Two Favorite Haibun, by Matthew Caretti - contemporary haibun online

Matthew Caretti

Two Favorite Haibun

Travel, the Senses, and the Unfamiliar

My first stop on a soon-to-begin bit of island hopping across Oceania will be Samoa and its Upolu and Savai’i islands. At the top of my to-do list—quite brief for this laid-back journey—is a visit to the Robert Louis Stevenson home and museum, as well as a hike to the site of his hilltop grave. I mention this because Stevenson was an epic traveler here in the South Pacific and once wrote, “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” This expresses well my own approach to this endeavor and, perhaps, the ideal segue into the craft of “travel haibun.” This sub-genre, in its broadest sense, doesn’t necessarily entail the written account of an epic pilgrimage or a lengthy expatriate sojourn. It could instead include a rendering of a trip to the in-laws, a weekend amble along a new trail near one’s home, or even an inner contemplative journey, for when we move body and mind we allow ourselves the possibility of encountering and sensing the unfamiliar. And it is here, at the unfamiliar, that travel, the senses, and haibun converge.

Russian literary theorist Victor Schlovsky contended that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make the object ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” This “defamiliarization” is, in fact, a natural extension of travel. The places and people, their languages and traditions, are at the moment of first impression unknown. Hence, travel haibun present a unique challenge—how to not only make the familiar unfamiliar, but also, while writing of foreign lands, render the unfamiliar familiar. It is a delicate dance.

This brings us to the idea of wonder. The epigraph to my latest book, a collection of haiku inspired by life here in American Samoa, is lifted from Umberto Eco’s historical novel The Island of the Day Before, in which an Italian nobleman is shipwrecked and washes up, or nearly so, on a mysterious Pacific island. In this passage, Eco writes about how a place quite far from home can destabilize our sensibilities:

To live in the Antipodes, then, means reconstructing instinct, knowing how to make a marvel nature and nature a marvel, to learn how unstable the world is, which in one half follows certain laws, and in the other half the opposite of those laws.

To further dissect this idea, let’s consider the process of sensing: the raw feeling, the perception of that feeling, and the mentation that arises from those perceptions. In her treatise on our five faculties, A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman writes, “The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.” And it is here, I believe, we hit on the basis for composing successful haiku and haibun—the “vibrant morsels” and their reassembly into meaningful patterns. Of course, this begins with careful (or “keen” for those more familiar with one of the most common definitions of haiku) observation of our surroundings, an awareness perhaps more easily accessed when faced with exotic or, at the very least, newly discovered places.

My travel journals are filled with such morsels, snippets of places and acts and people and all else that register as somehow unprecedented and, with practice, are “keenly perceived.” At the moment of their recording, most often, there isn’t an immediate inspiration for reassembling them, though at times striking patterns do arise. It is most often later, and sometimes well after the sensations have passed, that what was once raw begins to process through memory, some later experience, or even a bit of research into a haibun, the buttonhole and buttoning of prose and haiku.

In Ackerman’s book, she also reminds us that “the word ‘poet’ comes from an Aramaic word that denotes the sound of water flowing over pebbles.” Most certainly a pleasing sound and one to which haijin aspire. And so we have movement, sensations, and the forming of those into meaningful writing that is satisfying to the heart, mind, and ear. This is certainly no easy task, and its complexity is, I recall all too well, what kept me from trusting some of the earliest haibun pieces I penned, the genre discovered when my brother gifted me a translation of Basho’s Oku no Hosmichi. However, what ultimately led me to submit some of my own writing was that of a poet who I felt to be a kindred spirit (though with a more abundant sense of humor). His work showed the way toward haibun that resonates with the heart and mind, and proves quite pleasing to the ear.

That poet is Bob Lucky, who would also become the editor at contemporary haibun online with whom I would share many of my earliest pieces. I am therefore indebted to him on many levels—for the inspiration, the role modeling for a fellow expat and traveler, and the kind words of support offered following each submission. I’ve had the greatest pleasure these past several weeks searching for and reading or re-reading many of his haibun. As Bob notes in his April 2020 cho Featured Writer musings, “My early haibun were travel-based and autobiographical.” His are haibun that, melodious as they may be, work mostly on the level of making the unfamiliar familiar. Pieces that introduce to the world at large a bit more about what it means to be human and the myriad ways that humanity expresses itself. This begins with those raw sensations processed over time and filtered through reminiscence. Here is one of Bob’s early haibun:

Memories of a Lunch
hard rain
the sound of Hindi film songs
from the kitchen
One day in Chiang Mai a colleague invites me to lunch at a nameless Indian restaurant not far from the Sikh gurudwara. A Punjabi widow has set up two tables in her front room and dishes out whatever she’s got on the stove in the kitchen, always a dal, another vegetable dish, raita, and fresh chapattis that disappear quickly from the communal bread basket. I speak to her in my rusty, formal Hindi. She tells me about her late husband, her two married sons who live nearby in the town of Lamphun, her life in Delhi, her move to Thailand. My Hindi is not quite up to the task, and she periodically slips into Punjabi, but I do my best to keep up and manage to answer questions about my family. Putting on my shoes to leave, I notice the picture of the Thai King next to a portrait of Guru Nanak.
sticky afternoon
the heavy fragrance
of frangipani

This piece, included the March 2008 issue of contemporary haibun online, served in many ways as a catalyst for my own first submission to cho. It appeared about a year-and-a-half before I took the leap, when I was just beginning to read more widely within the genre. I admire this haibun in particular for its unique setting, as well as the great number of sensations it engages. To begin at the beginning, the title acknowledges immediately the role of memory here, but also sets forth the common social practice of a shared meal. The opening haiku then takes us from outside to inside, from monsoon rains to a distinct style of music emanating from a venerated space, the kitchen. Sound and sound and space.

We then engage an extended zoom of places within places, a somewhat labored conversation in a foreign tongue that includes the universal bond of family, and a quick and closing juxtaposition of the worldly and the spiritual. The masterful closing haiku then engages the raw, tactile “sticky” humidity (nothing like it when a Southeast Asian deluge is followed by a reemergence of the sweltering sun) and the olfactory “the heavy fragrance / of frangipani.” A lovely bit of alliteration here, too. The cumulative effect, then, is to take this special place in an exotic locale and climate, perhaps all quite unfamiliar, and yet find an ideal balance with the familiars of a shared meal and the universally human struggle to adapt—to find some stability, perhaps even equanimity, between or within the temporal and the transcendent.

Bob’s early haibun, like “Memories of a Lunch,” showed me a way forward in terms of merging movement and unfamiliar sensation with the shared familiarity of our humanity. In a way, and to extend the earlier metaphor, Bob taught me how to dance (and I hope he’s laughing at the literal imagery that might be associated with such an act). I want to share then an unpublished piece of mine that I feel trots with a bit with the same energy as those Bob might compose. At its heart is a most unusual place, the dissonance of a deep love, and, of course, the unprompted ruminations of memory.

A Master of Still Life, Which It Is Not

We make love. Hidden in a cave behind a waterfall. Within our tent. Atop our sleeping bags, then each other in turn. Our flaps open to the power and passion of the fall. To the wetting spray of its tumble. Pulling together from separate postings in Rwanda and South Africa into these Ruwenzori Mountains. Somewhere high above the DRC’s sprawling plains, where mixed herds become still-life shadows before they irrupt into a great migration. We, too, soon move off into other passions. Other arms. Yet all these years later I wonder, Can a love of this sort be unmade? If not unmade, what does it become? Untended memory, yes. And then?
giant groundsel    bitter medicine of the moon

A few points of contrast reveal that, as my neighbors here say, there’s more than one way to peel a banana. In “A Master of Still Life…,” the telescoping effect moves from an intimate moment to the setting itself, both near and farther off, and then into memory. The title is far less literal, yet connected both to the scene at hand and an assertion about how it might be understood. Then the brooding, the internal monologue, and a one-line haiku denouement that couples-contrasts flora endemic to the mountains and a reference to Ptolemy’s name for this range—Mountains of the Moon—with a nod to lessons learned, however painful, of love and loss. Here the familiar moves within the unfamiliar, sensations of the known world of emotion textured with “vibrant morsels” of the unknown.

In the “Courting the Muse” chapter of her book on the senses, Ackerman wrote: “When scientists, philosophers, and other commentators speak of the real world, they’re talking about a myth, a convenient fiction. The world is a construct the brain builds based on the sensory information it’s given, and the information is only a small part of all that’s available.” Thus, familiar and unfamiliar serve as mere descriptors pointing us toward something more epic. More mythic. A journey of bewilderment that extends both to and from the exterior and interior worlds. A constant challenge to the status quo of what’s “real.” A movement of wonder.

In the end, if we take a hard and honest look at the world and our place in it, we might be relieved to find it’s all rather perplexing, even that which is most familiar. It just depends how we look. I’ll be ever grateful to Bob Lucky for revealing to me a means to cast a thoughtful gaze as I travel, as I settle in foreign places and as I work towards some greater understanding of what it means to be human. Deeply so.

About the Author

Matthew Caretti began publishing his poems in 2009, though his fascination with Eastern short-form genres began much earlier. In 2017, he garnered the Snapshot Press eChapbook Award for Harvesting Stones. In 2022 published his first collection in print, Africa, Buddha, with Red Moon Press. Red Moon also recently published a collection of his haiku, Ukelele Drift: Poems from a Small Island (2023). He lives and teaches high school English in Pago Pago, American Samoa.

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