Going on About Haibun: From an Interview of Michael McClintock by Susumu Takiguchi

ST: OK, OK, let's move on. Apart from senryu, you have written in various other styles and genres. These include haibun, tanka and other forms. Do you have a favourite and if so, which and why?

MM: Haibun is by far the most interesting to me. I think its potential is enormous and hardly explored. There need be few or any constraints at all, except that it be written as an aesthetic whole, not a fragment. And that it include haiku as a part of that whole, not as a mere attachment, afterthought, as something tacked on but otherwise unneeded. Beyond that fundamental proposition, we should not encumber ourselves with any assumptions about the content or style of delivery for English-language haibun. That it must and will depart from being merely a tourist-occasion exercise in travel writing is certain. The haibun is open to a huge range of expression: from the surreal and dreamlike to straight discursive narrative -- even journalism: from impressionistic writing to exposition and storytelling, meditation and the personal diary -- an exploration of the wilderness of the self.

Unusual effects can be achieved, to the say the least, if compared to prose or poetry alone. In my opinion, haibun offers a kind of synoptic clarity and hybrid vigor that cannot be matched. For me, it has been a new dispensation, a new language of robust muscle. All my tools become useful. Every subject is approachable and malleable. I think there is a possible synthesis of prose and poetry in haibun that can be revolutionary, a watershed in literature. Haibun may be as close something "new under the sun" as history and literature ever offers.

And so, I am writing a lot of haibun. I am also working as a consulting editor and contributor to Journeys: A Quarterly of English-language Haibun, published by Hermitage West I write a column called "Tanka Café" for the Tanka Society of America Newsletter, and am editing and publishing "The New American Imagist," a series of chaplets of contemporary poetry by individual poets, also in association with Hermitage West.

From World Haiku Review, Volume 2, Number 2

Michael McClintock was educated at Occidental College and the University of Southern California, specializing in English and American Literature, Asian Studies, and Information Sciences. He served as Assistant Editor of Haiku Highlights in late '60s; Associate Editor of Modern Haiku in early '70s; edited Seer Ox: American Senryu Magazine, and the American Haiku Poets Series, 1972-1976. He currently is tanka editor for Simply Haiku, writes the "Tanka Cafe" column for the Tanka Society of America Newsletter, and edits "The New American Imagist" series for Hermitage West. 
Collections of haiku, senryu, tanka, and related poetry include "Light Run" (Shiloh, 1971), "Man With No Face" (Shelters Press, 1974), "Maya: Selected Poems" (Seer Ox, 1976). His work has been broadly anthologized, including in each of the three editions of The Haiku Anthology, edited by Cor van den Heuvel(1974, 1986, 1999). "The Tanka Anthology," edited by Michael McClintock, Pamela Miller Ness, and Jim Kacian, Red Moon Press, 2003.