Featured Writer: Stella Pierides

First-person reflections on the art of writing haibun

I have always been interested in stories. I listen to and read actual reports and fictional accounts to understand, and come to terms with, the world and myself. The stories I heard growing up in Greece were by the adults recounting how they crossed the Aegean as refugees from Asia Minor, tried to build a new life in a poor country that was not welcoming, lived through the occupation of Greece in WWII, the Civil War that followed, the Junta … Some stories were repeated in the same words, over and over again, others in ever-changing versions. Even then, as a child, I could see that for the adults, this storytelling—part documentary, part elaboration—was their way of coping with the reality they had faced and were still facing. Listening to these stories kindled my interest in how people manage to cope with emotional distress.

Recently, using my own experience as a writer of haiku and haibun who lives with Parkinson’s Disease (PD), I wrote an essay for the journal Juxtapositions about how haiku helps transform pain into something more bearable. I made a case for haiku being a tool in the Parkinson’s toolbox—part of a process that’s similar to Wilfred Bion’s¹ notion of “maternal reverie,” in which the mother becomes a “containing vessel” for her baby’s fears, anxieties, and unprocessed fears:

The haiku form(at) is available to absorb an experience, transform it through the poet’s drafting, crafting, and editing process, and give it back transformed, in the final edit, as a resonant poem. Understood in this way, the containing function entails neither passively holding unwanted and dangerous contents without processing them (i.e., acting like a dustbin, with the potential of becoming a pressure cooker) nor pouring them out with the expectation that others will deal with them or that they will be magically altered—but rather actively receiving and translating them into a more bearable form.²

I believe this applies to haibun as well: a healing process of transformation becoming available through the form.

The process begins with an initial period of calm waiting, without rushing to find answers or avoid difficult issues. I embroider my canvas with little, if any, prior planning or knowing in advance the haibun’s development and ending. Influenced by my, and my family’s, history, my personal and literary associations, and my store of unconscious thoughts, I set out to see how that “seed” experience unfolds—waiting, like my readers, to find out what happened as the first draft tentatively emerges: I trust the process eventually to yield a transformative outcome, both revelatory and containing, and thus satisfactory. It may resemble the story it is reframing, or it may take a different direction. (My haibun are never only and never entirely autobiographical, even if they have an autobiographical core.) At some point during this process, the forming haibun is influenced by other pieces of my written, painted, felted, or installation work, parts of my work history, and their place in the visible or invisible timeline … No poem is an island.

Eventually, when my editing eye examines the stitching, the seams, and the weave—right away or after days or months—a version appears that may be accepted, rejected, or more often shaped further.

To illustrate how this process works, I have chosen two haibun that illustrate the re-framing of difficult issues.

In my draft haibun “Quality of Life,” I describe in the prose someone living with Parkinson’s Disease (PD), whose failing facial, jaw, and throat muscles cause problems with chewing and swallowing. Spilling drinks, dropping food from his fork, and dribbling become a daily source of distress. As a result, our character, like most people living with PD, avoids eating in public. Of course, half-chewed food pieces on one’s clothes may not be a big deal for others, such as family or caring staff. Clothes (or the adult bib, if the person wears one) can easily be wiped clean or washed. But, for the person with PD, this situation—however lovingly prepared the meal or the napkin or bib placed under his chin—is experienced as belittling, infantilizing: a minus to quality of life.

Quality of Life

I’ve been awake since 3.00 am. Not unusual with this disease. At least today there is another reason. My birthday, when they descend on me en masse, daughters and sons with spouses, grandchildren … They had wanted to take me out to lunch. I refused. Their glances at my spilling my drink, sauce on my shirt … Daggers of disapproval. As if I could help it. They are ashamed of me.

birthday present. . .
his adult bib embroidered
with ducks

This version has the haiku that originally ended the haibun. Looking at the poem after writing it, I laughed and felt saddened at the same time. This poem alludes to conflicting emotions: the appreciation of and gratitude one would feel for the giver’s effort, the disbelief and mortification at the thoughtlessness of a gift (the bib) that reduces the receiver to a baby, the resentment at one’s increasingly visible disability and the stigma associated with it, the sadness that this could not be talked about easily, given one’s dependence on others’ help. At becoming a “sitting duck.”

Thinking about my being moved from laughter to tears, and back again, I remembered an incident that my grandfather used to enjoy telling. This story always started with him sharing a meager meal with friends, reminiscing about the first days of his arrival in Athens. The discussion would then become heated; he became agitated and angry, raising his voice against the unfairness of life. “My chest was full …” he’d say, at the same time realizing that his false teeth had flown out of his mouth. He had been careful with his teeth since, he used to say, polishing them to a “sparkling white!”

I believe my grandfather used the incident for effect. Like I did, just now. His audience laughed, every single time. This memory seems to have had an impact on me too, in incubating the haiku that I decided to end my draft haibun with:

birthday barbecue
his chef's apron
pristine white

While “Quality of Life” is on the back burner for the time being, working on it empowered me to describe some of the feelings I anticipated I’d experience. As if I was creating a mind apron that, had I found myself in this situation in reality, might have protected me from spilling otherwise uncontrollable thoughts and feelings.

Stepping away from individual and personal preoccupations, my haibun “And yet”³ moves to universal concerns.

And yet

The road twists and turns for miles ahead. The refugee caravan moves haltingly forward. Mothers carrying their babies; dazed children, old people, the young, all stagger towards a safer future. Crossing the Red Sea, walking through deserts, wading across the Suchiate River, the caravan camps at Calais, rests for a night on Lesvos, repopulates the Sicilian city of Sutera, rows across river Evros. Razor wire carves memories on children’s skin. A voice over the megaphone: “Achtung, Achtung!” Babies are born, grow teeth, learn to speak. It rains, it snows, it shines. New words enter dictionaries. Poems emerge from sleeping bags.

each spring
breaking through the soil
the human heart

The horrifying occurrences alluded to, named by the place where they happened, listed, and placed on a map, even when the direct participants refuse to acknowledge that they took place in reality, make them somehow “processable.” Humanity against itself, again and again, becomes recognizable, and, in thought at least, accountable. And when the human heart is brought onto the scene by the haiku, both in that it reliably gets broken and reliably regenerated every spring, we are reminded of its invincible, life-affirming nature.

As seen from these poems, I consider both haiku and haibun as containers, vessels into which experience is projected, processed, re-created, and re-framed, in such a way that it becomes easier, lighter, and manageable. While this transformation can be achieved in a stand-alone haiku, in haibun, the juxtaposition of the three elements – title, prose, and haiku – provides us, as readers as well as writers, with more space to induce and then trace the development of the re-framed experience. So, for instance, in “And yet” the haiku at the end is juxtaposed with (and so read in the context of) the images rendered in the prose. Paired with the prose and title, it lessens the impact of the horror depicted in the prose by introducing a more hopeful tone, partly anticipated by the defiant “and yet” in the title.

Allowing the story’s transformation into haibun, through accepting associations, memories, and imagination as they emerge, at least during the earliest drafts, is crucial in finding a satisfying, and still open, resolution. After all, we are not writing history! Not set in stone, our remembered realities, in becoming our haibun renditions, allow possibilities of seeing events in them from another perspective. While we cannot change the past or reality, we can change our perceptions and ways of relating to them. Isn’t this the healing process of therapy? Most likely. Remember Freud’s aim to transform neurotic misery into common unhappiness? If we understand “neurotic misery” to mean the painful human condition—where pain coexists with cherry blossom—then I believe a similar healing transformation to be taking place in haibun. If you write these forms, and by this point, I should say, if you practice these forms, you will know.

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Author’s Note: In several pieces of my work, bringing in other media, such as film, painting, sculpture, felted objects, has been an important part of the transformative process.

• • “Noir” (2020). video haibun, triptych, created and presented at The HaikuLife Haiku Film Festival 2020, organized by The Haiku Foundation. Click here to view.

• • “Who is” (2023), haibun displayed as a boxed object in “Intriguerium Number 3,” an exhibition by artist Robert Lamoon. Click here to view.

• “whether I am here or not” Painting by Maria Pierides. The haiku embedded in it, “whether / I am here or not / returning tide,” appeared in The Signature Haiku Anthology, Robert Epstein (ed.), May 2, 2020. Click her to view painting.

• “Felting Haiga [or, Hairballs to Haiga: The Evolution of a New Hybrid, ‘Haikufelting’], MacQueen’s Quinterly, January 2020. Click here to read the article, with links to examples.

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Endnotes

[1] Bion, Wilfred R. (1962), Learning from Experience. London: Karnac Books.

[2] Pierides, Stella (2022), “Parkinson’s Toolbox.” Juxtapositions Eight: Research and Scholarship in Haiku, pp. 37–61. The Haiku Foundation Digital Library.

[3] “And yet” From Haibun Triptych, one of the three haibun originally published in Fifth Review (special issue: “The blue collection 9: Home” [Winter 2018/18.10]) and later made into a video in honor of International Haiku Poetry Day 2019, organized by The Haiku Foundation).

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About the Author

Stella Pierides is a writer, poet, and artist. Her books include Of This World (haibun, 2017) and In the Garden of Absence (haiku, 2012), both HSA Merit Book Award recipients. Her article “Parkinson’s Toolbox: The Case for Haiku” appeared in Juxtapositions: A Journal of Research and Scholarship in Haiku, issue 8, 2022. She is a member of a neuro-cognitive research group associated with The Haiku Foundation, investigating how haiku are processed in the “mind-brain.” She serves on the board of directors of The Haiku Foundation, and she conceived and coordinates the Haiku for Parkinson’s feature.

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