're crooning and strumming for the late great johnny milking it for all they're worth then a guy with stockman's legs turns his butt to the crowd leaning into the mike for a boy named sue and after a couple more in memory of the man we're all feeling comfortable nursing a beer

darwin pub crawl
getting a skinful
of iced water

then there's something latin on the bar-room tv and black hat's murmuring his poems close to my ear and saying do i want a dance and i tell him i lost all the dance i ever had in me but he won't take a no and next thing my feet are giving it up for a passable samba and the hips are playing along and my face is smiling dancing with a partner first time in years and back on the bar stool i'm feeling pretty smug

and up on stage some little guy's playing a mean air guitar on a pool cue flying so high i'm halfway to believing i can hear the riffs and that's when i finally get it

always was a sucker for a well strung line

telling the stories
all over again
time to go home

by Ynes Sanz

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

first published in talking poetry blues, 2006

Patricia Prime: STRATEGIC MOMENTS

.

. . . she said if you hear a screech in the middle of the night it’s not someone getting his throat cut it’s just the pukekos – doesn’t she know we have pukekos in Auckland – families of them live along the wetlands of the North-Western Motorway and hundreds by the lake at Western Springs – but it wasn’t the pukekos that kept me awake it was the lightning coming through a gap in the curtains – I could see two stars in direct alignment – the top one faintly blue and the bottom one throbbing red – the more I stared the more stars I could see between them but then they all disappeared behind the clouds – the gap in the curtains took on the aura of the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey” – a film I went to the premiere of decades ago in London – a friend was an editor on the film and provided us with invitations – we met afterwards for a party at Kubrick’s house - a strange man who ordered his shirts and shoes by the dozen (all the same colour and design) – one huge wall-to-wall cupboard in his kitchen contained every known liquor – and what did that monolith represent? – we came away from the film with different ideas: I thought it represented God appearing to mankind at certain strategic moments in humanity’s ascent from ape to star-child – my friend was responsible for that sequence where the ape throws a bone up in the air in slow motion and it turns into a spacecraft – as a child I’d looked forward to the coming of the years 1984 (George Orwell) and 2001 – but now they’re both past – I can honestly say 1984 was my annus horribilis and 2001 wasn’t much better . . . the storm is over, the pukekos have gone down to the river and now I can sleep . . .

in a pile
of old film magazines
the director’s face
the quake of his crimped eyelids
hint that an image has formed

by Patricia Prime

Auckland, New Zealand

first published in Lynx, Feb. 2008

Barbara Strang: SIGNS OF AGE

.

I’m waiting on a hard seat in the little clinic behind the Outpatients Department. The others here are silver haired. One very old man droops in a wheelchair. He is thin and has long fingernails. That must be his daughter, who speaks about him to the attendant in a loud voice, as if he isn’t here.

new hearing aid
shocked by the sound
of my footsteps

.

by Barbara Strang

Christchurch, New Zealand

first published in Frogpond, 2006

Jeffrey Winke: A JAR OF PAINT

.

Snow clouds fill every inch of the sky while the artist carts his framed, exactly 23.5-inch square digital graphic prints into the gallery. He leaves wet footprints on the worn, maple floor. The young curator with dancer-straight-back posture and the soft cotton blouse enunciates the rule: “All nail holes must be filled and painted after your show is down. I have a jar of paint in my office.” The artist nods a bit too eagerly. She grimaces, pivots and returns to her office to shuffle documents into folders on her computer desktop. The artist stares at a blank, white wall.

slush puddle
a little wider than
he can leap

by Jeffrey Winke

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Review of John Brandi's WATER SHINING BEYOND THE FIELDS

Water Shining Beyond the Fields: Haibun Travels Southeast Asia by John Brandi. Tres Chicas Books: El Rito, NM, 2006. ISBN: 1-893003-09-4. Perfect Bound, 5 ½” x 7”, 190 pp., $14.00 US.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward

The book at hand, while covering separate journeys in Cambodia, China and Thailand respectively, may startle many by its sheer bulk. “Haibun Travels,” John Brandi’s sub-title proclaims, and common expectations of a Bashō-like travel journal are aroused. Basho’s most ambitious journal – the Narrow Road to the Interior (Oku no hosomichi) – ends after 40 or 50 modern text pages and Issa’s Spring of My Life (Ora ga haru), while lengthier, doesn’t surpass twice that number. Meanwhile, book-length collections of modern haibun in English are relatively few in number and lean more closely toward the Basho norm.

Certainly, no writer, however accomplished, might aspire to sustain over such breadth the verbal compression and emotive tension common to classical Japanese or modern English haibun. The prose in Water Shining Beyond the Fields, while rising on occasion to such heights by the common haikai methods of abbreviation and understatement, adopts no single style. Brandi echoes the breezy style of popular guide-books, imitates the excited breathlessness of the Kerouac of On the Road or Dharma Bums, reveals his social and political angst in passages of diatribe and, occasionally, writes with the lucidity and pithiness more commonly associated with the haibun genre.

Brandi, at Angkor Wat, rises to the occasion of the scene before him:

Narratives depicting Hindu myths adorn the inner galleries: architecture as storybook, the “pages” exquisitely carved on two meter-high walls, the detail minute…. “The Churning of the Milk Ocean” is our favorite. I’ve read translations of this story, seen episodes in New Delhi street plays…. Now the story leaps off the wall in front of us: gods and demons oppose each other, pulling on a great rope (the cosmic serpent) to churn amrita, the elixir of immortality into the world. Not only do they succeed, they froth into existence … dozens of erotic apsaras, heavenly dancers whose fingers flutter with secret mudras.

The apsaras float across the wall in dreamy trance, with sumptuous breasts and diaphanous outfits, heads adorned with flame-like tiaras. Their rapturous eyes and smiles evoke a state of communing with the Other …. Finally, there are half-parted lips that convey transience, a whisper emerging from a celestial realm. (23)

.

China, with its now pervasive and rapid modernization, calls forth one of Brandi’s finest passages:

Awful town, torn up, getting ready – for what? Earthen walls, tiled roofs, cobbled alleys, sheltered markets, landscaped entranceways, all that is (was) traditional, now in a heap. It’s challenging to walk; conduit and rebar pokes up everywhere, concrete tubes are rolled into open sewers. No one is working. Come next year, and the next, the town will likely still be under construction, the dream put off, everything sagging under abandoned scaffolding, money gone, the place bankrupt. The sweepers continue their task, though there aren’t really any streets to sweep. A warm breeze stirs yellow dust into whirlwinds; we mask our faces with kerchiefs, looking like bandits dragging suitcases of questionable weight:

in the wind
a man without a hat
holds his head. (79)

The poet’s revulsion is palpable here in the rubble and dust of the past being swept away by the new. The wry portrait of Brandi and his wife with the burden of their dubious suitcases is set off nicely by the haikai humor of the closing verse.

Brandi, at times, reflects clearly upon his own absorption in a culture he often rails against and openly reviles:

Cambodia, too, opens itself full-out to the world’s fastest growing industry: tourism. No matter the languages I speak, how cheaply I travel, how down-home I lodge, I’m part of it. Even if I go to Mongolia, stay for awhile, and shit in a hole, I’m hooked into the industry. Call myself traveler rather than tourist, seeker rather than traveler, so what? I’m the same old foreigner to the visa man, customs official, cyclo driver, food vendor, red-light girl, monk, charity worker, guide, innkeeper, pancake lady, shoeshine kid – all who want my money, however much, whatever little. I’m a walking dollar sign. (45)

This recitation of characters who are captive to a power greater than themselves (tourism!) is understood, at last, to include the poet.

In other times and other places, however, the author displays only perplexity as in this description of a bus trip in rural China:

And the passengers? Each was a knobby backwater bumpkin right out of a fairy tale: dirty, coarsely shouting non-stop over the unmufflered engine, chain smoking (windows rolled up), heaving butts, sunflower shells, and wads of spit to the floor, dust slowly powdering their dark, threadbare attire. In 40 years of travels I can’t recall another journey (save for a Greyhound in West Virginia’s coal country) where I felt more unacknowledged, purposely ignored. Eerie, indeed, to realize how truly vague and dangerous it is to be among humans (wild animals are more predictable and lovelier to watch)…. (102-103)

Brandi is shocked by being shunned and “unacknowledged.” When these Chinese peasants fail to recognize exactly how interesting our poet is, he can only sulk and resort to insults – “backwater bumpkin,” “dirty,” “threadbare.” His underlying middle-class sensibility, suppressed elsewhere, is here allowed free rein to see in his fellow passengers something akin to those mean-spirited mountain folk in West Virginia’s poverty-stricken coalfields who likewise treated him as invisible some years ago. Brandi does not reflect that the peasant and coal-miner, while sharing his bus, do not share in his sightseeing trip but are engaged in the mean and difficult business of securing a meal.

Quite fortunately, such scenes are not common in this book and the poet more readily shows empathy with the displaced and poor met in his travels. Brandi, too, convincingly conveys a sincere longing for simplicity that will find its admirers:

In America everything is big, except the computer chip. Big mugs, big cars, big schedules, big football games, big pills for big people, big flags over big malls, big talk from big sissies who run big business. Give me a twig fire. Cup of sake. Tea leaves unfurling in a clay pot. Narrow path through a parsley garden outside a willow shack. Chinese herb pills that slip easily down the throat. No smart bombs. No information bomb. No one going birth to death without chance revelation stirring the doldrums. I sometimes think America invented instant coffee, then sat down to avoid itself. Today, on a path to the beach:

sunburst
In grains of quartz
from the sweeper’s broom. (179)

Water Shining Beyond the Fields, the first title from Tres Chicas Books that I have examined, is a sharply designed trade paperback with full-color cover and pleasingly legible typography. The price is reasonable and John Brandi’s prose, despite occasional lapses, is quite enjoyable on the whole. Along the way, the poet adds some sparkling haiku, also, which really leaves the reviewer little room to quibble.

by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Lynx, Winter 2008

WORTH SAYING: DAVID COBB ON HAIBUN

.

in interview with Lynne Rees

nearby in the dark
someone calls someone else
using my name[1]

When David Cobb first moved to the small Essex village in the east of England where he still lives, the locals used to refer to him as ‘The Colonel’, convinced that someone who spoke foreign languages and made frequent, sometimes twice daily, trips to the village post box, not to mention trips to unheard-of countries ‘to do research’, had to be involved in something military and secretive. But there is nothing either military or secretive about David Cobb, a relaxed and rather shy man who is nevertheless happy to share his thoughts and ideas about haibun writing, although he self-effacingly says, “After 10 years struggling with and talking about haibun I’m not sure I have anything more that’s worth saying.”

It was in 1977, at the age of 51, “somewhere over Anchorage”, on his way to Japan for Longman Educational Publishers, that Cobb found an article about writing haiku in the in-flight magazine.

“My first attempts at writing them were little more than word photos,” he says, “and it would be another twenty years before Spring Journey would be published.”

Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore, a book length haibun, or ‘nikki[2]’ as Cobb prefers to call it, was published in 1997 and established Cobb as the ‘initiator of the haibun in Britain’.[3] It was inspired by Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North but as Cobb saw no value in creating a pastiche he also sought out the works of British writers that might give him some ideas about the prose, among them Gilbert White, Edward Thomas’s The Icknield Way, R.L. Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage, and the collage haibun of his contemporary, Bill Wyatt. He encourages other haibun writers to do the same.

“Read the sort of people whose prose will inspire you,” he says, “not just other haibun writers”. Two of his own more recent inspirations have been WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and Iain Sinclair’s Edge of the Orison. “Although not in themselves good models of haibun prose, they gave me reassurance that haibun ‘has found its time’ in European letters.”

What other advice does he have?

“Concentrate on writing good haiku until you have confidence in your ability.”

no pencil—
my poem goes to Ladbrokes
to be jotted down[4]

“The haiku have to be important and necessary,” he says. “It shouldn’t be a case of ‘I’ve written a paragraph of prose and now I need a haiku.’”

In creating his own haibun he normally starts with the prose, and while he will often write haiku specifically for that piece, he will equally use previously written haiku that feel appropriate to the theme and subject matter.

“I believe that Basho did this too, so I’m with the angels on this.”

What does he see as the function of the haiku within a haibun?

“It’s crudely simplistic, but I suppose in the prose one might look for settings and actions, whereas the haiku are deeper into reflection. There’s also the visual impact they have on the page. Something we haven’t fully exploited yet, I think. In fact, some of Basho’s seem to go beyond ‘link and shift’ and act as punctuation, bringing an end to particular sections.”

In the Introduction to Table Turning[5] Cobb re-confirms his opinion that the haiku need to be ‘good in themselves and also perform a role within the haibun’ although he considers this desire for autonomous haiku as an ‘ideal’, a rule that can be relaxed occasionally rather then being written in stone.

“I’m humble enough to admit that it’s a very difficult thing to do” he says, “but I do believe that the haiku should retain a link and shift relationship to the prose, which should also have the capacity to stand alone too. But the essential thing, surely, is that neither prose nor poetry should upstage each other.”

He remains dubious about the often stated ‘rule’ that a haiku shouldn’t be easily capable of being ‘folded back’ into the prose. “There’s such a variety of prose that’s acceptable in haibun – clipped syntax, stream of consciousness, a more relaxed narrative voice – that almost any haiku could be written out as part of it!”

So how does he feel about the idea of the ‘haiku-less haibun’? Can such a thing exist?

“I haven’t seen one yet,” he says, “and it really seems illogical. After all, the one thing that distinguishes haibun from other kinds of short prose writing is the interplay between poem and prose. Take away the poem and what have you got?”

He draws a parallel with the debate around ‘one-word haiku’ – “It’s inconceivable such a haiku can contain a kireji.[6] – but admits that he’s less interested in philosophical discussions of this kind than with the literary merits of haiku and haibun and his responsibility as a writer to his audience.

While other writers might wish to stress the value of ‘process’, Cobb’s motivation is normally towards ‘product’ and the satisfaction of the reader.

“A reader wants to be entertained and/or informed. A reader wants a sense of fulfilment and enjoyment. As an author you have a profession and a responsibility to enable that to happen.”

But a lot of contemporary haibun are written from autobiographical or life material. How can haibun writers avoid the trap of self-indulgence when using their own personal experiences?

“Yes. I’ve read a lot of haibun that seem to me to be substitutes for a trip to Freud’s couch. A haibun writer must not be looking for some kind of therapy for him or herself, but keep an eye on the reader and what will not be wasting his or her time. Interest is all, to adapt a well-known phrase of Keats.”

sciatica—
I listen to the lark
flat out[7]

Self-indulgence is not an accusation that can be levelled against Cobb’s haibun that celebrate landscape, nature, literature, history and myth, and the characters that populate them. Their blend of story and poetry is close to his heart as someone who began by writing short stories, then shifted to haiku, and subsequently found the haibun form.

So where do his haibun come from?

“From things that have been sitting in my consciousness for years (memory), from things that are new to me (experience), and from my imagination. I used to look for things to write about – we all need the practice when we start out – but these days I wait for them to arise.”

And how does he go about creating them?

“Nowadays I compose on the computer screen, print off a copy and make corrections, then go back to the screen. After several drafts, and when I feel I’m in danger of losing the spontaneity, I’ll put it aside and let my subconscious carry on working on it.”

And how does he know when a haibun is finished?

“I’ll have any number of writing sessions to bring a haibun to a state of completion, but is any haibun every really finished?”

This question isn’t at all rhetorical. In 2006, Cobb revised his 1997 version of Spring Journey for inclusion in Business in Eden, a task he received some criticism for, but he defends his decision because, among other things, he wanted to correct an element of “unfairness” he’d displayed towards one of his characters.

By “unfairness” he doesn’t mean a lack of truthfulness but more a misjudgement, and he has definite ideas about the ideas of truth in relation to haibun.

“People who want factual truth [in haibun] are evaluating them in terms of philosophy rather than in terms of literature. We know that Basho’s account in The Narrow Road does not always conform to what really happened by comparing it to his companion Sora’s diary of the same journey. Sora’s diary was a faithful, or ‘true’ if you like, account. Basho took artistic liberties, selected and re-organised things to create art[8]. I view haibun as reorganised experience.”

Some people might be alarmed to know that Cobb’s own Spring Journey deviates in places from the factual truth. “But why should that matter, if the reader believes it?” he asks. “What matters in literature is emotional truth.”

‘Room’, a haibun from Business in Eden, is a sensual and playful account of how, during a Sicilian siesta, he is seduced by his hotel room, by ‘her cool breath’ on ‘a steamy afternoon’. ‘Withdrawing’, another haibun from the same book, places its narrator in a future society where voluntary euthanasia is a socially acceptable alternative to natural death, an obviously fictional scenario.

“’Withdrawing’ started as a short story,” he explains, “and was an exercise in seeing what a haibun might be able to achieve. Up until now, this totally fictional approach is a one off, and isn’t really representative of my work. But I still believe it has emotional truth.”

through a small circle
of paint-splashed glass
the open sea[9]

“It’s liberating to write haibun,” Cobb says. “Haiku, although they can sometimes arrive whole like a gift, even if they are open-ended and one may take liberties with the form, can feel claustrophobic in their making. There’s less constraint with prose, it’s more like setting out on an adventure.”

In 2005 this adventure was extended when Rich Youmans (USA) invited Cobb to collaborate with him and Ion Codrescu (Romania) on a project of linked haibun. Several of the haibun appeared in ‘Modern Haiku’[10] and apricot tree was subsequently published by Leap Press in 2006.

Cobb says, “To be in at the birth of a genre is somehow idyllic,” but he admits he was apprehensive about the endeavour at first. “Would there be some irksome loss of independence? Would artifice supplant integrity? And we didn’t even have the sketchiest plan that might help us produce a coherent literary work.”

But in fact, the lack of all but the most minimal prescriptions turned out to be an advantage, and he was delighted to experience a boost in creativity, writing things he might not otherwise have written, roaming “between actuality and fiction”, without ever feeling he was really compromising his cultural “differences” as a writer and lapsing into what he regards as “infertile” homogeneity.

apricot tree is an astonishing text. It opens with a stand-alone haiku by Codrescu followed by a short haibun written by Youmans in response. That haibun’s concluding haiku acts as ‘the link and shift’ for Cobb to continue. The reader then travels with these three writers through memory, experience, and imagination, across geographical boundaries and cultural perspectives, but never outside the domain of universal human experience.

Does he think that collaborative linked haibun have a promising future?

“[Rich was] a sensitive and discerning ‘manager’ [and] his instinct for picking writers who might collaborate in a positive way must have been crucial. I suggest that it would be unwise, as some person might be tempted to do, to ‘go one better’, to launch a grandiose open invitation to all and sundry to take part in a linked haibun. It would not be ‘one better’, it would risk the infant’s life before it had begun to toddle well. It would be good if ‘linked haibun’ could keep its innocence a healthy while before the rule-mongers set to work on it.”

And one final word about how he sees his own haibun?

“Nobuyuki Yuasa recently said to me[11], ‘What is important is that the author is absolutely true to his or her feeling. If he contrives to be fanciful or serious, he loses his genuine feeling. It might also be a good idea to be both fanciful and serious at the same time, because our feelings are usually mixed… it is clear to me that there is philosophy behind your comic descriptions. You only hint at your philosophy and do not preach it.’

“I would be very happy if my haibun achieved something like that.”

the journey goes on
I squeeze just that bit higher
up the toothpaste tube[12]


Notes

[1] from ‘a day in twilight’, Palm (2002)
[2] nikki: “By this I mean extended or serial haibun… Basho referred to Oku-no-hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) as michi no nikki.” Cobb, 28.1.08
[3] ‘Batting for Essex, England − and The World’ by Nigel Jenkins in ‘Planet – The Welsh Internationalist’, No 173 Oct/Nov 2005
[4] from The New Haiku, Snapshot Press 2002
[5] British Haiku Society Haibun Anthology 2005
[6] kireji – cutting word
[7] from The New Haiku, ibid
[8] “The writer seems more interested in giving us the… spiritual experience than in the prosaic recording of facts. This is expected of any literary journal.” Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho, Kodansha International 1982, p.140.
[9] from ‘Second Course’, Business in Eden (2006)
[10] http://www.modernhaiku.org/issue36-1/haibun36-1.html
[11] from an email exchange with Nobuyuki Yuasa (Basho’s translator) about one of Cobb’s recent haibun, ‘A Walk with Issa (and the dog came too)’, Blithe Spirit, Vol 18 No 1, 2008
[12] from ‘deliverance’, Palm (2002)

Selected Bibliography:

Business in Eden, Equinox Press 2006
apricot tree, with Ion Codrescu and Rich Youmans, Leap Press 2006
Forefathers, Leap Press 2004
Palm, Equinox Press 2002
A Bowl of Sloes, Snapshot Press 2000
The Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore, Equinox Press 1997
Jumping from Kyomizu, Iron Press 1996

As editor:

Euro Haiku, Iron Press 2007
Table Turning, The British Haiku Society Haibun Anthology, BHS 2005
The Dead Poet’s Cabaret, Iron Press 2003
The British Museum Haiku, British Museum Press 2002
The Iron Book of British Haiku, Iron Press 1998

Website: http://www.davidcobb.co.uk/

David Cobb: ROOM

.

Room is very white in every part, well-proportioned, and breathes conditioned air.

I am a torso of half-roasted meat. Torpid.

Room and I are sharing a day of rest, a day out of the sun, the third of our holiday together. Under her cool breath she supplies the answer to three-down in the crossword puzzle we are doing. Pervading atmosphere of a place. Ambience.

This sets us to swapping words in our different languages. Room's is Italian and she tells me her real name is in fact Camera. I begin to suspect she's been taking pictures of me all this steamy afternoon, focussing on me her lens hidden somewhere up there in the Sicilian soffits and catching me in the nude.

To have carnal knowledge of Room I plump up her white pillow and imagine she is Leda and I am the swan.

from Etna's heat
flowing around my thighs
the melted snows

by David Cobb

Braintree, Essex, England

from Business in Eden, Equinox Press, 2006

David Cobb: WITHDRAWING

.

It is earlier in the morning than he intended when he draws back the bedroom curtains and peers out of the window. Takes stock.

glorious conkers
fallen in the night
the paper boy
misses a skip

A better Spicing than his yesterday evening he could not have imagined. Every one of his remaining longtime friends there, even those who were themselves squeamish about Withdrawing. A fine evening for the time of year; and when the high point of the celebration came, the ushers from the Terminal carried the Spicing Cup and the Withdrawal Cake out onto the patio, it was still so warm. The silver Cup had gone round from hand to hand without a drop of dew forming on it. A ceremony at once sober and lighthearted; nothing to embarrass.

a suppressed wind
until the night air
can bear it no more

Now the morning of the day itself is come. His steady hand smoothes a small crease from the Withdrawal Robe laid out neatly on the spare bed the night before; the spare bed where until she died his wife used to sleep. More now than ever he feels sorry she did not Withdraw, but took the more traditional way out of the world.

When the ushers come for him with the almost silent stretched limousine, he hands over the keys of the house and the chauffeur seals them in an envelope and puts them in his pocket. As they make the three circuits of the house, he wants to sing, a song about the wind through the trees, didn't they say though, the art was to Withdraw in silence?

But finally, when they have passed through the saltmarshes and reached the staithe where they must wait for the tide to swell under the ferry boat, and he can see through the haze the gates of the Golden Park, and the island and the Terminal itself, one of the ushers slots a CD into the car radio and plays a cantata by Bach.

sea lavender
a ship with an empty hold
putting out to sea

by David Cobb

Braintree, Essex, England

from Business in Eden, Equinox Press, 2006

Ynes Sanz: ARCHIPELAGO

.

all the humid night the fan squeaks like a blowfly in a jar or a distant corella calling in flight

morning comes and the ceiling timbers are the first thing i see their joints discontinuous as lines of morse code or a transcript of the faltering conversation of people who do not yet know each other

above my head the boards are easing apart to release dark beginnings small falls of webby dust depositions of previous lives old memories others’ voices and dream utterances sifting down into the room

outside a neighbour child plays with a mock-growling dog a cell phone chirps and a crow asserts its right to the clothes hoist

and daylight colours-in the room as you swim up through waves of sleep and into my arms

a room full of words
among book islands
our easy silence

by Ynes Sanz

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

first published in talking poetry blues, 2006

Barbara Strang: Be Careful

my mother calls as I run towards the rocks at the base of the lighthouse. It is unnecessary to warn me. Stirling Point is a splinter of land, aiming for Antarctica. The sea below bolts through the narrow gap to fill Bluff Harbour. I see a rusty spike of iron rising from the waves – Dad told me the skeleton of a ship lies below. Buoys mark the shipping channel. Once more I roll “buoy” around my mouth, and squint, trying to turn the weathered red drums into real live boys. One is making a human sound. Among the rocks I find a piece of green glass, worn smooth by the sea.

moaning buoy
my brother
casts a stone

by Barbara Strang

Christchurch, New Zealand

first published in Yellow Moon, 2006

Jeffrey Winke: BIG YELLOW BOOTS

.

We’re hunkered – and that’s the correct word – in anticipation of a major snow accumulation. Streets are pretty much empty, except for delivery trucks and mad-driving SUVs. I’m in a coffee shop where a big man wearing big yellow boots just walked in and ordered a small cup to go. He holds the paper cup daintily with his big fat fingers that look like mutant alien slugs. His mouth squawks like a pterodactyl. The snapping action of his jaws looks mildly menacing, even though his eyes crinkle with friendliness. Everyone talks about the weather as though we’re all college philosophy students examining truth as intently as a Fabergé egg.

snow globe
a sparkle flake rests
on Elvis’ head

by Jeffrey Winke

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Gary LeBel: A CHANGE OF CLOTHING AND A BOW

.

The ear’s conch still holds the ocean entire from last night, that undulation Yosa Buson had so memorialized with his notari, notari of the ever young spring sea. If the blade of the underdark were to prick my skin tonight, only a rill of shadows would flow out. Such is midlife, less crisis than removing clothes that were never a comfortable fit: it has taken me many years to learn to appraise the world above the belly’s horizon, the low chakra that jails us by stroking our baser instincts.

I bow to those who live more simply than I do, to those who take but one and leave two. To those who carry their calmness and serenity with them like a shell, I bow even lower…to listen.

As falling rain
can’t be held by shingles, old friends go their ways
just as water, finding its level,
reflects to each
a different moon.

by Gary LeBel

Cumming, Georgia

2002

Bob Lucky: THE UNDEAD DUCK

.

Just a day before the Year of the Rat, sitting in a kopitiam having breakfast, I read about a duck that refuses to die. A farmer outside of Kuala Lumpur slit its throat but several hours later found it still alive. Puzzled, he took it to the local imam who slit its throat again. The next morning it was still an undead duck.

In the photo in the newspaper, the farmer holds the duck with its mangled neck in front of him for the camera. He explains, in the caption, that the duck has stopped eating and has begun to smell a bit but otherwise continues to waddle around in the pen with the other ducks.

eating runny eggs
not giving death
a thought –
perhaps death
will ignore me too

.

by Bob Lucky

Hangzhou, China

kopitiam = a Chinese-style coffee house in Singapore or Malaysia

Jay Bryan: WINTER ESCAPADE

.

Early morning: “Is anyone awake yet?” Eating peanut butter off the crackers, Cinderella’s pink chemise and frilled socks, beagle licking her fingers, with glittering eyes telling stories half-understood. No nap. “Let’s go visit the peacocks and horses!”

appaloosa’s mouth
through split rails: a carrot
on our granddaughter’s palm

Running, full moon rising, sweet gum trees bending. Stopping to smell winter wisteria and early cherry blossoms’ ginger, wanting a sprig, then another. Whoosh, down a slide, “Higher, higher!” in a swing. And getting chilly? She doesn’t care.

under a sea of leaves
an acorn and its tender root –
“let’s plant it, Pappa!”

by Jay Bryan

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

John Irvine: THORNY BUSINESS

.

Heritage climbing roses adorn our deck. Pink and white, they attract thousands of bees. Heaven on a long stem. A couple of over-grown shoots offend my eye, so I fetch the secateurs to lop them. Two down, one more – out there…. I miss the top step and begin a short journey to the concrete paving. Half over the top railing I fling an arm around a bunch of rose stems, hug them to my chest.

The thorns bite into my hand and bare arm, I teeter a moment, stop. A thousand nervous bees circle my head.

on the thorns of a dilemma –
all that bites
is not necessarily your enemy

by John Irvine

Auckland, New Zealand

Diana Webb: TURNER'S GOAL

.

A sunken blob of paint marks the centre of the football pitch, almost spot on where Turner created a watercolour of the old churchtower, west-facing on the brow of the hill, beyond trees in full leaf then as now, their varying shades - five black and white cows caught where the goal posts stand today, between here and the new hedge, obscuring the view he brushed in of the river's flow...

drawn
to the chalky curve
a dragonfly

A pair of maintenance lads in green wheel out a new layer from a plastic container; turning the corner, a chemical smell, some kind of weedkiller they say, burning it in.

coated grass blades –
re-ruling them
the wind

by Diana Webb

London, England

first published in Presence 34, Jan. 2008

Jeffrey Winke: THE CANINE DROOLS

.

The black Doberman’s name is Messerschmitt. I had suggested the name Fluffy, but I’m fond of the ironic. The canine drools when it growls. My daughter, who is studying Eastern medicine, says the drooling is due to an abundance of cold wind – at least, that’s what I think she said. I like Messer when he’s on a taut leash and is wearing a choker chain collar to keep him in check. He’s best straining to snap my head off – leash tightening the choke while his black, wet marble eyes bulge in disdain for me.

nuisance call
sound of dead air
after I click off

by Jeffrey Winke

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Lynne Rees: ACROSS THE POND

Thin but Rich

Correspondent: Lynne Rees

We’re a little thin on the ground when it comes to journals dedicated to haiku writing in the UK, but we’re lucky to have Presence, edited by Martin Lucas and published three times a year. It’s down to his insightful, editorial eye that a high standard of writing (haiku, senryu, tanka, linked verse, haibun, essays and reviews) is maintained. The amount of haibun published varies but there are usually between four and six in each issue.

In his most recent editorial (no. 34) Martin has specifically asked for submissions on the theme of ‘Climate Change’ but to avoid work that is politically ineffective and poetically disastrous he suggests that potential contributors write in response to a personal experience of climate change, adopting an oblique rather than a direct polemical approach.

Haibun on this theme should be submitted directly to Martin at: m.lucas27 (at) btinternet (dot) com

Other haibun, for the next and future issues, should be sent to the haibun editor, Fred Schofield, at: fredly24 (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk

The deadline is 31st March 2008.

Presence costs £4.50 ($10) for a single issue; £12 ($25) for three issues.

by Lynne Rees
Juan les Pins, France

Miriam Sagan: MORADA HAIBUN

.

On a spring day in March, we walk to the morada. A low building of now rotting adobe, it was once used by Los Hermenos, the brotherhood of Penitentes. They practiced secret rites, such as self-flagellation and crucifixion, outside of the approval of the Catholic Church.

far-off silver statue
of a horse running –
droppings in this field

We take a path out along the mesa, on Pueblo land, expansive view in all directions. We walk towards Taos Mountain, looking enormous and blue-green in the clear air. Aren’t all mountains sacred? This one still knows it.

my pilgrim’s stick
no affectation –
my bad knee

About half a mile from the morada is a large cross – the first that Georgia O'Keeffe painted in New Mexico. Her painting is “White Cross” but it is now weathered gray. There are offerings of stones and pebbles at the base, left by visitors.

scattered feathers, scat
wild sacrifice at the base
of the swaying cross

I sit down on the foundation and look out over the land.

fence posts, barbed wire
shadow of the cross
bisects Taos Mountain

by Miriam Sagan

Santa Fe, New Mexico