Memoirous

 Waiting in a Snowy Wood Riding our bicycles Through a fog-hushed snowy wood A train horn echoes We wait, the sound fills the air Grinding down all around us The above is a tanka, a Japanese form I’m revisiting after my class, The Road to Haiku. In a previous post  I outlined the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable scheme. Truthfully, anything can be a form see renga, sonnets villanelles, and the rondeau. Consistency is the secret sauce. Regardless, the form forces us to search for different words instead of taking the first one that comes to mind, it forces us to pay attention to sound. With a specific word/syllable count we have to make choices—often for the stronger adjective, verb. It makes us slow down, dwell with the piece, ask ourselves, What exactly do I want to communicate? Emphasize the sensory. The context or story behind the story is Jack, my 3-year-old grandson, and I like to ride our bikes in the woods near our house. He on a child’s balance bike and me on mine. Believe me,...

 At our last class Cheryl threw out the prompt: changing seasons Changing Season The light of late autumn slants across the sky before finally disappearing, leaving a hologram upon the deepening shadows. She walks to the river, breathes in the molting leaves and biting air. There on the bridge she waits . . . like tears falling fast she rues the coming of night sad to see day end Again, the changing season was a metaphor not just for this time and place but my mental space of late. I’m planning to read more Basho in 2025 and use his works to inspire a revision of a creative nonfiction project on bicycling the UK from top to bottom that a small independent press MIGHT be interested in. I had a nice phone conversation with an editor who was interested, but unable to commit to the project. I know, we’ll see how it all goes—it’s a Basho journey.

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...

“Haibun for July 30” . . . . after days of blood, candles in the window again birds shake off the rain A couple of things: 1)Many of her poems are reactions to research on the 1919 Chicago Race Riot—specifically to The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot , a 1922 report, an old book sitting on library shelves that broke Eve Ewing open when she read it. “ . . . It was so direct and made such a bold claim on totality.” Here is the excerpt she is reacting to from that study: Rain on Wednesday and Thursday drove idle people of both races into their homes. The temperature fell, and with it the white heat of the riot. (7) Eve Ewing did not approach this collection with a set methodology. She searched for the most (to her) authentic response/form. She chose to write a haibun. From an interview I found online: “There’s a haibun in the book (“Haibun for July 30”). People are more familiar with haiku, but what the haibun does is allow you...