The Road to Haibun

A play on the title “The Narrow Road to the Interior” by the Japanese poet master Basho, who created the haibun poetic form, which combines prose and haiku to create a prose poem. As someone who experiments in hybrid, the 2-night workshop on haibun led by Cheryl J. Fish out of the Art Basin in the Bronx appealed to me. I signed up, as it was remote.

Haibun isn’t entirely new to me. When exploring the form tanka: https://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2019/08/juan-fujita-writer-of-tanka-and.html

https://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2019/07/tankawaka-approaches-to-writing-flash.html

The haibun starts as a sensory vignette, a bit of flash, prose poem. There can be a story arc, but does not rely heavily on plot. It is mostly there to set up the haiku attached at the end. Basho employed the art form in his travel writing to give more of a sense of a place, to evoke emotion, to help lead the reader into the exterior and interior. The minimalistic approach avoids the kind of purple writing most Western writers might assume, stripped of multi-adjectives strung together.

Cheryl explained the form and provided examples and invited us to experiment with haibun. For the first few she let us get away with almost haikus. She mostly wanted us to understand the form—it was very left-brain with an kind of stream of consciousness for the top half, and then right-brained with the 5-7-5 imposed structure for the bottom. From Cheryl: the form forces us to work harder, writing by erasure.

My first attempt, informed by the news of the lady outside of Pittsburgh who went missing looking for her cat and was suspected of falling into a sinkhole.

Woman in sinkhole

The woman parks behind the carpet store, Closed, and leaves her five-year old granddaughter strapped into her car seat. She shouts, Tipsy, Tipsy. She is looking for her cat, missing, lost in the night, in the snow. But, before she can get too far, she  . . .

sink holes in the night
down down into the darkness
she is gone for good

I thought sinkhole felt like a pretty good metaphor for how I felt most days post-election.