Haibun: A Writer’s Guide, by Roberta Beary, Lew Watts, and Rich Youmans/ book review by Thomas Festa
The publication of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide, by Roberta Beary, Lew Watts, and Rich Youmans (AdHoc Fiction, 2023), may be said to mark the late arrival as an English-language genre of the prosimetric form invented by Bashō in late seventeenth-century Japan. Although it is not quite the scholarly treatment one might have liked to see, I still warmly recommend it to anyone interested in the state of the art of haikai writing. To be sure, the haibun escaped notice in mainstream literary circles in America almost until the end of the last century, with the mixed results of experiments with the form by John Ashbery and James Merrill providing interesting exceptions to the rule. In fact, part of what makes this combination of prose and haiku so appealing today is the fact that it can provide such fertile ground for literary experiment—though the authors arguably exaggerate contemporary experimentation at the expense of the benefits of a deeper engagement with historical tradition.
The three authors, each of whom edits a major journal that features haibun, have provided a treasury of potent examples to illustrate their capacious if evolving definition of what constitutes haibun in the contemporary English-language context: “While haibun may be a centuries-old form, English-language haibun is in its infancy, and many writers are still being introduced to how the moving parts of this hybrid form come together into a whole—or, actually, something even better: a work where the sum is greater than the parts” (6).
With such fertile soil from which to grow, it is no surprise that this guidebook provides unique and stimulating provocation to creative thought. Chapters 3 and 4, “Reading Haibun” and “Writing Haibun,” deserve special attention for their careful attempts to elaborate the alchemical process—even if some readers might find the anatomizations of literary creation and interpretation a bit overwrought (especially the charts, 22-24). On the elusive quality of hybridity, an excellent comment on one of Roberta Beary’s astonishing haibun lucidly unpacks a key premise: “Here the haiku goes further than amplification—not only clarifying the strange, ambiguous prose, but also doing so in a shocking way by stepping away from it” (37). Such aesthetic observations may distill into creative principles in the hands of these experienced writers and editors: “The further a haiku distances itself from the prose, the more the emotional weight shifts to that haiku” (40).
In another exciting passage from the book, as the authors discuss their favorite haibun (one written by them, one by someone else), Rich Youmans unpacks the inner, intuitive logic of a “braided” haibun—where the haiku is broken up and dispersed among prose paragraphs—“The Undiscovered Language of Stars,” by the groundbreaking haiku poet Peter Newton: “Technically, I like how each line of the haiku ties in to the paragraph above—the breaking apart (an unhinged galaxy, a record skip), the uncertainty of the ultimate dissolution (“exactly where” read as a question), and the return to some inherent code in our DNA that ties everything together (the remembering)” (69).
Those of us who actively write haibun might quarrel with some of the opinions on offer. Somewhat inexplicably, the authors’ repeated emphasis on “The Holy Trinity” of title, prose, and haiku overemphasizes, in an ironically formulaic style, the specialness of titles in haibun. As the opening gambit in any work of art, a title doesn’t seem to contribute to a haibun in a way that is intrinsically different from how titles function in relation to lyric poems, short stories, novellas, or plays, much less songs, movies, paintings, sculptures—or the names of certain restaurants, for that matter. A title sets up an expectation, against which the experience will be measured. Furthermore, I for one do not find myself altogether convinced by the authors’ unevidenced claims about the fruitfulness of combining other inherited metrical forms such as “sonnets, terza rima, sestinas, ghazals” with haiku to produce inviting haibun (52). As an aside, it is also rather misleading to claim that blank verse is “unrhymed verse, usually iambic pentameter” (52, italics added), as the poetry of Shakespeare and Milton, to name only the most accomplished English examples, makes quite clear (52). Given the repeated insistence on examples that move away from haibun’s Japanese origins, this emphasis on fixed forms from other traditions seems slightly perverse, perhaps even contradictory. The nonmetrical sonnet might have provided an exception, for instance in Henri Cole’s hybrid entitled simply “Haiku” (in his collection Blizzard, 2021), or the moving, sixteen-line free-verse “Nature Narration,” yet another remarkable experiment by Peter Newton, from his eChapbook, Part-Time Gods, available from Snapshot Press for free download or online reading at: https://www.snapshotpress.co.uk/ebooks/Part-Time_Gods.pdf
Neglecting to mention brilliant, exemplary haibun by Irish poet Sean O’Connor also seems a missed opportunity. O’Connor manages to pack an emotionally intense piece of writing with rhythmic, charged language, infusing precise local detail with sensory particulars and a resonant haiku that recalls masterpieces by Bashō and Issa—without hewing to overt precepts. Despite my reservations about some of the prescriptive language in this guide and the somewhat mechanical descriptions of the creative process, this is a book worth savoring, and I will return to it not only to helpstudents understand this fascinating literature, but also to enrich my own future practice.
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Reviewer Thomas Festa is a frequent contributor to Lightwood. His poetry collection, Earthen, is published by Finishing Line Press and his writing has appeared in numerous publications.
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