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Featured Writer: Bob Lucky

First-person reflections on the art of writing haibun

I first read Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North—can’t remember which translation—sometime in high school. I had no idea it was a form, or at least the beginning of a form, we call haibun. I do remember forcing my self through it—it wasn’t terribly exciting reading for a high school student—and also being intrigued by the combination of prose and haiku. I was obsessed with travel at the time, so the book being an account of a journey also got my attention.

On a Spanish-class trip to Mexico, I was determined to write “a bus ride to Monterey” that emulated Basho’s Narrow Road. It didn’t go as planned, but I did spend hours gazing out the bus window and jotting down haiku inspired by the passing landscape. Those 5-7-5 haiku, exercises in syllable counting and descriptive imagery, are yellowing in a box somewhere. It was about 30 years later that I seriously began to write haibun. Why? I can’t remember that either, but I had begun publishing haiku around that time, and no doubt my running across the form in various journals awakened my dormant interest.

But I’ve digressed before I even get started. I’m supposed to be giving some tip or insight into writing haibun. My advice for writers new to the form: Don’t write a haibun until you’ve read and written a lot of good haiku and senryu; once you’ve done that, read a lot of haibun before you write one. My advice to the experienced haibunist is the same. The form is always morphing in some small way. And as writers, we morph, too. The haibun I write today are different from those I wrote almost 15 years ago.

“Gratitude” is a haibun that may best sum up the direction my haibun has gone. It was published in KYSO Flash in 2016 and was a runner-up in Vestal Review’s VERA, a readers’ choice award for best small fiction. My early haibun were travel-based and autobiographical. Most of the haibun I write now are, like “Gratitude,” essentially prose poems or flash pieces.

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Gratitude

In the morning you turned the crack in the ceiling into a metaphor and we both watched in disbelief as it spread wider and wound its way down the wall. Well, I thought, to hell with going to work. I went outside and sat beneath a tree. If I were rich, I might have flown to Paris for lunch, but I didn’t have much of an appetite anyway. I rubbed pine needles into prayer beads. I could smell the grass because a neighbor unaware of the end of the world was out mowing his lawn. I could hear birds singing as if nothing mattered but the next note. Clouds gathered and dispersed, the promise of rain and the threat of drought indistinguishable. Later, I watched the sun slip out of the sky and wondered if that was it. When I went back
inside the house, you were gone. I could barely see the crack, but thanks for leaving
the lights on.

evening chill
a dead star burning
bright

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I also wanted to discuss “Gratitude” because of the haiku. I don’t think I’m the only haibunist to read one of his or her published pieces and suffer an aesthetic cringe when he or she gets to the haiku. I agonized over this haiku. L3, to be grammatically correct, should be “brightly.” But it sounded too mundane, too prosaic. With “bright,” I heard a second kire, a cut—sometime at the end of L2 and other times at the end of L3 (if that’s possible). I’m much happier with an auditory illusion than a correct adverb, although I still cringe a bit.

Since I’ve gone on a bit, I’ll leave you with this haibun from about the middle of my career. This is probably the last purely autobiographical (I was in Ethiopia then) and last long haibun I wrote. And the haiku don’t make me cringe.

Boga Lessons

My wife signs up to go on a yoga retreat and forgets that she’s supposed to teach a kiddy yoga class Friday after school. Since anyone who gives a damn about yoga is also going on this retreat, there’s no one left to teach the class, and it’s too late to cancel it. The vice-principal of the elementary school says to my wife that it’s okay if Bob does it, he can just have them play some games. When my wife tells me this, I’m not happy, but what can I do, she’s my wife. She thanks me with a kiss on the cheek, swings her duffel bag over a shoulder, tucks her yoga mat under an arm and leaves. You owe me some contortions, I yell after her.

morning drizzle
the twinge in my hip
moves down to a knee

I know nothing about yoga. I come from a family of people who evolved to sit on chairs. There’s not one among us who can assume the lotus position or make it through the Japanese tea ceremony. When I meditate, I’m usually flat on my back and just about to fall asleep. And that’s my strategy, I’ll have them lie on their backs on the floor and I’ll soothingly tell them some crap about floating on a cloud. That should take up about five minutes.

At the end of the school day I go to pick them up and take them back to the classroom where the yoga mats are. First graders. There are five girls. There are only two guys. One has Down syndrome and the other is autistic. I explain I’m Miss Lisa’s husband—they call her Miss Lisa—and that I’m teaching the class today. Since they’re in a bit of shock, they follow my instructions to lie on the floor and close their eyes, and I start telling them they’re floating on a cloud and they should start relaxing their bodies. This is going nicely. I tell them the cloud they’re on is thinning out and they’re slowly drifting down to earth. A few of them decide they would rather fall to earth and start bouncing around like tennis balls dropped from a roof. The autistic kid starts flapping and I get out of him that he’s an airplane. He’s an airplane for the next forty-five minutes.

afternoon sunlight
on the wall
the world is flat

I settle them down and confess I don’t know yoga. I say, my name is Bob and I teach Boga, but before I impart my wisdom to you, show me your favorite yoga position. The frog and the tree make some sense to me. I can see that. This only takes up about ten minutes, so I have the trees teach the others how to be trees and then I tell them to make a forest. Trees don’t talk, I remind them. And there’s silence for a moment until the boy with Down syndrome falls and though there are only trees in the forest, everyone hears it. To refocus the group, I have them make a nice little frog pond and go ribbit ribbit.

With about twenty minutes more to kill, I’m thinking what I should do when a mother of one of the kids walks in thinking she’s going to get a little yoga in. I look at her and shrug my shoulders and she sits on the floor against the wall. We’re taking a break, I say to her, and one of the kids says, when are we going to do Boga. Right now, I say, everybody line up. That takes about five minutes. Okay, this is a race, I explain, but the last one to cross this line, and I draw an imaginary line near the far end of the room, is the winner. They all have to run to where I am to make sure they know where the line is. Boga is all about slowing down, I tell them. Some of them jump the gun, but we finally get going. Some of them are running in slow motion, some are crawling in some kind of snail imitation. Then there’s the airplane. I ask the mother if she will watch them while I go to the bathroom. I don’t know who the winner was. Class was over when I got back.

sunset
my face flush
with whisky

(first published in A Hundred Gourds 3.2, March 2014)

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About the Author

Bob Lucky is the author most recently of My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019) and the chapbook Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), which was a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2018. His chapbook of haibun, tanka prose, and prose poems, Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), was an honorable mention in the Touchstone Book Awards. Lucky currently splits his time between Saudi Arabia, where he teaches and plays in a ukulele band, and Portugal, where he is working his way through all the regional cheeses and wines.