Featured Writer: Judson Evans

First-person reflections on the art of writing haibun

The Haiku as “Solvent” in Lyric Haibun

After studying paleolithic cave painting over the last six years for a collaborative book called Chalk Song, I’ve been preoccupied by the origin of image-making, which has focused my thinking about the relationship of prose text to haiku in haibun. For me, haibun is a charged membrane, a cave wall where one is not so much adding pigment as slavering solvent around cracks in limestone where images leak through.

Sometimes as a very young child, just before sleep, I would stare at the ceiling of my room and find myriad-colored lozenges containing images I could choose to dream. Powerful images are still the central stimuli of my writing. When studying cave painting, I discovered the “shaman-artist” theory of David Lewis-Williams, whose fascinating book The Mind in the Cave develops the analogies noted above between cave and “membrane,” paint and “solvent.” For Lewis-Williams, the first cave painters were shamans who sought out altered states of consciousness to reach sources of power in nature. The first markings on cave walls, then, were projections of the brain stimulated by the sensory deprivation, silence, and disoriented space of the cave. The inner and outer combined to form a vortex of powerful images of another world. To paraphrase surrealist Paul Eluard: “There is another, but it is inside this world.”

I’ve come to imagine the prose of the haiku as an experience of the ordinary world of the 10,000 things, an experience furnished not just with eye-catching perceptual objects, but also with intimations or “leaks” from another, more powerful world. I’m too much of a strange amalgam of mystic and skeptic to be able to name that other world. For the shaman-artists who left red ochre handprints on the wall of paleolithic caves in southern France, these marks were an act of reaching across, of absorption. The energy that came through the cave wall was a potency, a sensory power that linked with the raw movement, fertility, and knowledge of the herds of bison, the movements of rain clouds, shifts of seasons. A whole or plenum that contained the spirits of the dead. Whatever is painted on the cave wall, there are places—“thin places,” as Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey, would call them—where energy flows through. It could be the handprint, or a flint blade cutting across an image, or a horse tooth placed in a crack. When a haibun is fully alive, the haiku does more than ornament, comment, or modulate by means of images; it bleeds through, it enacts passage.

In some cases, the haiku of haibun crack through the boundary between the living and dead. As co-editor of haibun for Frogpond, I have noted the resourcefulness of haibun to do the work of elegy and have highlighted the large number of elegiac haibun being written. (In the Autumn 2022 issue of Frogpond, I think of work by Doris Lynch, Peg Cherrin-Myers, and Tom Painting.) In a haibun published in Modern Haiku (Autumn 2021), I relived a commemorative potluck that a small group of my late mother’s Florida friends held in her honor:

Downpour Dark Room

Thunder doesn’t stop running bare foot to harvest
six ripe mangoes. We watch the back-lit Cuban tree frogs
climb the screens. We, too, are an invasive species here:
two males— stepfather and awkward stepson—released
from the strain of making conversation with these mourners, recounters,
familiars of my mother—the coven, coffee klatch, sangha—
filament, filament, filament of her flickering lamp, just to peel,
core, baste, broil, sauté, uncork—eat and drink to eat and drink—
in the almost anonymity of being without her, while they, the re-enactors,
at yoga, at divining secret fates and feelings, shine up the rainy dark
of the Florida studio. I hear her voice: If I ever got down on the floor I’d never
get up again…. inside my head in that scrap of regret
she holds on by, endlessly describing never finishing
the painting of ripe fruit on a chipped blue plate.

mango flesh—
in the white porcelain sink
the cut sun bleeds

In the first stages of writing this haibun, there was much more reportage and listing: the rain and our getting caught and soaked in it, the yoga mats everywhere, the awkwardness of my relationship with my stepfather, the various recipes, the lantern in the kitchen, the specific music, the paintings by the host, and in the yard the samurai-like crab that greeted us. But all of this kept me locked inside this very immediate sensory world while my mother remained absent.

I probed at various isolated images within the prose searching for a “thin place.” Often in paleolithic cave paintings the viewer is caught by charcoal or ochre marking out a single detail— an eye or snout—and only a shift of light reveals the rest of the image in the very contours of the cave wall. I’ve always thought of haiku as metonymy rather than a metaphor—a fragment of a larger whole. When we use a “kigo,” that larger whole is the cycle of samsara, but in this piece I wanted an image that could be a microcosm of my mother’s emotional entanglements with her community, and of her perceptual world. Ultimately, it was the link between the mangos brought in from the rain and the sketches of mangos among my mother’s art that began an opening; then the tree frog on the outside of the screen trying to get in. In a sudden leap, cutting into the mango flesh broke through to my mother’s presence.

In my most recent project, I have created a sequence of haibun in the form of postcards (three of which are published in this issue). They are written by a deeply conflicted persona on a cross-country trip and addressed to a mysterious couple only identified by the myriad playful nicknames bestowed upon them (“Dear Benevolent Geniuses,” “Dear Conscientious Objectors,” “Dear Ladies of the Canyon”), always with sardonic campiness. The character who emerges, “Bob,” is based on someone who had been a tenant in a basement apartment in the house I share with my husband. He was a closeted gay man from an evangelical family in Texas, a stymied intellectual—he had been a Classics major—pressured into finding a “real” career as an accountant.

When he came to our door, he was escaping a violent relationship and showed evidence of trauma. In reality, he would live in our house for only a year and a half, and it took most of that time to break through to develop the beginnings of a trusting friendship. Then he “set out for the territories,” as he put it, and launched a cross-country car trip to the promised land of San Francisco. We didn’t expect to hear from him again, but there were three epigraph-length scrawled postcards, then a long silence, followed by a late-night call from a coroner in California. He had committed suicide, and the only information to connect him with next of kin was our phone number. The juxtaposition of the hopeful trip and the suicide haunted me for years, particularly because ten years before he entered our lives, I had lost my first partner to suicide. At some point, I rediscovered the three postcards, and realized that my imagination had exaggerated, elaborated, what he had written. I wanted him to have more life.

Although I was conflicted about the ethics of what I was doing, I found myself writing more postcards, the ones he didn’t write, going to Google Maps to trace out the quirky zigzag pilgrimage I invented for him. Somehow, a voice came that was a transcription of neither his voice nor mine. As I plotted out and researched eccentric tourist sites, I was inspired by the details and images of odd Americana as well as memories of my own cross-country travels, always refracted through what my imagination trusted Bob would notice and respond to.

The postcards are insider-intimate, yet oddly stagy, and we slowly get the suspicion that the recipients are imaginary friends. This writing process has been an experiment in thinking about where haiku come from: how much is “self”? how much “other”? The character is not me, is not a haiku poet, but he is perceptive and—maybe most importantly—he sees the world obliquely, through a unique distorting lens. In writing the haibun, I’ve been forced to understand, in a visceral way, a desolation and loneliness that isn’t mine. And in each of these “postcards,” the haiku becomes fraught and charged as it attempts a shifting, perilous “crossing” between self and not-self. While the haiku prose of these pieces maintains Bob’s perceptions, the haiku break through to my own. Here is “Postcard #3,” published in the Autumn 2022 Modern Haiku:

Postcard #3: Oscar Wilde Bookstore,
New York City, Christopher & Gay St.,
Sept. 2, 1998

My Polymorphous Fellow Travelers,

This postcard reminded me of your poster: “Navy Seals
Blasted by Cold Water.” I hid in your bathroom to study it,
escaping the crowd at your party, titillated at the thickly muscled
bodies, hard-pressed into each other’s contours, each trying
to find safe center of the scrum. Fleshly murmuration.
(Could I confuse predators as part of a larger, multi-limbed body?)
I’m still trying to find that body electric minus electrocution,
minus the fire-hose blast of icy water—old queer Walt’s
kissing lightly and being kissed in return.

stark naked
starling
without its flock

Bellwether Bob

When I reflect on this piece, I realize that the source of Bob’s erotic discomfiture—the sexy Navy Seals poster—was a piece of décor brought into my world when my husband moved in with me. Whatever titillation it might have had for us numbed out over the years of having it as “wallpaper” in our bathroom when we brushed our teeth. The real Bob never actually saw it; he never came to that “party,” though he was invited. In the weeks of writing the first haibun of this series, I began to see something fresh in the poster—the vulnerability of a bunch of men in their long johns, huddling behind each others’ bodies for protection. Early on a drizzly, cold autumn morning during those weeks, starlings overtook our birdfeeder. Running out in a t-shirt and shorts to throw something in the compost, I saw one lone, wet startling left on the feeder. Somewhere between poster and birdfeeder I felt an ambivalent charge— memories of high school gym shower, arousal and shame—but equally memories of that solstice party that Bob never came to, the warmth of my chosen family of friends. The poster’s “murmuration” took on a new meaning, and through the haiku I was able to cross into Bob’s isolation.

I have always wanted too much from haibun and I have never gotten over its difficulty. I have written myself into many corners of the cave and sometimes, like a cartoon character, have sketched an exit with a piece of charcoal and found a way out. The struggle for me is trying to find that fluid passage, which in everyday terms is the connection between image and narrative—part and whole, vertical and horizontal. Isolated images stimulate narrative context; narratives coalesce around or precipitate concrete images. For me this is a tussle between observation and imagination—as Wallace Stevens writes in “The Snow Man,” between “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Haibun remains an experimental archeology where the charge of lyric prose offers fossil footprints back to the haiku.

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Works Cited

Chalk Song by Gale Batchelder, Susan Berger Jones, and Judson Evan. Boston: Lily Poetry Press, 2021.

The Mind in the Cave by David Lewis-Williams. The Mind in the Cave. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.

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About the Author

Judson Evans is a full-time Professor of Liberal Arts at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches poetry workshops focusing on haiku, haibun, and renku, and a visual studies course on Paleolithic cave art. He recently became co-editor of haibun for Frogpond. In 2007 he was chosen as an “Emerging Poet” by John Yau for The Academy of American Poets, and in 2013 he won the Philip Booth Poetry Prize from Salt Hill Review. His poems have appeared most recently in Folio, Volt, 1913: a journal of forms, Cutbank, and The Sugar House Review.