Filling Up on Haibun

This article first appeared in the Press-Enterprize, August 11, 2024

A few weeks ago, during the peak of a heat wave, I took the kids to the San Diego Zoo’s Safari Park. Despite the weather, we had a great time, and I decided to capture one of the moments in a haibun.

The haibun form dates back to the 15th century master Basho. Already well-known for his haiku, Basho began publishing journals of his travels interspersed with the short form poems, and the genre spread from there. Haibun is the combination of haiku with any other style of writing–most commonly journalistic prose. The pairing results in a powerful juxtaposition, allowing large leaps between layers of meaning.

For many decades, English language haiku journals have included sections for the haibun form, but poets have only begun to fully explore its rich possibilities in recent years, as haibun have become more polished and experimental.

As explained by Roberta Beary, Lew Watts, and Rich Youmans in Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023), the key is to create a series of “sparks” within the reading experience. These bursts of surprise are the heart of haiku themselves, and the haibun form allows them to stack together like nesting dolls.

Remember that, regardless of what you might have learned in school, haiku have nothing to do with counting syllables. The Japanese don’t count syllables–they count mora, a sound unit that we aren’t tuned to in English. Because there are multiple mora in many syllables, lines of 5-7-5 result in poems that are much too long, and the counting itself puts the emphasis on the wrong thing.

The real essence of haiku, instead, is that spark, that leap of surprise, contained within a single utterance, so that the silence around the poem rings with meaning. I like to say haiku are “two worlds in one breath.” They show us two ways to look at something, revealing the complexity of life in the process.

For example, one of my favorite haiku from Basho is this:

summer grasses …
all that remains
of the warrior’s dreams

Even though the poem is written in three lines, it’s read and expressed as a single sentence with two parts. The “summer grasses” evoke a setting and season, a scene that repeats year after year, as grasses grow and cure. That image is juxtaposed against the ephemeral hopes of a warrior fallen in battle, here and then gone like all of our dreams, eventually. The haiku is a profound reflection on the cyclic nature of life, and our small part in propagating the wave of history, each of us a single blade of grass bending to the invisible winds that move through a field.

This experience of profound juxtaposition works well no matter how small the package, and contemporary haiku poets sometimes condense their poems down to the single line of a monoku, like this one  in Jennifer Hambrick’s new book, A Silence or Two (Red Moon Press, 2024):

in too deep to turn back starlight

In this one breath we see both the stars at the end of a long night hike, and the idea of falling so deeply into something (love?) that it becomes as impossible to give up as would be to turn back starlight.

That “spark” between ideas is the essence of haiku, and the haibun form takes it one step further, creating sparks not only within the haiku, but in the gaps between styles of writing. The title of the piece cuts against the prose, which then cuts against the haiku, which includes its own cut inside–all of these imaginative leaps swirling in a way that sets the mind ablaze.

This is what I’ve tried to do with my haibun:

Hot Air

My son and I stand beneath the huge balloon at the center of the almost-
empty safari park. It’s still hot at closing time. The orange globe sways
in a warm breeze. Whoa, we shout as it topples toward us, and then we
laugh as it tips away. Again and again it looms and lets go, looms and
lets go, until finally a voice in the loudspeaker sends us home.

always practicing joy ride

I wrote the prose first, simply describing the little game we were playing, and the haiku arose as a reflection on what it meant–how the practice of joy is a choice we have to consciously make. The title, though, “Hot Air,” points both to the balloon itself and a subtle suggestion that all this profundity might be fleeting. That practice of joy might only last until we hit traffic on the drive home.

Haibun is the perfect form for anyone who wants to make writing a part of their life. We all have experiences like this, that mean something and that we want to remember. Often we’ll take a photo and be satisfied with that, but memories become richer when fully explored. With enough of a leap, haibun can spark them into stars.

Learn more about some of the poets pushing the form to it’s limits on episode 72 of The Poetry Space_: Experimental Haibun.