Featured Writer: Sean O’Connor

First-person reflections on the art of writing haibun

The Currency of Haibun Writing

The haibun and haiku forms are twins who came into the world under the parentage of Matsuo Basho and his poet colleagues. They laboured long and hard to give birth to these sibling literary forms and to nurture their development. Basho is perhaps the most famous haiku poet worldwide; however, he is just as well known for his haibun, in particular Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North), a masterpiece of Japanese and, indeed, world literature. The haibun form did not, as is sometimes said, develop years after the haiku. The two were developed by the same group of writers in Japan almost 400 years ago. To understand and write haibun well we need to be clear about how the haiku form works, as the haiku is a defining feature of the haibun. I will, therefore, talk about the haiku in order to clarify the haibun literary form.

Whenever I am in Japan, I make a point of leaving my diary open on Thursday evenings between 7 and 8 p.m., as many Japanese do. One of the country’s most popular TV shows, “Pure-Bato,” has been aired during this prime time slot every week since October 2012. The show brings Japanese personalities on to try challenging cultural activities such as calligraphy, watercolour painting, or ceramics. Their efforts are then ranked and corrected by expert judges, and they are scored on a scale ascending from “Talentless” to “Master.” These activities vary from week to week. However, the show’s flagship is its half-hour haiku workshop in which the celebrities face the praise or blistering critique of haiku poet Natsui Itsuki.

“Pressure Battle”

The haiku workshop is entertaining, humorous, and educational. The set is colourful and lively. The audience too is both live and lively. Contestants who do well are invited back to try to advance up the achievement scale. The show has directly produced several new and highly successful haiku authors. It has prompted the production of other haiku shows, including a haiku travel show. “Pure-Bato” (the name comes from the English words—Pressure Battle—due to its challenging nature) is widely seen as being responsible for a major surge in haiku activity in Japan that has encompassed all walks of life and is cross-generational.

When I first moved to Japan in 2008, estimates of the number of active haiku writers in the country ranged from 1 to 2 million—today it is somewhere between 6 and 10 million. The lower figures are based on membership of haiku groups. To put that into perspective, the Haiku Society of America (HSA) has a worldwide membership of about 1,000 people (myself included). That means that for every member of the HSA there are at least 6,000 active haikuists in Japan alone!

And they have TV shows (plural—”Pure-Bato” is merely the famous one), strong book sales (the sales of Madoka Mayuzumi’s debut haiku collection B-men no Natsu exceeded 60,000 copies), sponsorship deals, radio and TV appearances, a mass support base with tens of thousands of writers submitting haiku to newspaper contests every week, haiku book sections in the bookstores (and no shortage of haibun for sale too). There are travel agents that specialise in “haiku vacations” which tour areas where famous haiku poets lived or where renowned haiku were composed.

A vision

All of this provides us with a vision of what the future can hold for writers of haiku and haibun around the world. We too can enjoy haibun and haiku being clearly understood and appreciated by the public at large. We too can enjoy radio and TV productions based on the enjoyment of our writing. Our better authors can make their livelihood from writing haibun through sales, broadcasts of their readings on radio and TV, and live appearances in concert venues.

For such achievements to be realised we need clarity about what we are doing, and focus.

Watching “Pure-Bato” a few weeks ago during my latest visit to Japan, I was struck by how poorly we understand the haiku form, let alone the haibun. A particular word uttered by Natsui-sama during her workshop reminded me of this. That word is “jiamari,” which refers to a haiku of more than 17 syllables. One of the contestants on that show had written an especially good haiku and the teacher strongly recommended that the author add more to it. More, not less. Make it more than 17 syllables.

Natsui did not invent this approach—Basho and his colleagues did. Just over 1,000 of his haiku survive. None are less than 17 syllables. Many are longer. There are dozens that are 23 syllables long. Furthermore, writing less than 17 syllables is frowned upon as wasteful of the limited space available to an author composing a haiku. I have often heard Japanese haikuists say something like, “the haiku is already too short, it is wasteful to use less than we can.”

Write enough

This is the opposite of the typical approach advocated in English to “pare it back.” Instead, when we “pare it back” we should recognise an opportunity to add more within the limits of the form. This is a critical difference. It is the difference between the minimalist approach to poetry which strives to use as few words as possible and the approach that seeks to maximise the poetic value of an already constrained form. It is worth keeping in mind here the observation of acclaimed Irish writer Clare Keegan, that literary writers need to write “enough” and that means not one word too many. It also means, not one word too few.

Back in 1974, The Haiku Anthology, edited by Cor van den Heuvel, was published. This was at the tail end of a minimalist movement in several arts, most notably painting and music. Minimalism was conflated with haiku. So was concrete poetry. These forms (and there were others) had their own lives, their own births, and were their own entities. Calling them haiku did not make them haiku. It did sow confusion, though, a lack of clarity that persists today, more than half a century later.

The conflation of a wide variety of “short forms of poetry” under the umbrella of “haiku” has often been done in the name of “experimentation.” However, experimentation is a necessity in art, not a virtue in itself. Every time we sit down to write we are faced with a blank page and an imperative to experiment. We need to try an approach to whatever story we are about to tell to see if it works. It might. It might not. That’s why we need to edit. And re-edit. And sometimes to dump it in the bin and start again. Experiment again. Indeed, it is in the nature of experimentation to fail. We need to be able to discern when our experimentation has succeeded. That is the work we submit to the world.

Any misunderstandings about haiku, any lack of clarity, will, by definition, be brought into the writing of haibun as haiku are a requirement of the haibun.

Short poetry

Back in the 1990s when I was the editor of the print journal Haiku Spirit, I too published all kinds of “short” poems under the name “haiku.” I too bought into the minimalist notion of haiku. I also thought that kigo were merely references to nature and did not see why they should be mandatory in a haiku. I can see now that (like some current editors) it would have been accurate to describe the journal I was editing as a “short poetry journal” rather than a haiku one. This would also have allowed the publication within its pages of haiku too. Indeed, not all of my own short poems qualify as haiku. I have no difficulty with that—I just call them something more appropriate to reflect what they actually are.

Ten years after my first haibun was published and while I was reasonably established as a writer and editor, I moved to Japan. It was quite a challenging experience to slowly realise that for years I had misunderstood so much about the writing of haiku, tanka and haibun.

The first shock was to hear how casually adamant every haikuist was that a kigo was a defining requirement of a haiku. “No kigo, no haiku,” I often heard. It also took a while before I understood that a kigo was not some sort of trite rule that one must refer to a season in a haiku. I realised that:

A kigo is a literary device used to generate emotional resonance in a haiku poem.

It is a defining literary technique of the haiku and is therefore not optional. Writing haiku is transformed once we understand this point. After all, a haiku is a poem, and everything we expect from a poem applies to the haiku too. We expect to be moved by poems, to be emotionally engaged with them, and it is the kigo that delivers this emotional quality to the haiku poem.

Haibun writers who neglect kigo in their haiku lose a key literary device and their work is the lesser for it. Furthermore, the haiku in a haibun need to be written well enough to work as poems when they are separated from the haibun. This is very evident in the haiku composed by Basho for his many haibun. Those haiku of Basho’s are frequently cited without reference to the haibun they are taken from. In short, to write haibun well requires a mastery of the haiku form.

There was one point about haibun writing I did have a good understanding of when I arrived in Japan—the haiku come first. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense, I mean you write haiku for a haibun before any prose is scripted. This always comes as a surprise to those who attend any haibun workshop I deliver. Yet, it was the approach of Basho and his contemporaries. We start by contemplating the haibun we wish to compose and write a number of haiku in relation to it. Those haiku then inform the direction of the prose (and a haiku may appear before the prose starts). I typically don’t use all of the haiku composed, and sometimes write new ones as the haibun progresses, but I never start by writing prose. This is the approach that has spanned nearly 400 years of haibun writing and I had grasped it from learning about how the founders operated. It was a small consolation to me as I was attempting to digest a large helping of humble pie.

Our currency

Words are the currency of writers. We need to know our pounds from our pence, so to speak. It is worth reminding ourselves what the words haiku and haibun mean. The character hai means skilful. It also has a connotation of playfulness, in the sense of playing a difficult game or solving a challenging puzzle—playing chess as opposed to snakes and ladders. The ku in haiku means verse, so haiku means “a skilful verse.” The haiku began as the opening verse of a longer poem, the hokku, which literally means “the opening verse.”

The hai in haibun is the same as in the word haiku, and the character bun refers to sentences, therefore, haibun means skilful sentences (or skilful prose). A haibun, by its very name, requires prose. The recent “experiment” of abandoning prose in haibun in favour of any form of poem the writer feels like writing before “capping it off” with a haiku is fundamentally flawed and demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the haibun form. The haibun is a prosimetrum, that is, a combination of prose and poetry, specifically, in the case of the haibun, of prose and at least one haiku.

At least one haiku. The haibun form is not a “short form.” There is no restriction in the length of a haibun, nor in the number of haiku it contains. You only have to look at any of Basho’s many haibun to see this. A haibun may open with a haiku, close with one, have several between sections of its prose, include a sequence (or more) at any point before, during, or after it. There is also no restriction on a haibun’s subject matter or any curb on its writing style. One of the notable aspects of Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North is the range of prose styles contained within it.

With so many possible variations within the haibun form to enjoy and, of course, strive to master, why would anyone bother to mess around with it? Alongside a need for clarity about haibun and haiku is the necessity to focus. Attempting to import, or perhaps impose, other forms of poetry—for example, minimalism, concrete poetry, blended poems—onto the haibun form is unfocused. It undermines clarity and is wasteful of time and talent. When writing in a form it is best to do it to the best of our ability, and not confuse our pounds and pence. Call a minimalist poem a minimalist poem, and so on. Our credibility rests on getting our nomenclature right.

It takes many years to become skilled in any form of writing and the haibun form is no different. With the haibun we have the added task of becoming proficient in the writing of haiku too. This is a tall order. There are no short cuts.

The recent boom in haiku writing activity in Japan did not happen accidentally. Writers such as Natsui Itsuki spent decades refining their craft. She, and thousands like her in Japan, continue to draw on the intellectual and artistic capital of their ancestors. They have honed their artistic clarity and focused on what they wish to do well.

We are at liberty to do the same.

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The following haibun by Sean O’Connor appeared in cho 17.3:

Noelie

Noelie hated The Church, and he said it in his book. It was a really big book, more than two hundred pages. Imagine, Noelie Grimes writin’ all that!

Even though he lived here for years no-one knew how much Noelie had done—all the places he’d lived and everything. There was a load of photographs in the middle, all old lookin’, in black and white. Noelie outside an Irish bar where he’d worked in Canada, at a cannery in Florida, singing on a street in Paris, with builders in Nottingham, all that stuff. The one that made me laugh though, was of him standin’ beside a donkey in New York where it said he asked people to give him money to support Ireland—and they did!

There was a great view from his flat at the top of the main tower. I was in it when the American ship anchored out in the bay for a few days, an aircraft carrier. It was gigantic.

“Look at that fuckin’ thing,” I sez, “even though it’s miles away, it’s still ginormous.”

We’re sittin’ there gazing at it, sayin’ nothin’. Then I sez: “It’s intimidating all the same, isn’t it?”

“Meant to be,” sez Noelie. “Imagine that thing opening up, raining hell down on us; we wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“Not up here in-anyway,” I sez.

“Not anywhere,” sez Noelie.

dark grey warship
passing under its shadow
a shoal of herring

Bit by bit I read his book. He grew up on The Hill, in the tenements I mean. When he was six his Da was crushed to death by a crane that fell over where he worked.

Noelie had loads of brothers and sisters, but one of them died before he was born, and another was dead before Noelie could remember, so by the time his Da was gone there was just six of them left, including his Ma. Before that they lived in two rooms, but they moved into a one-room once there was only six of them—to save rent.

There were six of us too, but none of us died, not when I was young in-anyway. Even though we lived in a one-room, it was nice really. The toilet was indoors and right beside our room so we didn’t have to queue or try to guess when its free ’cause we could hear it flushin’ and that. And there was a long narrow garden we could play in without any hassle.

Noelie and them had to go down loads of stairs to a toilet in a little concrete yard. It was always freezin’ (so was ours though, now I think of it).

The real difference was Noelie’s Ma. She didn’t drink. And she was always singing, even in the daytime. She was a cleaner in Arnotts and had loads of friends.

And Noelie liked school, that’s another difference between me and him. He loved writing and drawing, but he was good at everything.

Spring sunlight...
the slow sound of pencil
soft on Foolscap

When Noelie was ten his mother was singing as she washed the potatoes. She stopped suddenly and fell down. Her face went purple and everyone was crying. She was brought to The Mater, and the next morning she was dead.

snow at the window...
the pull of a long strand
from mother’s hairbrush

That’s all in the book, and how Noelie felt there was a kind of magic happening the way it snowed for the whole day of her funeral. It says in the book:

“It was a slow snow, as gentle as she was, and most of the day it kind of hovered in the air, lowering itself gradually, almost reluctantly, and gradually too, the grey world we lived in became brighter, the dirt and grime of our impoverished streets and buildings became fresh and clean, and there was a brilliance in all this.

“Then I realised what my mother was; she was another kind of beauty, quiet and transformative. In some unnoticeable way she surrounded us with a kind of calm joy, and everything became wonderful around her. Around us.”

black funeral horse...
snowflake after snowflake
melting on his back

I know this bit ’cause I cut it out and walked to Mr. Printo in Finglas and got it laminated. It wasn’t a great idea ‘cos then I couldn’t read most of the next page, but I didn’t mind, it made me feel happy for years—reading that bit of Noelie’s book. I never knew someone could love their Ma that much. Or that a Ma could be so lovely.

It’s become a kind of prayer for me, this little bit of writing. I made loads of copies, hand-written, printed, laminated, framed; and I make a point of reading it whenever I get the 29 bus, ‘cos this bus passes where Noelie did a terrible thing the year after his book was out, after he’d been on the telly and the radio, and even got paid to go to England just to talk about it.

above traffic...
a joyful din of children
with sycamore seeds

The thing about Noelie was that although he wasn’t what you might call “chirpy,” he never looked sad. And he never blew his top or got in scraps with anyone. That’s where the surprise is, I suppose.

But in-anyway, you can’t blame him for what he did. Everyone wants to do that sometimes. I know I do. And it makes sense, I guess, after what happened when his Ma died.

All the kids were sent to different houses and Noelie went to an aunty in Phibsborough. A couple of weeks later, a woman came there with a priest. There were Gardai too, but they stayed in the background and didn’t say anything.

Noelie was sent to a boys home in the middle of nowhere. It sez in his book that he hated it there. Every morning any boy who pissed in his bed got the leather. There was a queue for that sometimes and they were usually the small boys. Noelie hated to hear them all cryin’ and that.

The school was in the same place, in the same big buildings where they slept in huge rooms together, and ate in a big canteen, and never went anywhere except once a year when they were made climb Croagh Patrick with millions of other people, in their bare feet. Fuck tha’.

Even though I didn’t cut it out, I remember one thing Noelie sez in the book about that place:

“This is a heartless enclave, damp and stony.”

I like that word, enclave, and after Noelie explained it to me I sez, “The blocks are a kind of enclave.”

“You have it in one,” he sez.

I didn’t hear it for years, not until war broke out in Yugoslavia, then journalists were saying it all the time.

In-anyway, another boy had the same birthday as Noelie and as soon as they were eighteen they fucked off together and made it all the way to Nottingham to stay with the boy’s uncle, who was a builder. Noelie liked it there, but after a while he headed off to live in different countries, mainly Canada and America. He came back to Ireland ten years later and ended up with all of us in the blocks.

. . .

Sometimes I wish that battleship would come back and fill the bay with menace again and I could sit with Noelie on his balcony and drink cans until we’re bursting so much we could piss in a huge arc that would go out over the city and cover the heads of the gunners with our spray.

I want to say “fuck ‘em.” And I want to hear Noelie laugh at that, as he would.

Autumn dusk...
from a silent sycamore
something is swaying

No-one around here knows what the last things Noelie wrote were. We know it was a lot, the telly said so, and it was written by hand on yellow foolscap found between his shirt and his chest. There was a protest outside the copshop for everyone to see what he wrote. We want to know his last words, what he said that isn’t in the book.

eve of Advent...
tickling his sallow back
greying chest hair

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Sean O’Connor is an award-winning poet, author, and editor whose work has been widely published, translated, and anthologized worldwide. He has written six books, including Even the Mountains (2017), The God of Bones (2022), A Patch of Earth (2023), By Dogen’s Stream (2024), and Fragmentation, winner of the HSA Merit Book Award: Best Haibun Book 2021. See www.seanwriter.com.

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