Editorial: The Survival of Haibun Today

One year ago this morning I celebrated the first anniversary of Haibun Today in an editorial review of this blog’s stated mission and publishing record. I do not intend to repeat that performance on this, our second anniversary, but prefer, instead, to address the broader problem of the survival of haibun as a viable literary genre.

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The haibun writer and connoisseur alike may be forgiven the complacent view—one reflective of human nature, perhaps—that the good that is present today will, of its own accord, be here tomorrow. Hasn’t haibun had a place in haiku literature in English for many decades? Aren’t haibun now a fixture in many haiku journals? A literary form, however, may be compared to a garden. Future harvests are not insured by this year’s gathering but only by the care and cultivation of each subsequent season’s plantings.

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Haibun, of course, do date back to the early days of the adaptation of haiku to English. Robert Speiss, long-serving editor of Modern Haiku, published his Five Caribbean Haibun in 1972 and his works are by no means the earliest datable examples. Haibun may fairly be said to gain traction only in the 1990s, however, and to reach some level of sophistication and maturity toward the close of that decade and the beginning of the new millenium in such poets as David Cobb, Michael McClintock, Ken Jones, William Ramsey and others.

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What then is lacking? In the editorial “Haibun Tomorrow? Maybe, Maybe Not” (Haibun Today, March 12, 2008), I opined that little in the way of informed critical study of haibun had been attempted and that even an adequate bibliography, a necessary tool for such investigation, did not exist. A bibliography is offered here at Haibun Today but it must be considered provisional and sketchy in every respect. Further, in my list of haibun’s shortcomings, I added:

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Perhaps most telling and damning is the lack of a comprehensive historical anthology of haibun classics, one that includes both the earliest and latest significant achievements in the form . . . . For young would-be writers of haibun, this deficiency is critical and debilitating, for they face the challenge of learning a difficult art with only contemporary examples and their natural talents to guide them—historical and aesthetic continuity being a chimera.
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My enthusiasm for haibun as written and for haibun as it may yet be written has not wavered. It is this sense of promise, of great things yet to come, that explains the deprivation I feel in the absence of a retrospective collection of the finest haibun. However that may be, and however much I and others may believe that the haibun literature itself justifies such an authoritative and comprehensive anthology, many other tasks—less glamorous perhaps but no less essential to haibun’s survival—require the attention of sympathetic writers and editors.

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The necessary work, broadly speaking, might be classed as critical and archival. Occupations for the critic, and haibun theorists and publicists alike are in short supply, include book reviews, historical and theoretical essays, and in-depth articles on or interviews with accomplished haibun practitioners. So little has and is being done, with respect to such activities, that every modest review or familiar essay must be regarded as a welcome contribution. Archival projects, on the other hand, include not only the compilation of an exhaustive bibliography but also the ultimate rescue, from the oblivion of the rare out-of-print journal or pamphlet, of many early exemplars of haibun as well as occasional essays or commentaries of historical and literary importance.

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This labor is beyond the skill and resources of any one writer or journal but requires the participation of many hands in the haikai community. So, once again, I would like to call upon not only the self-interest of haibun poets in pursuing such goals but would like to appeal to the haikai community, as a whole, to meet what I see as an obligation, that of honoring and supporting a core aspect of its own artistic heritage, the haibun of Bashō and his far descendants.

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by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

Jeffrey Woodward: Woodberry Tavern

wading into thick
cigarette smoke to the beat
of a jukebox
Brubeck and all that
old school jazz

The graying proprietor and his wife, too, were seated, more often than not, with a few aging cronies—familiar enough to extend an unending tab—around one circular table, a friendly lot, and cozying up in pairs for a night of Euchre or Canasta.

High ceilings of pressed, patterned tin and a long mahogany bar with a brass rail footrest from end-to-end, the taupe walls and beveled glass liquor cabinets of another era contrasted favorably with Mr. and Mrs. Woodberry—so much so, that after only a glass or two, one might penetrate that couple’s wrinkled exterior and perceive their hidden youth.
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tequila straight
from the shot glass
with a little lemon
and salt for a chaser
our aqua vitae

One long and narrow room, with an entrance on Water Street and a door at the far back, the latter opening onto a screened wooden porch on stilts and a view of the river some 20 feet below—this is why our little band, barely legal, came to frequent the tavern that summer: to sit and watch the dark currents pass under our perch, there in our high nook and hideaway, to wake to life in that deliciously cool air of last light and to listen, in the silent intervals, to the bankside willows gather the wind.

a dark saying
of Hêrákleitos

is quoted
and thus translated floats
away with the river

the delicate girl
the brunette who wears
a flower in her hair
she is a bit mad perhaps

she looks like Ophelia

another round
of shot glasses stops
at our table
a chorus of mock-protest
from the girls in tight jeans

the Rokeby Venus
passionately praised
for line and color
we speak of Velásquez
as if he were of our crew

and so we drift along
pleasantly enough
no ferryman near

with his forbidding shadow

when we happily ship oars

by Jeffrey Woodward
Detroit, Michigan
first published in The Tanka Prose Anthology (2008)

Jeffrey Woodward: NEBRASKA

a bare tree
and then, again,
the Great Plains

opening before you as if set into place checked and double-checked with a master carpenter’s level so nearly exact as to render literal that old saw about mountain and molehill frost over first light unwinding a never-ending scroll of sky a wind to whittle cloud after cloud away if not the stench of pig trough pig pen another village interrupting the prickly monotony of corn stubble another village with a water tower’s polished introduction and then again corn stubble a patchwork of brown of gray

remembering
its roots in the sky—
a bare tree

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by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Frogpond 31:2, Spring/Summer 2008

Jeffrey Woodward: SOBERANES POINT

the smooth white belly
of a washed-up shark
exposed and torn
the light of this day peels back
and ebbs away with the tide

the very rocks
that shouldered
froth and spray
loom above the water they
and their jagged shadows

ripples everywhere
in the fine sand
repeated ripples
that echo a last
wave’s retreat

on the saw-like
teeth of the shark
on the gaping mouth
without smile or grimace
a little lingering light

going barefoot going ghostly over the sand after the heat of yet another brittle day the dark draws near cool and clinging in one whispered breath the Pacific’s burden of brine is brooding but familiar and on the winding coast road headlights behind us now and then a beach bonfire before that undertow where no one floats a flame tended by anonymous faces smudged anonymous hands erased by that glow and by the occasional dry spittle of sparks

by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

Editorial: HAIBUN TODAY, ONE YEAR LATER

This morning, November 9, marks the first anniversary of Haibun Today. One year in the life of a blog that doubles as a literary journal isn't easily summarized but numbers afford an economy often wanting in the written word.

What precisely has Haibun Today done in the past 365 days? One can begin by noting that this editorial is the 400th posting on this blog, an average greater than one posting daily. The following list details what types of writings Haibun Today has most commonly published and in what quantity:

285 haibun
31 tanka prose
18 book reviews
15 essays
10 interviews

These works of poetry and criticism come from 83 contributors in twelve countries with the USA, Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada leading the way.

Quantity and quality are not equivalent terms but the numbers above do say something pertinent, in my opinion, about the vitality of haibun now and about the role of Haibun Today in this ferment. Haibun’s liveliness and variety are amply demonstrated by the 300 plus poetic works (haibun and tanka prose) published in the past year. This journal’s unique role in the field of haibun is two-fold at least. First, Haibun Today has encouraged and provided a platform for the broadest possible sampling of current haibun styles and of certain variant forms rarely found elsewhere (haibun without haiku, graphic haibun, audio haibun and tanka prose). Second, Haibun Today with 40 plus essays, interviews and book reviews very likely has published more critical commentary on haibun than the remainder of the haikai community in 2008. This last observation, while indicative of Haibun Today’s deep commitment to haibun, is depressing if viewed as symptomatic of the haikai community’s indifference to one critical feature of its own heritage, the haibun genre.

I’ve offered a look at the ledger and a dry accounting of what Haibun Today has accomplished in 365 days. But how does this record balance with the goals of this journal? Two early editorials—“Haibun Today? And Your Point Would Be . . . ?” and “On the Road Alone: Haibun Today, Haibun Tomorrow”—announced our mission and outlined the four goals that were to guide our editorial work:

To create a haibun-specific journal to correct a perceived shortage of venues for serious writers of haibun;

To create, in the absence of any existing forum, a place for critical dialogue about the haibun genre;

To tolerate rival styles and schools of thought in the selection of manuscripts for publication—this, to insure balanced coverage of the haibun scene now;

To overcome the parochialism of haibun writers working in isolation and separated by geographical space.

The successes and shortcomings of Haibun Today will be judged ultimately by the reader. The editor’s view—not without bias—is that Haibun Today has traveled far in a relatively brief span of time but that the landscape before us remains an expanse of unknown breadth and depth. Exploring and mapping this region was and is our chief raison d’etre.

I wish to thank our many readers for their continuing curiosity and our contributors for entrusting their poetic work to a journal whose aims, at times, must seem quixotic. Onward, then, to year two!

by Jeffrey Woodward
Detroit, Michigan

Jeffrey Woodward: DEAD LETTER OFFICE

Although you may count me among that number who are inclined to say, I would prefer not to, midway in my journey I do not find myself disoriented in a forest but here, in the Dead Letter Office, where the Fates, busily foreshortening somebody’s thread, have secured a position for me.

I often hear those white-robed and pale sisters over my shoulder, softly humming the Te Deum while employed at their spinning. Good Greek girls, they, too, are converted.

Meanwhile, my position is secure, for the sorting of this mail will not end. I almost said my purgatorial business but, in this trade, there is no cleansing. Instead, letter after letter with a bad or illegible address, with an intended recipient long departed – judgments for debts overdue, offerings of condolence, confessions of love: the destiny of every petition, no answer.

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by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Quartet (Teneriffe, Qld.: Post Pressed, 2008)

Editorial: TANKA PROSE AND HAIBUN TODAY

Attentive readers of Haibun Today, noting recent references to tanka prose, may well ask, “What is tanka prose? Does it differ from haibun?” The short answer is relatively simple. Tanka prose is the marriage of prose and tanka. This distinguishes our subject from haibun, the marriage of prose and haiku.

Isn’t that a rather superficial distinction that serves only to multiply categories arbitrarily? Both combine prose with verse. Why not simply call both haibun?

Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova (1295 M.E.) employs such poetic forms as the canzone and sonnet in its prose commentary. One model for Dante’s Italian achievement was that of the Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius (524 M.E.), a meditative Latin prose tract that is illustrated by various classical meters like the elegiac couplet or the Catullan hendecasyllable. Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (1230 M.E.) is only one of many Old Norse-Icelandic sagas that join alliterative meters, such as drôttkvætt, to prose narrative. While these compositions all wed prose to differing verse forms, I doubt that the average reader of Haibun Today would seriously advance such famous works of world literature as examples of haibun.

The anonymous Tales of Ise compiles many discrete prose episodes, each accompanied by one or more tanka, while Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary is a travelogue in diary form with many tanka. Both of these works date from the 10th century in Japan. Such writings qualify as early masterpieces of tanka prose. But if Tales of Ise incorporates tanka while haibun incorporates haiku—tanka and haiku being closely related Japanese verse forms—again, someone will ask, why not simply name both haibun?

First, Matsuo Bashō is the earliest poet to place haiku in a prose composition, thereby inventing haibun. Bashō lived in the 17th century—seven centuries after the masterpieces of tanka prose that we mention above and many centuries after the various European prose and verse works that we cite. For the poets who wrote Tales of Ise and Tosa Diary, the terms haiku and haibun quite simply did not exist.

Second, if we compare prose writings that include many tanka as against prose writings that include other types of verse, we discover that the presence of a specific verse form is not without influence on its immediate prose environment. Compare Bashō’s Knapsack Notebook to Dante’s La Vita Nuova. Bashō’s haiku and Dante’s canzoni will not sanction similar prose styles. Now compare the prose in Knapsack Notebook to that of the Diary of Izumi Shikibu (circa 1003 M.E.); the contrast in gender and social milieu answers for some of the difference between these two poets, yes, but the nearly 150 tanka in the court lady’s diary suffuse the whole with a very elegant, urbane and intelligent lyricism that lies quite outside of the rusticity and self-denial, whether real or feigned, of Bashō’s haikai.

Why is Haibun Today then engaged in publishing and otherwise promoting the genre of tanka prose? What right does tanka prose have to a place in a journal that is devoted to haibun?

I started publishing tanka prose in Haibun Today in late 2007. I’d recently published an essay on the subject in Modern English Tanka and had been writing tanka prose myself for some months prior. I began a private correspondence with a handful of other poets who shared my interest and we worked quietly together. No journal regularly published tanka prose at that time, so Haibun Today established itself as “tanka prose central”—by default. Since then, and partly as a result of the same small group of poets directing their submissions to other venues, Modern English Tanka, Contemporary Haibun Online, Lynx and Atlas Poetica now also publish tanka prose regularly.

The curious reader may well inquire, “Does tanka prose offer something haibun cannot? And, for that matter, does tanka prose promise something that tanka alone does not?”

For reasons not entirely clear to me, tanka more easily adhere to other tanka than one haiku to another; tanka more readily join together in sequences or sets than do haiku. Compare the classical norms for tanka and haiku—31 and 17 syllables respectively—and one sees that a tanka is roughly double the length of haiku. Tanka is at once more expansive and more lyrical. This is not to say that one form is superior necessarily but to recognize that tanka and haiku have differing properties.

Modern haibun in which numerous haiku occur uninterrupted by prose are quite rare. Even examples where two or three haiku follow in succession are infrequent. Jim Norton offered a haibun with haiku sequence entitled “Sandscript” in Pilgrim Foxes (2001). Ken Jones did something similar in “Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made Of” in The Parsley Bed (2006). Ruth Franke, as translated from the German by David Cobb, recently wrote the same in “Summit Ice.” Even in the classical haibun of Matsuo Bashō, haiku in sequence are found only in Kashima Journal and Sarashina Journal. The reader will often sense in these works that the haiku are fused together by an act of the poet’s will, that the haibun on close examination demonstrates the poet’s ingenuity and constitutes a tour de force.

What of tanka prose then? Because tanka do combine readily, because tanka are more expansive (and dramatically more so in sequence), the prose component can better sustain an elevated or poetic diction in response to the verse’s call. This kind of heightened prose must be very abbreviated in haibun, for the bare haiku will not support such tension for long. So this is one quality that tanka prose offers that haibun cannot.

Because tanka do join together so successfully, in the classical and medieval periods, the Japanese court established the series of 100 tanka as a kind of standard and one that poets often achieved alone or in collaboration. Modern tanka sequences of commensurable length are not unheard of. Since this is so, what can prose – or, more pointedly, tanka prose—offer that tanka alone cannot? One striking property of tanka prose is the counterpoint of the two modes, verse and prose. Another noteworthy property is the qualitative difference in the transition from prose to tanka (or vice versa) as against the transition from tanka to tanka within a tanka set.

Since tanka prose straddles two literary disciplines, that of haibun and tanka, does it lay a special claim upon the allegiance of both haibuneers and tanka poets?

I believe it does. Specifically, writers of haibun can learn a great deal by reading tanka prose and comparing its best examples to the best haibun. The number and placement of tanka in relation to the prose is critical in the composition of tanka prose, a matter that forces itself upon the practitioner rather early on. Haibun, I am sorry to say, is far too often written by communal habit to the proven formula of one brief paragraph, one haiku, fini. Because this is so, haibuneers rarely examine the possibilities of varying the placement or number of the haiku.

But what claim does tanka prose have upon the practicing tanka poet? I’ve mentioned already what it offers, from the standpoint of form, that tanka alone does not. It broadens the formal possibilities of the tanka genre, in brief. Beyond that opportunity, however, tanka prose promises to reclaim tanka’s venerable past, for tanka came to maturity with its prose accompaniment, whether in the form of a memoir or a romance, a poem-tale or a military chronicle.

And what of haibun then? If tanka prose is all that I say, what will become of haibun? Haibun and tanka prose share a common identity as Japanese hybrids that wed prose and verse. Their respective preferences for haiku and tanka lend not only the relevant verse’s name to the hybrid form but some quality or spirit of that verse as well. I once spoke of haibun as “terra incognita—vast and only marginally explored.” I might apply the same description to tanka prose. Both forms are relatively new in English practice—less than 50 years old! Each form has strengths; each has limitations. I’m confident that both will be here for a rather long stay, indeed.

by Jeffrey Woodward
Detroit, Michigan

Review of Stanley Pelter's INSIDEOUTSIDE

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insideoutside by Stanley Pelter. George Mann Publications: Winchester, Hampshire, England, 2008. ISBN 9780955241574. Perfect Bound, 6 x 9 inches, 128 pp., £8 UK.
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Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
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insideoutside – third of a planned six volume series of haibun by the British writer Stanley Pelter – confirms his often stated predilection for writing that tests the boundaries of the genre and extends the many varied experiments of past imperfect (2004) and & Y Not? (2006), his two earlier collections. The author generously collects and presents in alphabetical order nearly 70 haibun – everything from haibun that blend free verse, instead of prose, with haiku to texts where a graphic element assumes a place beside prose and verse as an integral unit of composition. There are even haibun written for recitation, whether for solo or group performance.

Because the narrow compass of a review will not allow full discussion of Pelter’s numerous innovations, selected examples will have to suffice to represent the variety of his work.

In “Thunderguy – Isle of Arran,” the prose half of the normative haibun equation (prose plus verse) is supplanted by free verse passages that alternate with the haiku:

..............................a moon
..............................even in shadow
..............................her wet eyes

Grey and more
Drizzle
Clouds drift, pull lower over Meall Biorach
Fall into heather at Doire Fhionn Lochan

..............................some deep
..............................others near the surface
..............................so many pitfalls

Town clothes, town shoes, town socks
Drag of heavy waves
As sea-served crags fix
And trees in Coirein Lochain diffract
Drizzle and more

..............................wet rocks
..............................they reflect
..............................his going (116)

What is interesting and deserving of comment is that the free-verse sections at the left margin, if read aloud, do not depart radically from the marked rhythms that prose in poetic haibun often adopts.

Pelter’s earlier books introduced the graphic component as a third element, along with prose and verse, of haibun composition. His exploration along this line is perhaps more extensive than elsewhere and includes texts accompanied by very simple (almost primitive) pen and ink sketches, texts presented in comic strip format, texts where a proliferation of type fonts and point sizes underscores meaning and texts where the haibun is handwritten, an act that points to authorial presence and immediacy. One remarkable series of three haibun, “ceci n’est pas une haibune?” (21-24), serves to illustrate Pelter’s program well – the ironic title being a doffing of the hat (a bowler no doubt) to René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist whose simple painting of a pipe bore the inscription, “ceci n’est pas une pipe, i.e., “this is not a pipe.” The first haibun in this series juxtaposes free verse with what looks like a simple linocut of a guillemot in flight. The second offers a relatively standard model of contemporary haibun – haiku, prose and haiku, in this instance – but the adjacent page presents the original text now revised and reconfigured, now part of a black-and-white illustration, now with the text itself presented alternately in handwritten and cut-out letters. The third member of this series advances one further step, dividing the page into two columns, a handwritten haibun text to the left, a collage of what appears to be an old-style IBM digital punch-card with an ink drawing to the right.

Another technique Pelter favors, as in “from bialystok song is to,” is to frame a text with its sound values foremost – the haibun designed for recitation:

from bialystok to from bialystok to from bialystok to this railway track to that railway track to that to that to that to that from this from this to that to here from there to back to front to YES to there to there from here from here from there from there from where to where … (29)

Work of this nature echoes earlier avant-guarde assays in sound poetry such as Tristan Tzara’s “L'amiral Cherche Une Maison à Louer” (1916) or Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate” (1921).

Similar effect is achieved in the title haibun where the concatenation of phrases repeated with slight variation appeals to the reader first on the aural level, its lyric tone being rather bittersweet and elegiac as the following excerpt will show:

so i will wait for U in the garden ~ sit in the garden that has just been watered ~ waiting for a buttercup to close ~ a buttercup on the grass that waits to be cut ~ the grass just watered … in the enclosed garden ~ i sit here for U ~ alone with sounds scents of breeze ~ wait for U to come ~ enclosed by greens ~ the enclosed garden just watered … i go inside to outside ~ wait for U in the garden just watered … i say ‘yes’ ~ i say ‘yes’ to inside ~ i say ‘yes’ to outside ~ so i will wait for U in the garden ~ sit in the garden that has just been watered. (42)

insideoutside, an attractive trade paperback with a glossy full-color collage cover, is available directly from the author for the price of shipping and handling while copies last. Interested parties may inquire of the author at 5 School Lane, Claypole, Newark NG23 5BQ or via e-mail: spelter23 (at) aol (dot) com.

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reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Lynx, June 2008

Review of Janice M. Bostok's STEPPING STONES

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stepping stones by Janice M. Bostok. Post Pressed: Teneriffe, Qld., Australia, 2007. ISBN: 978-1921214-07-3. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 54 pp., $15 Aus.
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Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
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This newest book by Janice M. Bostok, widely-known Australian haijin, marries prose and verse into a moving memoir of her life as the young mother of an autistic son. stepping stones, then, is not a collection of individual haibun as much as it is an episodic summary of two lives with the chief events now related in a factual confessional prose style, now in contemporary free-verse, now in a brief haibun with or without accompanying haiku.

Bostok deftly sketches her son’s early problems with spatial orientation in the following way:

When we were out walking and he was in the pusher he would cringe back from bushes which hung over fences onto the footpath …. The shrub would be quite a distance away from him.
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This spatial problem became more pronounced after he walked. He also crouched down to go through doorways or ducked to one side. Often when he ran he ran into things or put out his arms as he moved, in the manner of the blind …. Even after he learnt to walk proficiently he would drop down to his hands and knees and crawl through doorways. (22)

The expository detail which serves to establish both background and atmosphere in the narrative of Tony, the poet’s son, is sometimes finely nuanced, sometimes raw and searing:

Travelling with a rigidly autistic child in the car is always a difficult experience at the best of times. Not liking his routine to be interrupted, he would often lie down and go stiff, refusing unequivocally to enter the vehicle. Other times I might get him into his car seat and before I could drive off he would begin to scream until he became so distressed that he would vomit. If he was sick before I actually left the property I could abort the trip and stay home. Many times I simply had to turn the car around a few kilometers down the road ….

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Sometimes we made it all the way to town but that would often be a short-lived victory. For arriving in town was merely the beginning. If I drove in the one direction around the shopping block he was happy. If I made a u-turn he would scream …. We always had to appear to be traveling in a circular pattern. (42-43)

With the rich context of the prose for support, Bostok’s haiku and tanka resonate deeply:

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pregnant again …
the fluttering of moths
against the window

foetus kicks
the sky to the east
brilliant (7)

from a stringy gum –
its leaves showing white
in the rising westerly wind –
a crow suddenly hops
onto the slanting roof (34)
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The expressive haikai passages in the prose – many acceptable as stand alone haibun, with or without attendant haiku – employ many of the techniques that Western haiku also avails itself of: absence of punctuation, quiet understatement and parsimonious phrasing:

another address to locate in an unfamiliar city i can now find my way to the Autistic Centre but accommodation has been offered in an unused nursing home …. at night the kitchen is bleak with windows which look out to a block retaining wall holding a cut-away bank in the hillside most of the nursing home is closed off from use by the fire doors half-way down the long hallway Tony and i the only occupants feeling enclosed i walk towards the glass doors and the main entrance beyond as i walk a ghostly figure in a long night gown approaches from the opposite direction for a moment i feel the panic then i realize as i stand in front of the wide glass doors that my reflection is looking anxiously back at me (36)

stepping stones is not free of stylistic flaws nor perfect in its overall construction but deficiencies in form here find compensation in the courage and honesty wherewith Bostok addresses a deeply personal and difficult subject, her manner rising at times to the acute elegiac tone of

i look at my son a rosebud that didn’t unfurl plucked too soon perhaps a bud which cannot blossom …. (52)

This book, in the end, may be less aesthetic manifesto than a document of the frailty of the human condition and its redemption by love. I commend it to the reader as such, with the fine one-line haiku which serves as its sub-title:
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sun on the stepping stone the distance deceiving

reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Lynx, June 2008

Jeffrey Woodward: PEACE AND PLENTY

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the weathered slats
of a privacy fence,
front and back

The old neighborhood is still what it was, more or less, when I left it: parallel rows of wooden homes, lots apportioned with a view to equality, house after house raised uniformly upon one plain but serviceable plan.

This is where, with Hitler put to rest, our boys that would be coming home were housed—they, and their young families—and peace began.

Despite the cosmetic touch-up of new sod and siding or the cheery face-lift of a faux brick-front, the old neighborhood is still what it was—notwithstanding Korea or Vietnam.
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by Jeffrey Woodward
Detroit, Michigan
first published in Quartet (Teneriffe, Qld.: Post Pressed, 2008)

Review of New BHS HAIBUN ANTHOLOGY

Dover Beach and My Back Yard: BHS Haibun Anthology 2007. Selection and Commentaries by Colin Blundell and Graham High. BHS Bookshop at www.britishhaikusociety.org. ISBN: 978-1-906333-00-3. Perfect Bound, 5 ½” x 7”, 72 pp., £7 UK, $10 US.

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Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward

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Released early in this calendar year, the British Haiku Society’s biennial haibun anthology showcases 25 haibun by 15 contributors. Each haibun is accompanied by a commentary that the editors penned jointly, a shift in emphasis from the last BHS collection, edited by David Cobb and Ken Jones, wherein the editors offered their independent and often conflicting views.

A wide variety in style, subject and tone is achieved in Dover Beach and My Back Yard and the level of writing is consistently high. Choosing good compositions to comment upon is relatively easy for the reviewer, a circumstance which promises fair compensation to the curious reader.

Charles Hansmann, who has established a distinctive voice in contemporary haibun, offers the very atmospheric and brooding, “At Sea,” in which his skillful and precise description is demonstrated at its best:

Every morning there’s a clatter of clam shells on the deck and gulls swooping down to their breakfast. They’re defiant, but wary, and when we step out they spread their skank wings and flap like stiff laundry to the sky. (12)

With “Church Going,” Bamboo Shoot offers pointed observations that are enlivened by his crisply paced prose:

My road took me through the small village of Damerham, where a large CHURCH FLOWER FESTIVAL notice was fixed to a tall hedge. Larkin-like, certainly no church connoisseur, I stopped; and passing through the thick, ochre-lichened walls into a sweet-smelling almost cuttable cold, it came again – the elusive sense of being elsewhere. (18)

A “sweet-smelling almost cuttable cold” mixes the olfactory and tangible in a terse and wholly convincing fashion. It is the sharp detail of such sensory perceptions that supports Bamboo Shoot’s frequent parenthetical but telling asides: “Larkin-like, certainly no church connoisseur….” This poet owns an uncanny ability to objectify his own “sense of being elsewhere” in his observations of his immediate environment and of his fellow occupants:

…two elderly ladies – strangely still wearing woolen cardigans and tweed skirts – hardly seemed there at all in any material sense …. Their whispers seemed to live out their own brief lives – hanging in the air, crisp as winter breath, before dying away to vanish into the stonework. (18)

“Dover Beach and My Back Yard,” the haibun that lends its title to this anthology, comes by way of Ray Rasmussen of Alberta. This composition is immediately appealing in its economy of means: simple comparison and contrast. The poet’s daughter does the gardening while the poet rocks “back and forth in the newly hung hammock”; a copy of Arnold’s “Dover Beach” lies open while the daily news, with its war reportage, “is cast aside.” Rasmussen meditates upon the loss of faith that was the theme of Arnold’s poem but even before his explicit rejection of that, the very unity of the domestic backyard scene – kittens playing, a dog gnawing a bone, nuthatches nesting – foreshadows the poet’s simultaneous acceptance of hard realities and his determination to enjoy life as is: “... Matthew, family and garden must suffice for now (30).”

Doris Heitmeyer, in “Sound of Jackhammers,” compares the building façade under repair in New York City to the same tenement “due for an overhaul when I moved in 50 years ago (52).” The sight evokes vivid recollections of her youth as a single girl in the city with the frequent counterpoint of the scene now: her old tenement “boarded up,” “street kids lounging under the scaffold” – or her hesitant, feeble and aging steps counter to the “little hip hop dance” of the kids on the street. A closing haiku affords a strong summary of past and present:

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The pigeon flies a straw
to its niche in the scaffolding
– sound of jackhammers. (53)

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The commentaries of editors Colin Blundell and Graham High are generally practical, informative and revealing. Time after time, they pick out the weak spot in a given composition or provide an accurate appreciation of the understated strengths of a particular haibun. These commentaries are not without hazard, however, as in the following remarks that were inspired by Hansmann’s “At Sea”:

The presiding view that haibun prose should be unobtrusive and exhibit subtlety and lightness of touch is difficult to balance against the desire to write prose that is striking, memorable and original. (13)

The above assertion that a “presiding view” exists would seem to be an invention of the editors or, perhaps, a phenomenon observed in their immediate milieu. It is not a claim that I have seen advanced commonly on that side or on this side of the water. Editors, however, should be granted some poetic license in promulgating their own literary opinions, so the damage here is not great.

Elsewhere, however, a similar uncritical attitude on the part of the editors leads to some embarrassment as in the following notations on Doris Heitmeyer’s “Luna Moth”:

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Without consulting a World Encyclopaedia of Moths, the only thing we know about a Luna moth from the haibun itself is that it is big and ‘cool luminous green’ in colour and, very mysteriously, ‘like an ordinary sphinx’…. The haibun is worthy of inclusion in the anthology if only for the strangely haunting image of a moth being ‘like an ordinary sphinx…’ (which presumably makes it extraordinary)…. (43)

One can only wish that Blundell and High had consulted that encyclopaedia, a small effort that would have solved the “strangely haunting image” and great mystery of “an ordinary sphinx.” For Heitmeyer’s sphinx is a rather ordinary and common moth after all.

No book is free of error, however, and on the positive side, Blundell and High raise the bar for future BHS anthologies in selecting very strong work and providing incisive and helpful critical reaction overall. Beyond the few haibun commented upon here, Dover Beach and My Back Yard includes excellent works by many well-known practitioners of haibun such as David Cobb, Jim Kacian, Jane Whittle, Ken Jones, Jeffrey Harpeng and Lynne Rees. The book itself is a handsome and portable perfect bound volume, one that I readily recommend.

reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Lynx, June 2008

Review of Jeffrey Harpeng's QUARTER PAST SOMETIME

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Quarter Past Sometime by Jeffrey Harpeng. Post Pressed: Teneriffe, Qld., Australia, 2007. ISBN: 9-78192121-4172. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 36 pp., $15 Aus.
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Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
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New Zealander Jeffrey Harpeng, now resident in Australia, writes haibun in a rich voice akin to the rhythms of much modernist verse, say, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos or Basil Bunting’s Briggflats. The example of Bunting is most apropros because Harpeng’s haibun are not only replete with historical and cultural allusions a la Pound but also, like the Northumbrian Bunting, remain stubbornly loyal to their immediate locale, to regional history and to local speech-patterns and place-names, whether the chosen setting is a lush green headland on volcanic Banks Peninsula in New Zealand’s South Island or a desolate backcountry cemetery in an Australia brittle with drought.

On the low stone wall above the beach, there are a couple of rusty cauldrons once used for rendering whale blubber. They gather leaves, gather wind-drift, gather trash. My imagination rivets great copper handles to them, and a hotplate of magma rises to brew Turkish coffee. I spice it with cardamom and sweeten it with a sugar-bag of sugar, enough coffee, enough sugar to string out the minor gods of place, to stew all time in a sweet brown cloud. Let that be drunk and the ensuing dream be a clear blue sky and us walking, a child here and another there. How they run ahead.
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The harbour is a caldera twelve million years old. An occasional tremor ripples the landscape. Seasons have poured into the harbour and receded like the tide. In a high altitude photo of Banks Peninsula, Akaroa appears little more than a lichen tracery on a crumpled map. (27)

So he writes in “Akaroa – Remote Viewing,” with the fine descriptive detail that is characteristic of his observation of landscape and his cognizance of that same land’s history.

In a prelude to “Australia Day 2007,” Harpeng begins, “Sitting on the back porch, looking south, a thousand miles and more of drought in that direction and to my right twice that much and more (31).” Deprivation and death are the main themes in this work wherein the drought-stricken terrain itself becomes an invasive force. Farther along, the poet introduces us to his deaf brother in a cemetery scene:

I am with my brother and mother. A man in a Hawaiian shirt asks directions. He seems to be subtitling himself, making shy sign language below his chest as he talks to us. We don’t know the suburb of the dead he is looking for. The base blue of his shirt is fathoms darker than the sky.
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‘Do you know him?’ My mother signs to my brother and dubs her own soundtrack.
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"No,” my brother says.

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among the sleeping
so many
in unkempt beds

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The man in the Hawaiian shirt is already a whole congregation away. (32)

The elegiac note is sounded and deepens as this haibun now progresses to Harpeng’s grief over his mother’s mortality:

Before the road winds up the Marburg Ranges, there’s a straight past the place selling potted roses.
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‘Over there,’ (three houses at the foot of a hill) mum says, ‘is where the lady lived who made my wedding bouquet. That year was dry, florists had no flowers, but on the day a flower from here and a flower from there on our wedding date…’
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The countryside is once again brittle.

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drought
so much
forgotten (33)

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One of the most endearing qualities of this book is found in the unguarded but unsentimental tenderness that the poet reserves for members of his family. We meet his brother, again, in “Kaikoura”:

At the sea’s edge, I estimate compass setting, point out from the rocks, push-mower roll one hand out from my heart toward tomorrow. In the grammatic space inhabited by my brother, I make him a thumb-winged plane, palm down, further and further out there. In reply he zig-zags a tutorial pointer across a map in the air. A map on which I see him already gone, barely arrived. Six years since last we met.

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We cross the broken scripted rocks: geological glyphs smoothed and pooled by the tide. Surf-washed, wave-worn inlets are littoral character traits in the script. I wave for his attention. He responds, shrugging eyebrows and shoulders. I scoop bucket-fulls of air to my chest, sample it at my lips, then splay fingers from my lips with gastronomic gusto, and a Latin pout. My brother’s head and eyebrows rise, drop to a nod’s fading echo. (24)

Quarter Past Sometime collects thirteen haibun and two variations on the sonnet. another form that the poet shows an affinity for. Haibun by the baker’s dozen may strike the reader as a slender offering but Harpeng’s works are often longer than what one commonly reads in haikai journals. They also employ a complex association of images and very rich diction, circumstances which add to the gravity or density of the individual titles. If I were drawing up a list of the ten most interesting haikai books of the last year, Quarter Past Sometime would rate highly, and is therefore recommended to the reader.

reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Lynx, June 2008

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

Jeffrey Woodward: TIME WITH THE HERON

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The angler will do well to put his fly-rod aside for a time and forget the alluring ritual of the to-and-fro rhythm of a cast, to sit on a shaded bank beneath an inviting willow, to watch the water slur over a sandy shallow or ruffle on a rift in the rock.

Time will allow one to study the blue heron not far from the willow’s shadow, to learn the skill that is his by concentrated patience and poise. The heron stalks his prey upon stilts and parallel to the bank ― stepping lightly now, pausing here, pausing there ― with a lazy deliberation given only to one for whom time has no meaning. Even the heron’s cautious movements muddy the water. Even he, for a time, adopts the stillness of a statue.

Time will allow one to repeat the exotically poetic names of the hand tied flies ― Blue Quill, Royal Coachman, Pale Evening Dun, Muddler Minnow, Yellow Sally, Gray Hackle ― until the syllables become a meaningless babble, having only their own inherent musical properties, like the voice of the water before the first man came.

Time will allow the angler, also, to fix his eyes upon the bewildering maze of light everywhere at play with the water or to gaze, without ease of penetration, at the muddy trail a heron makes.

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when the water clears,
the mind, also, of
a great blue heron

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by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Contemporary Haibun Online, V3, N2, June 2007

Jeffrey Woodward: EVENING IN THE PLAZA

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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

by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in bottle rockets 18, Feb. 2008

BRUCE ROSS ON HAIBUN

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interview with Jeffrey Woodward
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Bruce Ross, a past president of the Haiku Society of America, edited Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku (1993) and Journey to the Interior, American Versions of Haibun (1998). He is the author of the popular manual How to Haiku, A Writer's Guide to Haiku and Related Forms (2001) and has published four collections of original haiku: thousands of wet stones (1988), among floating duckweed (1994), Silence: Collected Haiku (1997) and summer drizzles: haiku and haibun (2005).

JW: Most writers of haibun come to the discipline from other creative writing backgrounds – free verse, short story, what have you. You are well-known for your haiku, of course, but did you practice other literary forms before adopting the way of haiku and haibun?

BR: My father, born on Cape Breton Island, recited Longfellow and other poets to me and gave me anthologies of world poetry and a volume of Whitman when I was in public school. Later in this period I spontaneously wrote nature lyrics. Usually I carried one or another volume of poetry with me, also. I was attracted to the Romantic poets and later the Beats and the poetry they were reading and writing, including haiku. Paul Reps’s poetry with drawing and the writings of Hakuin made strong early impressions. In high school I was placed in a college-level creative writing course where I submitted what I now understand as a haiga. I was criticized for including a drawing with my poem. More or less I have been writing poetry and drawing consistently from that early period.

JW: Tell me, if you will, what first led to your interest and involvement in haibun. And, on that score, do you recall your first effort in the genre and the circumstances surrounding the writing of it?

BR: I knew of haibun during my college years from Earl Miner’s Japanese Poetic Diaries but was attracted to the spirit of the form through travel fiction and films in that vein. My first published haibun (and perhaps my first serious attempt at haibun) was “Aglow,” published in Modern Haiku in 1994. I vaguely remember desiring to place haiku in a prose narrative to best describe the heightened experience I had had.

JW: Do you find certain settings or a specific time of day conducive to your writing of haibun? If you have a standard working method, might you be so kind as to share it with our readers?

BR: Not really. Again, I am especially attracted to travel, and many of my haibun result from such activity. I normally collect my haiku in journals. In certain circumstances I know my haiku will be part of a haibun. In fact I often earmark certain haiku as potential haibun and include notes and drawings composed during or soon after the given experience. I do find myself more and more over the last years forcing myself to sit down and compose the proposed haibun.

JW: What, in your view, is the ideal relation of prose to verse in haibun – closely or distantly related? Do you conceive of these two modes of composition as equal partners or do you view either mode, prose or verse, as more crucial to haibun’s success?

BR: It depends on the given haibun. There is no hard and fast rule. Haibun have different moods and the kind of aesthetic linking of prose and poetry is dependant on that mood, what I call “flow of sensibility.” Aside from that “flow” I value “privileging the link,” the subtlety of the link, in haibun. So the value of haibun for me is “flow of sensibility” and “privileging the link.” This would preclude one or the other from being more important, though from haibun to haibun one often takes precedence.

JW: Because mastery of this genre requires of a writer the skill to compose accomplished prose and verse, haibun raises the bar considerably for would-be practitioners. Many excellent haiku poets do not write acceptable prose and many excellent prose writers have little ability in the writing of haiku. Your practical experience over many years as an educator, editor and writer of haiku and haibun places you in a unique position to offer practical advice to the young writer who wishes to adopt the medium. How can the novice acquire proficiency in both modes and what is the most direct route, in your opinion, to learning how to delicately balance prose and verse?

BR: Read the best haiku and haibun, including the Japanese masters, would be first. Cultivate your sensibility would be next. Look to experiencing/writing haiku epiphanies and haibun narratives of epiphanies. Why not aim high! My How to Haiku might also help.

JW: Your book, Journey to the Interior (1998), remains to this day the most readily available anthology in the genre. That is a testimony to your editorial abilities, certainly, and yet so much has happened in haibun in the past ten years. One might almost say: everything has happened…. Were you to edit today a second and updated anthology, how do you imagine such a compilation might differ in form and emphasis from Journey?

BR: Probably I’d include more selections from fewer, but outstanding practitioners of the form.

JW: Haibun is an international phenomenon, though reportedly rarely, if ever, practiced in its native land. Do you have an insight into what has led to the form’s proliferation in so many languages and varied cultural settings? And can you fix upon a specific time or event that may have triggered its rapid growth outside of Japan?

BR: I think that there are few examples in world literature to link prose and poetry as haibun does. The example of Basho’s Journey to the Interior was an available classic of world literature. For many writers prose feeling and poetry feeling is an enticing combination. John Ashbery published the volume Haibun in 1990. Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels appeared in 1965. So an impulse from the Beats and later more avant-garde poetry had flirted with the form. In the early 2000’s I led an online haibun workshop and double kukai for the World Haiku Club. There were entries from around the world, including Japan. More than that, I’d attribute the increasing global interest in haibun to the internet and the incrementally increasing attraction, good or bad, to wordsmithing.

JW: The spread of haibun across the globe has also proven how elastic the genre is. In your essay, “Narratives of the Heart” (The World Haiku Review, 2002), you cited various examples of form that the genre has assumed, from diary to fiction, and you remarked, “Haibun is now obviously an open form.” Beyond our general recognition that haibun usually weds prose and verse, are there some minimum guidelines or parameters, in your view, that demarcate haibun from other literary genres?

BR: At this point I haven’t thought beyond “flow of sensibility” and “privileging the link.” As a product of Japanese literature and, specifically, congealing in forms around haikai style, I think what goes for haiku sensibility, goes for haibun sensibility. On the highest rung, this entails a narrative of an epiphany. There is really no easy graft of other writing genres onto true (whatever that means) haibun. At least, this is the way I see it now.

JW: In How to Haiku (2002), you observed that “a short paragraph followed by one haiku is in fact the most common form of haibun written in English.” This can be readily verified by a cursory reading of the online and print journals that publish haibun in any given quarter. The one paragraph, one haiku format may be the closest thing we have to a consensual model for writing in the genre. This abbreviated form, too, is most welcome by haiku editors who often have to deal with severe space restrictions in their journals. Should we be concerned, perhaps, that “a short paragraph followed by one haiku” might eventually become enshrined as the normative model with the result that other more expansive forms are gradually suppressed?

BR: Never be concerned, it’s not healthy. But, editorial necessities aside, it would be unfortunate that the magnificent examples of Japanese prose diaries, like Basho’s Journey to the Interior, would not be available as legitimate literarily valid modes of proceeding to contemporary voices.

JW: Again, in How to Haiku, you wrote, “A haibun is a prose narrative that is autobiographical – that is, in haibun you are telling a story about something you did or saw.” I understand that in a how-to manual directed toward the novice, simplification has some heuristic value. Is it your view that haibun must be strictly autobiographical? Or do you admit alternative approaches, such as the expository or fictional prose account?

BR: We have both expository and fictional prose haibun in Japanese literature. It already exists. But in Japan the genre we would call haibun is classified as separate genre, such as “diary of the road.” Soseki provides the affect of haibun in fiction. As with haiku, though, I prefer, for haibun, the autobiographical experiential mode.

JW: In your introduction to Journey to the Interior, you offered the following definition: “…haibun is a narrative of an epiphany. Haiku, on the other hand, offers us an epiphany, a revelation.” While I understand that you are speaking of the best the genre might offer, “revelation” is a heady term and rare enough in our daily lives to lend to your formulation the character of hyperbole. Do you still conceive of haibun in these terms or has your view altered?

BR: My view has not altered. That is, my “sensibility” has not altered. It is a matter of perspective, really. I have studied, practiced, and taught internal energy states for many years. I still do. Degustabus non disputandum est (There is no disputing taste). A Zen saying: Before I studied enlightenment trees are trees and rivers are rivers. While studying enlightenment trees are no longer trees and rivers are no longer rivers. After achieving enlightenment trees are trees and rivers are rivers. It is a matter of perspective really. What matters about haiku and haibun is the insight of whatever valance you choose concerning our natures and the world’s nature. Art, poetry, human love, etc. can provide these experiences, to borrow from poor Shakespeare. Despite the postmodern processing of our lives, these connections are still available to us.

JW: One curse of being an influential anthologist and educator is that you must find yourself confronted often with impositions like this interview where questions focus on every subject but your own personal writing. You were a writer before you accepted the other titles, however, and so perhaps I will not be amiss in asking you some specifics about your own writing. In your collection, summer drizzles… (2005), your haibun “Winter Desert” holds a particular interest for me. I know the landscape that you describe therein well and I’m particularly impressed by the understated means that you employ to convey how that terrain gradually overpowers and possesses the person passing through. You speak there of one’s consciousness being absorbed and of the winter rain driving you deeper into your own person. Would you share with our readers the events that inspired this haibun, the story beneath the story as it were?

BR: No impositions. And no titles. I have a Taoist or is it Quaker disinclination for them. Glad you liked “Winter Desert.” My wife and I were visiting that part of Arizona around Tucson. We wanted to see Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and had to pass through the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation to do so. The haibun’s “flow of sensibility” is the resulting consciousness/connection to the landscape and its inhabitants. The haiku links are based on that consciousness/connection. Otherwise, the haibun speaks for itself.

JW: Another noteworthy and powerful haibun in summer drizzles… is “Gone in Sleep.” What I found of immediate interest, when I first read this piece a year or so ago, is the marked juxtaposition in the prose between the breezy travelogue-like opening sentences about modern Chicago and the intimate and warmer tone adopted in the concluding sentences about the beggar. The haibun will lend itself to various interpretations and I wouldn’t ask you to offer your own. I would be interested, however, in hearing you speak of how much of this material is strictly factual and where, if at all, you have claimed poetic license in order to arrive at a more satisfactory literary result.

BR: Like most, if not all of my writing, this haibun is experiential. Those “as ifs” were the affective result of my encounter with the beggar. Despite my reaction (or lack of action) I’m hoping some issue of compassion resonates here.

JW: I want to ask one final question, but let me, first, thank you for your patience and generosity in participating in this interview. Our readers will certainly be interested to know about your current or future publication plans. Do you have any new haiku or haibun books in progress? Or any planned anthologies or other work in the haikai field?

BR: You’re welcome and thank you for approaching me with this interview. Well, I have a planned volume of my haiku, possibly including haibun, haiga, and collaborative renku, for fall 2008. Also for fall 2008 Venturing upon Dizzy Heights: Lectures and Essays in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts, which includes previously published articles on haiku, haibun, and tanka. Perhaps of additional interest is the lecture on the Japanese influence upon Van Gogh’s practice of still life painting. I have in mind another anthology in haiku but this is in a formative stage right now. Possibly, also, a small volume based on the haiku and haibun written while literally following a part of Basho’s Journey to the Interior.

insideoutside: Stanley Pelter on Haibun

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interview with Jeffrey Woodward

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Stanley Pelter, born in London in 1936, attended Wimbledon College of Art and, after a three year interval as a result of being a Conscientious Objector to Military Service, completed three years of post-graduate study at the Royal College of Art. A self-described “apprentice maker of haiku for 12 years and composer of haibun for five,” Pelter has served as Secretary of the British Haiku Society and has published four haiku collections. The third volume of an intended six-volume series of haibun will be released in the very near future.

JW: First, if you do not mind, might we speak a little about your background? Many of the autobiographical and anecdotal haibun in your first book, past imperfect (2004), address your poverty and Jewish roots during the London of the last World War and the post-war period of reconstruction. I take it that you are retired now, but what educational and employment background did you have when you came to maturity and how, if at all, did these later developments affect your writing?

SP: Yes, I am retired. In a different life, an examination was compulsory at 11. Wrong side of the track youngsters were not spectacularly successful. The few that were attended a Grammar School located on the right side of the track.

My choices were between English at University or Art College. Art won! After an enforced 3-year break as a Conscientious Objector, I won a post-graduate course at the Royal College of Art. Fortuitously, I was one of a small tutorial group that included David Hockney and the recently deceased, great artist, Ron Kitaj. Mortgage redeeming years were in Education, reaching the worryingly dizzy height of College Principal! Alongside writing bad poetry, I made numerous black and white scraperboard illustrations. To attract students, I also used mild humour, some of which have since emerged as haibun.

JW: Can you recall when you composed your first haibun and the circumstances of that act?

SP: First haibun? June 2003. ‘That C# Minor String Quartet’ (Volume 2 – & YNot?). For a year or two the County of Lincolnshire, in which I now live, financed a programme of ‘Music in Quiet Places’. This supported recently graduated students who formed Trios and Quartets. Venues were often village churches. From this understated starting point, stimulation was based on the device of juxtaposition that, here, was able to outstrip even its haiku effects: Beethoven’s homogeneity of form and content, supra-consciousness of a late string quartet versus one composed by a Jew who perished in Terezin, a Nazi Internment camp, christian church versus jewish atheist (oxymoron, perhaps?), the resonant acoustics of an ancient, hill-top church versus gale, emotional performance versus their banal departure, cold setting versus just another of many evening performances, the illustration that indicated unity trembling at the edges. With this complexity, how could a haibun not evolve?

JW: You frequently remark that haibun is so novel that it is premature to seek to delimit the boundaries of the genre. More specifically, in the essay “Definitions – & Y Knot?,” you argue that the chief value of a definition or catalogue of norms is to serve as “an aide memoire for those new, or at least less experienced, to an area of activity.” How accurately does that older formulation reflect your current view?

SP: Editors of Society Journals and the like live with constraints; representing their membership, publishing more, not less, which often means selecting a larger number of shorter haibun. But too many judges take the default position and lump haibun into their own recognisable position. Sometimes, there is a veneer of claiming Bashō’s crown of :

do not resemble me
never be like a musk lemon
cut in two identical halves

In practice, this is belied because, however varied may be the content or form, if the ‘appropriate’ characteristics that fix their parameters are not recognised, there is little they would consider positive to comment upon. Despite this, I still hold the view we should work to limit the damage of constraining ‘characteristics’, ‘definitions’, ‘guidelines’, but do so by working outside the box, trying to reach beyond the rapid build-up of their words and practices, which is a consensual middle ground. The problem is how to balance helping less experienced writers from sliding into that follow-my-leader syndrome while retaining constitutionally important aspects of the genre. Despite a lot of huff and puff, those cubic walls of their increasingly cemented solid house simply refuse to be blown down. An outside gale is needed.

Also of interest here are which haiku characteristics barely get a mention in the context of transference to the haibun genre. The present grouping is surprisingly selective, and far from all embracing. It is wiser, with less potential for myopia and more for perceptive innovation, to maintain the pretence of being a closet social being.

JW: In this same essay on the problem of rule and exception in genre, you write, “Usually provides a simple and simplistic yardstick by which Editors and Competition judges measure whether a piece of work ‘is or is not,’ ‘complies or does not.’ Not this side of the wall? Must be the other, usually less acceptable side. Usually slides into a ‘virtually never.’ The harder task of recognising, understanding and accepting exceptions can be avoided.” I find this quite accurate and amusing. How does this relate to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view of definition, a view you’ve quoted favorably, as an “ornamental coping that supports nothing”?

SP: The application of a broadly interpreted definition does relate to Wittgenstein’s view, but is not so extreme as to be just ‘ornamental coping that supports nothing’. Despite my sometimes exuberant statements in relation to what, for all practical purposes, have become defined parameters, there is still a struggle to understand where present outer limits might lie, what are the far from easy language form and structural problems, in order to close in on or, with hard work, perseverance and dedication, to even move beyond them. Few work in this outreach area. There seems to be a psychological need to define that tends to inhibit and limit possibilities, but open processes imply that, at this beginning stage, less ‘rules’, not more, is a greater aid to creativity. But, faced with so many submissions and so little time, it is tempting for Editors and Award judges to use their own guideline definition as a simple weighing machine. Who can blame them? But it diminishes the genre.

A few years ago I spent 18 months persuading a couple of obdurate British Haiku Society Committee members there was at least one other way to establish a haibun award without it involving financial reward, or gold, silver, bronze gongs. It now exists, its aim educative, analytical, reflective, with an opening for two-way discussion. Selection is not just about ‘the best’ but those that generate open-ended analysis and discussion. The intention is to make haibun a more developmental process, especially at this early stage of its cycle. In 2006, 2 selectors, Ken Jones, who, was supportive, of the aim, and David Cobb, chose 14 haibun. Commentaries were limited, production poor, but it did result in anthology No 1. The second, based on submissions in 2007, saw two different selectors choose 25 haibun. These received fuller commentary and analysis, with a higher standard of production. Readers are invited to respond. Understanding, for some, still reflects a ‘winner/loser’ framework. So, Wittgenstein is apt in his observation in relation to ‘definitely supporting nothing’, but, more accurately, its supports are already, by definition, damaged.

JW: In your introduction to & Y Not? (2006), while outlining such commonly accepted norms of haibun as the expectation that it contain haiku and be in the present tense, you ask: “What can this new genre incorporate into it and call its own? After all, it is haibun, not haiku! It is more than haiku, more than a story.” Implicit in your argument, unless I misread you, is that the path of haibun may deviate widely from that of haiku, perhaps not even run a parallel course. Might you elaborate?

SP: When I read this question, despite being an atheist, the first thing that came into my mind was Calvin’s analysis of the law of Moses. ‘The law’, he says, ‘was political, and since the politics have changed, so have the rules’. Haiku is haiku. Haibun is not haiku. It is a different genre that, while retaining some of the spirit of haiku, is not haiku. Even if in danger of seeming simplistic, a new, different genre has new, different rules.

While incorporating certain characteristics that distinguish it from, say, the short story form, we are, or should be, in that exciting period when ‘the world is our oyster’, when discoveries are made, ground breaking experimental developments tried, where creative process applications defy too quickly established conventions, and the concept of haibun winners and losers is irrelevant. It should be an alchemical bubbling, like that early 20th century period in Art when this or that ‘movement’ flourished, intelligent developments like Cubism evolved from early perceptions into the then unrecognised aims and intentions of, for example, Cézanne, African and Oceanic art. The excitement is still palpable. What was considered revolutionary and outrageous by establishment standard bearers evolved into fluid movements with approaches, not only to content, but to the way creative processes are applied. For haibun makers, it is that time when non-lineal questions galore can be broached and many manner of answers attempted. Presently, too much excitement, too much navel-gazing is going on from within existing parameters. For me, the practical yardstick is that my most innovative haibun would not pass muster, not slip through the buttery mesh of existing, sometimes unconsciously applied criteria. It can be a measure of development, in much the same way Impressionism, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Duchamp et. al. failed to fit neatly into their contemporary parameters. Haibun should have no safety net. Better to break a bone or three than never to have attempted the triple somersault.

JW: For haibun in the immediate future, then, what course?

SP: Over and above similarities, whatever haibun can incorporate into itself that distances it from haiku – far more than obvious differences such as the use of semi-colons, narrative, applying mixed times and tenses, fiction, factive fiction, simile, less subtle metaphor, and the ways syntax can extend expressive range, greater perseverance, a more forceful application of analytical and critical faculties, intensive reworking – it should also be disruptive of conventions and consensual practices. In one shape or form, few haiku are not derivative of others. The same applies to haibun; and this is not confined to content. What is not required of haibun is to become tame, civilised. It is easy to turn it into a summer garden for visitors to inspect and buy samples to take home. As 20th century Art mounted a frontal attack on accepted orders, so haibun discussions, and practical outcomes of those discussions, should, in the 21st century, be making a new order, rather than the present heavy-breathing tickling of sensibilities. What is being assembled for haibun in the way of limited devices and must-have attributes can be fragmented and ruptured into a less constrained, more open-ended framework of loose filaments that continue to reshape and reform. I suppose the question to ask is, can we see haibun being different from the way it is viewed now? I see our hold on it being, all the time, tenuous, allowing for, and accepting contradictions, being sceptical about even personal views. This is one way of refuting the concept of an eternal perspective and edifice, looking for sub-structures beyond appearances that are being carved from the haiku model. In addition to areas that seem natural to transfer from haiku to haibun, is a re-presenting of them, seeing the same characteristics both as what they are and as they can be from only a haibun perspective. For example, minimalism is a far wider concept than when lineally interpreted. An attribute of both haiku and haibun, it can be understood as being a limited number of syllables, as in haiku, or, following its pattern, short, simple language sentences inside short prose/poems. An easily assimilated relationship, but is it the-end-and-be-all of the concept? Less directly understood, it can be different from this more easily understood one. Spare, even terse, minimalism can be inside seriously complex haibun, with greater development of juxtaposed situations and other appropriate devices. It is from this more angled perception that we are likely to find the raw materials of great haibun. Unlike other fields, this one is more productive if worked in isolation and not though groups. Perhaps the reasons why should be left for another day. So, back to your question!

JW: Yes, haibun versus haiku: do you perceive their respective paths as parallel or diverging?

SP: Length, the many interrelationships of prose with a variety of haiku forms, areas of content and ensuing structures, language and devices, is sufficient to indicate differences between the two genres. I suppose I should be more specific: Perhaps even more important than minimalism is the haiku and haibun device of juxtaposition. While it can play the same or nearly the same role in both genres, it can serve different purposes, be more wide ranging, appear in haibun in ways that are different from haiku such as tripling or quadrupling images or events or moods within events. By definition of them being different genres, we do not always have to impose existing haiku format and rationales in haibun. For me, the critical factor is the story itself, and it is this that should confirm its literary nature, the shape of language, form of haiku, an alternative or equivalent. A not particularly advanced example is ‘bar-mitzvah photograph’ - Volume 1 ‘past imperfect’. It opens with a scene from the Scottish Island of Arran, remembering 19th century ‘People Clearances’. This juxtaposes with the effect of an ancient photograph of one pair of grandparents celebrating their engagement in another Country on a contemporary family celebration. Most of the attendees are descendents and, so, escapees from the holocaust. Some are survivors of the holocaust. Those, and the millions who died, were forced to wear them as badges of recognition shame and humiliation. Conversely, it became the flag of the Phoenix State of Israel soon after their own war of survival. It seems entirely appropriate to use a row of Stars of Davids and dehumanising numbers tattooed onto bodies and sewn onto concentration camp uniforms as non-verbal haiku. In context, they make at least as much sense as that assumed to be the natural haiku format. In other words, the context, content and aims of each individual haibun is the fuse, the driving force of what is appropriate, whether it works to contrast short with long sentences, is more effective with no ‘and’, no ‘the’ or both, or what linguistic changes are made necessary to achieve intentions.

JW: And what other distinctions do you observe between the two genres, haiku and haibun?

SP: Haiku gains ‘immediacy’ with the use of the present tense, while haibun can move into subtle areas of discovery of Selves by switching tenses from first to third and back again, present to past or vice versa. Haibun can grow out of a drawing or painting, either your own or by another. Haibun can introduce ‘visuals’, whether as complete units or as separate ‘one-liners’, in ways that, in haiku, are less pertinent or effective. Of course, it depends on how they are done. Often, they need to be at least slightly off-centre, sometimes bizarre, with more than a hint of surreal images and/or objects. Haibun can also more readily assimilate ‘found’ prose material, an aspect I, at some length, am incorporating into a future book. In haibun, verbal juxtaposition can be seriously and intentionally more ambiguous.

JW: In what way?

SP: Volumes 1 and 2 introduced a new presentation of haibun – impact haibun. These have proven to be ‘puxxlepuzzles’. Few have commented on them, and those that have do not find them straightforward by any existing criteria. Either they fail in what they are about or indicate that, when faced with a never-before-met-situation, logic is an automatic reflex first approach. They are always single-pagers that incorporate haiku and haiku immediacy, and which, despite a unifying rationale, helps them bypass rationality, bringing into play more sensory areas. In the Introduction to Volume 1, past imperfect, I described them as being ‘more cubic, homogeneity evolving from the total image that appears on the page. By definition, because literary effects are minimal and language patterns run counter to familiar formats, there is a greater need for open-ended reader involvement and understanding’. Yet, in spirit, they are closer to haiku than surface appearances might indicate. It has not yet happened. C’est la vie! But in a way, the presentation of an incomprehensible format is strangely exciting. Another difference between haibun and haiku is that, in haibun, there is the possibility of random pairing of images, situations, ‘ideas’. This negates predictability. Outcomes cannot be known in advance. Pairings can grow, affecting interactions. Many of my haibun are subterranean attempts to claw back dispossession, to make some sense of it by jousting with specific myths and archetypes. This is not suited to haiku. Haibun, better than haiku, can describe fears of living within illegible systems, with a desire for social networking while feeling the full force of intolerable loneliness, make sense of an apparently cohesive society, but in which there is disconnection between escapist lifestyles and, often, a feeling of puniness when confronted with seemingly fanatical beliefs that appear to support killing of ‘non-believers’, in the face of perceived power systems that feel conspiratorial, malign, unstoppable, can be more emphatic, contradictory, lyrical, dissolving, three or more toned. This, too, is less, if at all, suited to haiku. By comparison, haiku can give the appearance of a kind of spiritualised dreamland of fairytale-like innocence. There is, even now, far more to haibun than consensual nods of approval. I have to admit I am excited by involvement in these and the many other possibilities, from both within and beyond the haiku genre, that make up the panoply of creative tools available to haibun authors able to evolve appropriate forms of haiku.

JW: If you do not object, I’d like to single out one of your haibun for discussion. I realize that one haibun can in no way be representative but perhaps it will allow us to focus more directly on the practical problems posed by your writing. The work that I have in mind is “Passacaglia ~ Fêtes Galantes.” On a superficial reading, I find this work of roughly 1000 words readily accessible but if one studies it closely, complications quickly arise. You’ve informed me that this work caused you considerable difficulty. Can you describe its structure or form and explain why the execution was so problematic?

SP: This haibun was a difficult composition. There were more than twenty versions; events placed differently, paragraphs, sentences, phrases rewritten, events added or altered. Hand written, the modifications made it look like an area map suffering a breakdown! The eventual first sentence and second paragraph established the confusions created when time, space, geography spill over into beliefs. A long time was spent reducing language to that most expressive of overlapping and interweaving ‘themes’ with their juxtapositions. It tries to achieve the haiku quality of understatement in a way different from haiku inside being in contrast with ‘believers’, a dwindling church congregation, one who does not belong to ‘this butter group’, who were, together, attending a musical event of French secular music from another Age in the setting of an old English village church, the French aristocracy playing poor for a day and back to rich again, the swings in time, making literary qualities effective without being obtrusive, evolving haiku that flow into the prose, breaking the spell of a churches’ resonant acoustics and religious aura with a child’s spontaneous actions, an interval to stretch muscles, with another throw back to the past opening the door to another story within a story ending with a disappearance that leaves only a doubt about what is remembered in a distant layer of living. Complicated enough? But getting some of the phrases to pitch correctly seemed to take forever. Linking musical timbre of speech helped to unify an evening of secular music played on original instruments in a setting designed for another purpose. At this stage, questions of success and failure are inappropriate. Only what is going on, what is attempted matter.

JW: The prose element in your haibun is quite varied. Some pieces offer a narrative that is relatively traditional and naturalistic. Others offer the reader a prose style that might be termed Joycean with its fragments of literary parody, local dialect, puns and other word-play, as well as the “stream-of-consciousness” technique. Where your prose departs from naturalism, how does the altered prose style affect the quality of any haiku or other verse that is present in the same composition?

SP: Beckett, Pinter, Joyce, Celan, Rabelais, Gurdjieff are influences. They, and my own language formations, direct and sometimes become the ‘music’ of content. I repeat – individual haibun content and intentions dictate formal language, structural needs, shape of undercurrents, and determine and are determined by the devices employed. When language departs from the everyday conversational, it does so because of the haibun’s stringent requirements. It is not wayward or a display, just relevant. Not so relevant is whether they appear as ‘natural’ haiku characteristics. Style and form standardization is debilitating for haibun.

Sometimes, as in 'London slums' (Volume 1), a haiku can ‘stretch’ through the prose, like a theme in a musical score. If the haiku is at a different pitch, or purposely dissonant to the prose, then it either has to have logic integral to that prose or it fails because it jars in the wrong way. For the most part I try to move haiku in line with language formations of the prose. Homogeneity is achieved by this integration with prose patterns. Occasionally, this works in reverse. Examples include 'birth day', 'head cases', (Volume 1) 'first love at first sight –just what is going on', 'pre-postmodernist baby', 'journey into deathland', 'genocide' (where the word ‘genocide’ stretches in red across the page and is repeated three times, one underneath the other, acting as one of the haiku, putting more emphasis on its meaning by being uninterrupted by any other words or sounds) – (Volume 2), Others depend on the power of musicality of word sounds and their repetition, even when, sometimes, content is harsh, as in 'huffypuffy' (Volume 1) and 'insideoutside', 'Bialystok', 'day death in life of', 'inside somewhere outside there', 'land e scape', 'no way to stop it', 'pea-souper' and 'as' (Volume 3).

JW: Your own haibun, like the haibun of others, contain haiku within the prose more frequently than not. Your practice demonstrates an understanding then of haibun as a genre that often joins the two modes of written discourse: prose and verse. Your remarks, in the introduction to past imperfect (2004), raise the specter of the visual element or illustration employed in haibun as “a ‘haiku’ in its own right” or as a third element that joins the prose and verse. You do utilize various “visual aids” in certain of your haibun – satirical pen-and-ink sketches, photographs, cartoons complete with ‘balloon’ dialogue. How successful, in your opinion, have your experiments in this vein been and what future do you see for the adoption of such techniques by others?

SP: To date, I have employed visual elements in 3 ways: 1) as haiku, when this is the most appropriate format; 2) as illustrations that enhance prose and haiku; 3) as the prime vehicle of the story.

1 I have, above, given examples, as in 'bar mitzvah photograph' (Volume 1)

2 There is something about a visual image that not only has an independent life but also immediacy that can both clarify and enhance the prose/poem. When it works it adds a dimension not otherwise available. This has nothing to do with the Eastern image look-a-likes employed in haiga. Inevitably, they are weak versions of the Chinese and Japanese originals and have little to do with either their or our culture.

Volume 1 was a mix of the artist who designed the cover and myself. One, of mine, drawn for 'sisters', seems to integrate with and enhance the haibun by the compositional device and shapes employed. In the drawing, exaggeration and a disconnected head retell the ‘story’ in a less familiar way.

I have exploded this in Volume 3, insideoutside. I would include those illustrations for 'North Meister', the title haibun 'insideoutside', '10 days', 'storm waters', 'a fear of losing our shadow', 'sleep', 'solstices', 'hour in the life and death of', 'juxtaposition', 'nearly 100 – she wants the sea', 'paths lead to Ways', 'ceci n’est pas une haibun – 2', 'inside somewhere outside there', 'sheets of rain', 'camouflage is gd is bd', 'but there can be no guarantees', 'mountain failyer'. Usually, the more literal the less successful they are. Readers will make their own decisions on this.

3 I have, so far, produced only two; 'Family' (Volume 2, &YNot?) and 'evacuee' (Volume 3 – insideoutside), not because I do not believe they can be a different, just as successful form as mass-mode haibun, but because, done as I did, they are SO difficult and slow. They have been absorbing, revealing innovations, and a great learning experience! The family was first published as a run-of-the-mill haibun in the journal of the British Haiku Society. Later, an article on the topic of Japanese Manga and Haiku was due to appear. I was asked to create an English equivalent. In this, two major influences were Art Speigelman’s Maus, and Raymond Briggs, an older Art College contemporary who, among much else, art/wrote The Snowman. The second, 'evacuee', is a twisting, turning single image in a haibun response to a request for ‘visual haiku’. In both instances the ‘straight’ version was also published and seemed to strengthen one of my ‘fingerprint mantras’: when form and structures alter, new requirements emerge specific to those alterations. Bear with me as it goes some way to help clarify my position vis-a-vis each haibun being self-contained, making individual parameters in terms of requirements, characteristics, language and structural complexity (or not). In the Graphic format, new and different space passages occur, and a different range of shape-containing areas into which only so many words, handwritten or typefaces, can be fitted. Sometimes this is the determinant that decides more narrative or internal thoughts have to be used. Being visual also allows a different but increased exaggeration of emotional responses that would be overstatement in the prose. Lettering can change to better ‘describe’ or ‘explain’ an action or reaction. A single image can sometimes do the work more succinctly than a hundred words.

So, a hybrid based on, but different from an already hybrid form, has a shape so different it requires a different perception. It requires a different mental consciousness, in the same way as haibun in its relationship with haiku. Whether or not they make haibun or only a comic strip, I cannot judge. Perhaps, it depends on haiku/haibun processes of concision, beyond-the-literal, literary intent and suchlike.

At the time of publication of 'the family', response from readers was very favourable, probably because of the type of illustration with which they could empathise, and not because it was seen as a haibun. Most, I suspect, require a more stereotypical pattern for that to kick in! Perhaps it will take some time yet before it is recognized haibun is a far more elastic medium than as presently harvested.

JW: Your third book of haibun, insideoutside, is scheduled for release quite soon. How, if at all, does it differ from your previous collections?

SP: My third collection …. Between this and Volumes 1 and 2 the differences are the Introduction’s increased accessibility and the book’s structure. Volume 1 has content unity. Volume 2 works in that way only when broken down into sections. Volume 3 again has a broadly unifying theme – interior and exterior landscapes and Love. Physically and metaphorically, the self-contained, complex Island is Arran, off the Western mainland coast of Scotland. Love is non-sexual, as in the title haibun, or intense, obsessive, sexual, dangerous, that turns in on itself, or is not even yet externally recognised. Some of the haibun are intentionally complex. The 3 volumes retain a connection with thematic juxtaposition of the primal mythic, gently humorous situations and more dark images. Perhaps the ranges of devices to obtain specific effects and results have increased.

JW: Earlier, I quoted your statement to the effect that haibun is neither story nor haiku but something other, a distinct entity, one with important and interesting differences from story or haiku. Is this still a fair summary of your position?

SP: YES. This made me reread the Introductions to Volumes 1 and 2, which, while still a bit OTT and, in parts, difficult to grasp, I would say is, fundamentally, still my position. The Introduction to Volume 3 is more readily assimilated. It does describe the process I often apply that allows me to be in any way creative. Perhaps, separately, a verbatim selection might be of use to haibuneers ready to move on from the definition and judgement-stoked consensual middle ground.

JW: Haibun’s historical provenance is perhaps inseparable from the haikai of Basho and his school, that is, it made its social debut in the company of haiku. Haibun, however, has largely died out in Japan and its reception here in the West, while originally situated strictly within haiku circles, increasingly exhibits symptoms of independence from the strictures of haiku. Some poets practice only haiku, some only haibun. How does the haibun writer, in your view, differ from the haikuist?

SP: To the haijin’s problem of reducing so few words into maximum ‘power’ and, with haibun, the necessity of homogeneously embedding into contents’ appropriate prose (or of using haiku as a juxtaposition device), you add story concision, increased complexity of structural shape and form, and some of the major differences between the genres begin to be seen. Different skills have to be learnt, other mind fixes established. For the most part, a longer gestation period is needed, more modifications, sometimes over years between the first and published versions. (Publication is a dreadful moment! No sooner is it in print than obvious ‘tightening, preferred words, phrases and images appear and have to recognised as being in a closed circuit of one). There is less opportunity for the one-hit flash that starts and finishes in an inspired sitting. Another difference is that in haibun words can become more visual codes of communication: tungewuage, sSs-eEe-xXx, etc. Haibun can invent words to more precisely fit the context, can take a little longer, can more directly relate to music and musicality, can narrate or talk conversations that criss-cross time, this or that side of Death, this Age, this space, this dimension or that, as in 'journey into deathland'.

JW: Before venturing one final question, I want to thank you for your patience and generosity in agreeing to this interview. This last point follows logically from the distinction you have drawn between haiku and story, on the one hand, and haibun, on the other. If haiku and haibun are two distinct entities and if we already see, side-by-side, poets who specialize in haibun and not haiku, and vice versa, do you foresee an eventual “parting of the ways,” so to speak, where haibun and haiku become completely individual disciplines?

SP: Despite what I do and how I do it, and knowing there are those who now write only haibun and those who write only haiku, I do not yet foresee a complete ‘parting of the ways’. Haibun, for many, has to include haiku as beloved over the centuries. Haibun, even at the most cutting of present cutting edges, cannot yet prevent itself connecting to the nature of haiku. What else distinguishes it from the short-story form? When formats emerge that directly relate haiku to non-lineal language, structures and contents of a given haibun, I suspect, haijin would reject it out of hand, and would, by default, be separated from stand-alone haiku makers. It also depends on how rigid are haijin in maintaining the status quo for haiku. Argumentative ‘party politics’ within the world of haiku give an impression of agitation, but the reality paints a more cohesive, flat-plain image.

How I would love to write a haikuless haibun instantly recognised as a cognisable haibun and not a short story. The Philosophers Holy Grail Stone! Thank you for offering me your questions. Even as I think about them, my ‘answers’ seem thin and somewhat wayward. Again, c’est la vie!