The Road to Haibun
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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 writin...