Featured Writer: Lew Watts

First-person reflections on the art of writing haibun

I have spent most of my life burying the past, moving on constantly, never looking back. It’s a consequence of childhood trauma, a set of experiences that had to remain buried. And without being totally aware, this extended to other parts of my life: forgotten dreams, friends and family left behind, the most personal poems filed away. Writing haibun has been my savior—it has allowed me, safely, to resurface many memories.

Earlier this year, I was heavily engaged with pulling together a new collection of haiku and haibun. I had not reread most of the haibun since they were published, and it was a shock at times to read what I had written and shared with the world. It also raised a question: why did some of the more recent haibun resonate stronger with me?

I have long answered the question, “What is a haibun?” by leaning on Bruce Ross’s comment in How to Haiku: A Writer’s Guide to Haiku and Related Forms (Tuttle Press, 2002): “If a haiku is an insight into a moment of experience, a haibun is the story or narrative of how one came to have that experience.” And I had always assumed that the story, or narrative, was contained within the prose (usually written first), away from which the haiku leaped. In this telling, the gestalt of the experience may well be captured by the haibun as a whole, but the core is captured within the prose.

But consider this haibun of mine, first published in Contemporary Haibun Online 16.3 (and anthologized in Red Moon Press’s Contemporary Haibun Volume 16):

Deposition

“Help yourself,” the quarryman says. Steve saunters over to the dark layer, then motions for me to come. This is indeed what we’ve been looking for—the Sandwick Fish Bed, of Devonian age. The rock splits easily, and we find fragments of the armored fish, Coccosteus, and an occasional fin. We note a sheen preserved on many split surfaces. This is primary current lineation, caused by the alignment of tiny mica flakes as water sloshed across the ancient lake bed. The sheen marks the orientation of the paleocurrent, but not its direction. Suddenly, I hear a yell—Steve has found something. There, in the middle of a large mica-sheened surface, lies a complete Osteolepis. The fossil fish appears perfect, though one scale is missing. Nine inches away, along the primary current lineation, we find it.

where she was found . . .
my mother’s head pointing
against the tide

What is the key “experience” here?

I remember writing this haibun, thinking back to that glorious day of discovery in the Orkney Islands. As always happens after writing the prose, my mind started wandering to possibilities for a final haiku. Suddenly, the memory of my mother’s suicide came rushing toward me. She likely jumped off the same bridge as her mother—her body was found on a beach, some ten miles away.

Bruce Ross (in Contemporary Haibun Online 14.4) talks about haibun being a “narrative of an epiphany,” and I would agree. In “Deposition” that moment of epiphany culminated in the writing of the final haiku. That was the key “experience.”

I recently asked my friend, Charles Trumbull, how best to define the kind of link involved in “Deposition.” His first thought was that, as a “triggered memory,” it could be considered as kotoba-zuke—linkage by word, as a form of allusion. But the haiku clearly involved a strong emotional response to the prose—perhaps nioi-zuke, or linkage by scent. The jury is still out, not least since neither seems able to capture the enormity of this “release of a buried memory.”

When I looked back at my published haibun earlier this year, it was clear that the prose was written first in almost all of them—in fact, the weakest were where the prose came later and tried to link (and shift) to the haiku. Indeed, a haibun like “Deposition” could only have been written with the prose first. That initial narrative was needed to surface and release the haiku from the depths.

In a recent issue of Modern Haiku (52.2), Lee Gurga provides a fascinating analysis of how haiku are stepping out from so-called “normative” forms in new and exciting directions. In a telling section, he describes his own transformation as a haiku poet: “Thus my haiku journey involves moving from striving for Blyth’s ‘poem of enlightenment’ to writing itself as enlightenment.” Gurga goes on to say, “I remember Bill Higginson saying that the ‘aha’ moment that we are all looking for sometimes comes in the original experience of nature and at other times in the making of the poem itself.” This is what happened with “Deposition.” This is also what happened with those recent haibun that resonated more strongly. This is what I’m striving for.

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About the Author

Lew Watts is the haibun co-editor of Frogpond and the author of Tick-Tock (Snapshot Press, 2019), a haibun collection that received an Honorable Mention in the Haiku Society of America’s 2020 Merit Book Awards. His publications also include the novel Marcel Malone, the poetry collection Lessons for Tangueros, and a forthcoming collection of haiku and haibun from Snapshot Press. Born and raised in Splott, an onomatopoeic district of Cardiff, Wales, he moved to the U.S. in 2002 after working in the energy industry in Europe, Scandinavia, the Middle East, and Africa. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Roxanne Decyk.