Why criteria? Three reasons. First, there's a reasonable consensus as to what makes a good haiku. Why should haibun not be treated with similar rigour? Second, editors, book reviewers and competition judges surely require well considered guidelines to assess fairly what is submitted to them. And they owe it to their writers to make clear the criteria by which their work is to be assessed. In all fields of literature, notwithstanding the shifting debates and fashions, there is a sense of standards by which quality is to be maintained. For haibun these are at present idiosyncratic, rudimentary or nonexistent. Third, many published haibun are so lacking in any kind of literary merit that they bring the genre into disrepute and detract from its potential.

In judging haibun, we consider the following:

• Does the haibun enlarge our imaginative sensibility?
• Does it have literary quality of some kind, with writing that's economical, direct and concrete, containing authentic imagery?
• Is there feeling in the haibun, expressed with appropriate musicality?
• Is there a worked out theme, crafted so as to show rather than tell?
• Is the haibun playful, elliptical, with space for the reader, in the haiku tradition?
• Are the haiku of good quality and do they interact successfully with the prose?
• Does the haibun contain more than one layer?

Below are two examples to demonstrate how we judge a haibun. Let's start with a haibun by Bill Wyatt [with his permission] which we've place in the "notable but not irredeemable failure" department.

Example 1: Scarlet Haibun by Bill Wyatt

Comment by Bruce Ross: This is what we would call an "interesting failure." The haibun is a wonderful meld of Buddhism, compassion for non-human life, and love of a companion animal. It is almost, nay is, a modern fable. Yet to be considered after the fine prose styling is the haiku. It is failed for its obviousness (it "repeats" the first few prose sentences and any irony is undermined by one of the last prose sentences). What is needed is a greater pushing out of feeling or wisdom, or, a more stunning simpleness. The lesson: Don't repeat in the (concluding) haiku what occurs in the prose.

Example 2: Buying a Soul by William Ramsey

Comment by Ken Jones: We've placed William Ramsey's haibun in the "laudable success" department. In many respects this is a truly classic haibun, and for me something of an inspiration (see the angel in my "Visitation" in "Arrow of Stones"). There is a focused and evolving theme which engages the reader's interest throughout. And, in the best haiku tradition, there is something ambiguous and mysterious going on, which is heightened by the contrasting ordinary, everyday narrative. Examples are the mail order catalogue entry, "SOUL", the question of making a photocopy of the soul, the merest hint later that the soul is a winged, soft feathery thing (like some sort of angel), and the reference "my mail-order exhalation of God", which signals that we are moving into deeper waters. The interaction of the mysterious and the ordinary makes for several comic opportunities, but the treatment is always light and sometimes ironic .Throughout, the reader is given plenty of imaginative space to enjoy. In the closing paragraph and haiku the narrative moves into its existential climax, which lifts the haibun beyond just clever entertainment. Although we are explicitly told about the writer's "depression" the emotions are otherwise expressed entirely through imagery -- in the "show, don't tell" haiku style. The piece is well crafted both stylistically and structurally. The prose is almost entirely direct and concrete, with its domestic imagery of that whirring blender, and the high proportion of kitchen-table dialogue (dialogue is almost always a winner in haibun!). Reader interest is structurally maintained through sandwiching the dialogue passages between narrative ones, and adding the catalogue entry verbatim for further variety. This haibun exhibits another virtue of the genre, that of economy of means and the absence of material superfluous to the writers essential purpose. Here, as with haiku, "less (usually) means more." In my view the exception here is the space given to the Christmas episode in the middle. This also includes the kind of weak haiku which would be better folded back as the prose which it really is. (Fortunately there can be little doubt about the strength of the concluding poem.) Ramsey is undoubtedly one of our most interesting and stimulating haibun poets, but too many haiku that read as prose stand out as a striking weakness in his work. I have some sympathy here, since this is a problem with many of my own haibun. This raises the classic question of how to write effective haiku when the prose is so brilliantly haiku-like. It's easy with "mud bank" prose (as Ramsey calls it) where the reader is grateful for even weak haiku which stand out as "pearls." And unfortunately there is a whole tradition of bland, pedestrian, earnest "mud bank" prose in haibun writing which has stunted the growth of a LITERARY genre. But having got the prose right, we have to take another, higher level, look at how the haiku can relate to the strong prose. There are several possible approaches here which have so far been explored only tentatively.