The most common form of English-language haibun consists of one to three fairly short paragraphs followed by a single haiku that sums up or comments on the preceding prose, although a variation of the form intersperses haiku throughout the prose. These prose sections of a haibun are most often expressed in a heightened “poetic” tone that is matched likewise by the accompanying haiku. Such haibun equally represent most often a direct response to some facet of nature. And the majority of the more successful of these address the mystery of universal subjectivity in its moment-to-moment manifestation.
Three examples of such successful haibun are set, appropriately; during the periods of sunrise or sunset when the claims of our ordinary daytime consciousness and so-called objectivity are loosened. Hal Roth’s winter haibun and Dennis Kalkbrenner’s “Lake Superior” occur at dawn. Both are expressed in a dream-like mood that evokes Chuang-tzu’s Taoism with its emphasis on the ephemeral, perhaps illusory; nature of perceived reality. So-called objectivity is broken down by such a mood and the nonhuman subjectivities are revealed to us. For Roth in a bleak winter field, they are the evoked pathos of a sapling that will die because of wounds created by a buck’s rubbing against it and the haunting personified winds, both of which are incorporated into the concluding haiku:
midwinter—
dawn winds approach
the buck’s rubbing tree40
For Kalkbrenner, skipping stones on Lake Superior in the summer, it is the very recovery of a child-like capacity to commune with those non-human subjectivities. The prose thus concludes: “Awake again all young dreams.”41 And this process, provoked by the fragrance of roses and the misty lake, is concretized in a metaphor of those half-forgotten dreams in the fading echoes of the skipped stones described in the haibun’s concluding haiku.
J. P Trammell’s “Sunset on Cadillac Mountain” reverses the oriental convention of watching sunrise from a holy mountain. Here Trammell’s seemingly objective presentation of the perceptual transformations caused by sunset on the mountains to the west and the inhabited islands to the east of Cadillac Mountain comes to elicit a poetically charged response to what Trammell experiences: like whales, “humped islands rise in the bays”; the sun, like a creature, seems to “settle onto the knobs and ridges of the pink and blue mountains”; the waters appear fiery silver “as if poured molten from a ladle.”42 But with darkness a different subjectivity of the mountain is manifested. The lights of the stars and those of the inhabited dwellings on the islands and in the forests surrounding the mountain produce a sabi-like mood: “I am alone in the encroaching darkness...” and evoke the sabi-mooded objectivity of the concluding haiku in which an unseen yarrow’s fragrance “penetrates the night.’”43
G. R. Simser’s “Water Spider,” in the act of describing the play of that creature’s shadow on the bottom of a brook, occasions a startling emotional process that commingles perception, illusion, objectivity, subjectivity, dream, memory, revelation, and spirituality In a tour de force of compression Simser moves from the breath-like five-part shadow of the creature to an epiphany of material creation itself:
...five ephemeral pods closing together to become one and then opening and closing again and again, motions in time tracing breath’s flow over bony ribs; tracing briefly the crucifix, the magic discovery of homo ad circulum’s head, hands and feet, and then the snow-angel wonder of youth, arms pumping its wings to exhaustion, then finally fully extended these magic pods become our gliding five-point star; while all the while above us, somewhere, floats the draughtsman, silent and unseen, of such natural art... 44
The allusions to God and Christianity in Simser’s act of perceptual meditation are clearly evident, the water spider becoming a metaphor of God’s sustaining moment-to-moment creation and, by consequent extension, of the interrelationship of all realities, of, ultimately, universal subjectivity. Such associative complexity leads Simser to the realization that the individual human has many realities within his or her self and the haibun’s prose ends with this realization: “...we too continue to float in many dimensions ”45 The concluding haiku reinforces both this realization and that of universal subjectivity by describing, in a return to the objective creature, the water spider’s shadow which, in the haiku’s third line, has, like human beings, “many dimensions.’”46
The democratic compassion tacitly expressed in linking man’s nature to that of a water spider is straightforwardly presented in Liz Fenn’s “No Monkey Business,” a simple narrative of the nourishment and release of five orphaned newborn mice that were found in the family’s house. The mother in this haibun expresses her love for her son’s act of kindness in rescuing the mice but worries that one of the mice will return to be caught in one of the family’s seemingly necessary traps. Notwithstanding the apparent lack of awareness of cruelty-free traps, the haibun ends on an upbeat note with a senryu-like expression of universal good will in a haiku that notes that a “no trespassing” sign has been placed in the house’s crawl space.47
Another common form of English-language haibun is the travel journal. The standard for such a form is set by Basho’s Narrow Path to the Interior. Besides the artistry with which Basho commingles deftly descriptive prose narrative and deeply evocative haiku, this work and others like it resonate with a shared cultural history. That history, which includes centuries of poetic responses to well-known natural and cultural settings, augments whatever artistry is present in a given travel journal. But without the artistry, mere reliance on familiar or exotic settings alone cannot carry the work. Robert Spiess, editor of Modern Haiku, in a discussion of haiku sequences based on travel, noted that most of such “‘vacation haiku’ ... are too much recordings of stimuli, rather than creative, in-depth work.”48 A great number of published short travel haibun unfortunately support this view. The best of such haibun reckon with the resonances of history upon the modern present felt moment, expressed in haiku, within the context of the given haibun’s travel narrative. So, in these works, the haiku carry the narrative. Dave Sutter’s “Italia: Quattrocento/Ventecento,” as its title indicates, is a light essay on the impingement of the Renaissance and other past Italian history on the decidedly flamboyant present-day modern culture in what Sutter calls a “quintessence of contrasts and extremes.’”49 Perhaps generated by Sutter’s visit to the cemetery where his uncle, who died as an American serviceman in Europe, is buried, this haibun discusses the observed contrasts in a straightforward manner, almost always exemplifying each of its eleven paragraphs with a forthright illustrative haiku. If you are charmed by the “light touch” of the prose and the haiku, you will enjoy the haibun. But most of its haiku are based on a simple direct contrast that unambiguously underscores the work’s thesis: a blind man selling broken statues, farmhouses eight hundred years apart in age, schoolchildren leaning to look at the Tower of Pisa, a topless woman compared to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Unless you feel the aesthetic weight of the thesis, the success of the work’s haiku comes from the simple irony of the depicted contrasts.
More successful is J. P. Trammell’s “The Temple of the Snail,”50 an account of a visit to the ruins of the temple of Ixchel, the Mayan moon goddess, on the Mexican Caribbean island of Cozumel. The haibun conveys a poetic entrance into the realm of sacred history as concretized by the temple (Trammell quotes from Wordsworth’s The Prelude on this theme) and manifested in the seemingly protective barrier of a rainstorm that Trammell must cross in order to commune with the sacredness of the temple. His taking shelter