Paper and pen. Write.
I don’t recall how or why.
Came the glare. The light.
The short haiku-styled poems that I ofen write for The Poetry Blog such as yesterday’s entry and A Visit to New York City, in Hiabun, on April 8, is a form of poetry-prose that some view as a kind of travelogue that combines both narrative and one or more haiku, particularly in the sense that the haiku derives from the haikai, a linked-verse poem that consisted of a long series of short stanzas, and the first stanza or starting verse which was known as a the hakku which set the tone for entire poem with a description of the location and the season.
The haiku developed into its own form in the late 1800s and retained the the "5-7-5" form of the hakku. It often contained a reference to the season as well, although the sense of location faded in favor of a haiku moment in which man and his location or environment existed in a unified whole without a sense of time that can best be described as an experience of the moment whose quality is enternal and exists solely for its own sake within that wholeness of moment and eternity.
The haibun departs from haiku as an explication of a moment of experience in each verse is part of a narrative that explores how that experience came to be. In Haibun: Haikai Press, Beth Viera wrote: "Like haiku, haibun begins in the everyday events of the author’s life. These events occur as minute particulars of object, person, place, action . . . events [that] connect with others in the fabric of time and literature, and weaves a pattern demonstrating this connection."
The classic example of haibun is Basho’s Narow Road to the Interior, a travel journal, or nikki. In America, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder explored haibun, as did Bruce Ross, Hal Roth, and William M. Ramsey. Even so, haibun is still an experimental form and has many facets yet to be explored.
If we could see what
We could be, would we not see
What not we are not?
I respect, appreciate and an am a bit terrified at the form myself, although the temptation is completely irresistible. I have taken the concept of the travelogue and applied not to location so much as time. My narratives are travelogues of my life and travels as I experienced each in combination with the other. I primarily use the "5-7-5" format but with an embedded rhyming scheme in which at least two of the lines have an actual or implied rhyme, sometimes at the end, sometimes internal, to provide an alliteration that reinforces the experience. There are variants of course, but I try to combine the elements of form and function in a tightly constructed poem that explodes into multiple, enchanting and unexpected insights from humor to self-revelation to enlightenment.
For me, hiabun is a journey of me, a travelogue of a life beginning and continuing, and once begun, wandering forever into time, forever into eternity.
Eternity has
No beginning. No ending.
Forever, now is.
Citizen Poet 