Featured Writer: Alan Peat
First-person reflections on the art of writing haibun
In one form or another writing has been the one creative constant in my life. From the age of seven through to eighteen I kept a diary, at university in the early 1980s I started to write poetry. By the ’90s I had two collections of longer free verse in print and was working on my first two non-fiction books—a history of the pottery manufacturer W.R.Midwinter Ltd. and a catalogue raisonné of the surrealist artist John Tunnard.
After a chance purchase of a secondhand copy of Harold G. Henderson’s Haiku in English in a London bookshop, I also started to “dabble” in haiku and tanka. I was, at the same time, teaching and writing books for the educational sector—books about punctuation, sentence structure, writing non-fiction etc. These were my “bread and butter” until I worked myself into a mental collapse in 2016. In retrospect, the breakdown was, for me, a stroke of good fortune, as I returned to writing poetry, now mainly concentrating on haiku and tanka. However, I missed the “space” that longer poetic forms afforded. I then came across haibun in Blithe Spirit and Frogpond. The form immediately appealed to me, and I struck lucky. I sent an early attempt to Frogpond and in due course a long, helpful email appeared from the then newly appointed haibun editor Lew Watts. With revisions suggested by Lew, the haibun was published, and over the course of the next couple of years haibun became the main focus of my writing. Although I make no claim to expertise, in this short essay I’ll share my personal thoughts and approaches in the hope that they may be of interest to fellow haibuneers.
Much is made of the three-part structure of haibun, though I think it’s important to remind ourselves that what we are aiming for is a single, integrated whole. For me, each element (title, prose, haiku) is of equal importance. And each should add to the whole. If the title and the haiku—singular or plural—don’t add value to the whole, then the entire haibun falters. For this reason I also don’t feel the need to overly worry about making the haiku link and shift. If the haiku adds value to the whole, then a clear prose-to-poem relationship isn’t necessarily a weakness. As long as the haiku develops an aspect of the prose, a tangential shift isn’t a prerequisite. I’m not suggesting that the haiku shouldn’t link and shift; it’s just that I don’t think it should be perceived as a hard-and-fast rule.
The title tends to be the last element of the haibun that I write, though in a recent project I’ve been working on this isn’t the case. My friends Diana Webb, Lorraine Padden, and I each choose an excerpt from a Shakespearean sonnet (we are working our way through all 154) as a title for a haibun. The haibun might relate to the original sonnet or it could head off in an entirely different direction. This, however, is an exception to my normal practice of writing the title last.
In terms of a haibun’s prose, the first sentence is of paramount importance. I remember, many years ago, reading David Lodge’s book The Art of Fiction. Lodge memorably described the first sentence as the writer’s way of bringing the reader over the “threshold,” as being the gateway to the story/poem. If it’s a dull sentence, the reader is unlikely to want to step inside. For this reason I think long and hard about how I start a haibun. My openings tend to fall into two groups:
1. “Gentle Invitation” openings:
In flat landscapes such as these, it is easy to follow the sun.
2. “Pulled in by the collar” openings:
Mr. Whitton killed on Saturdays; the Sabbath was for reading and weekdays were too busy with work.
Both form questions in the reader’s mind. In the former, my hope would be that the reader might want to discover who the unidentified author is and why that author might be wishing to follow the sun. In the latter —a “medias res” / “middle of things” opening—readers are thrown straight into the heart of the action. I’m hoping they might want to discover who (or what) Mr. Whitton has killed. In both instances, I’m attempting to invoke a sense of mystery and anticipation.
After surmounting the hurdle of the first sentence, the writer of haibun faces the biggest peril: the over-use of adjectives (and adverbs). I enjoy reading haibun with judiciously placed adjectives, and I’m not averse to the odd complex word. But, and it’s a big but, I find florid prose just doesn’t work. The haibun is a constrained form; it’s longer than a haiku or tanka. but it’s still essentially a short form. In such a confined space, every word has to count. For this reason I prefer terse prose and precise use of punctuation—a key part of meaning making.
Perhaps this is one of the main reasons I have been so drawn to the form. I’ve always enjoyed the work of writers whose prose is both terse and elegant. I have in mind Japanese authors such as Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, and Yasunari Kawabata, but also Western writers such as Nina Berberova and Julian Barnes. I recommend reading Berberova. She is perhaps less well-known than the others, but her writing is incredibly vivid despite, or maybe because of, its concision. Her output is spare and yet richly layered—a rare thing indeed. Her books have certainly impacted my own work.
When the body of the haibun’s prose is almost complete, I always read what I’ve written out loud—it’s become a habit. I do this so that I can attend to the rhythm of the sentences. If the rhythm of a sentence “feels wrong,” I rewrite it. It’s hard to explain; to some extent it’s intuitive, though it’s also informed by my lifelong interest in music. I’ve played the trumpet since primary school and I think that having an ear for musical phrasing has helped me to think of poetry in a similar way.
The next aspect of the poem that needs careful consideration is the conclusion. There’s a scene in Peter Shaffer’s film Amadeus when Salieri’s opera Axur, re d’Ormus is being performed and Mozart and his friends mock the overly dramatic ending. Although the scene is entirely fictional, it does point to a danger inherent in both music and literature: the pitfall of the overblown ending. My favourite kind of haibun has an opening that evokes curiosity and an ending that partially satisfies but still leaves me wanting. If I were to return to the cinematic analogy, I guess what I’m saying is that I prefer a European art house ending to a Hollywood blockbuster one. That’s my personal preference, though clearly blockbusters make more money!
I mainly site my haiku at the end of a haibun, though recently I’ve been experimenting with multiple haiku threaded through the prose. My main reason for sticking with a closing haiku is that I like to retain the narrative flow. If haiku are arbitrarily threaded through the prose, I find them (as a reader) distracting—they disrupt the flow. But, if there’s a clear break in the prose I think that multiple haiku can be effective.
To this end, I’ve been experimenting with temporal shifts in my haibun. The idea came after reading Julian Barnes’ novel Levels of Life. The novel is divided into three distinct parts:
1. The Sin of Height. This section explores the early history of ballooning. It also features the relationship between the actress Sarah Bernhardt and Fred Burnaby, a British military officer and balloonist.
2. On the Level. A deeply moving autobiographical section dealing with the profound grief Barnes experienced after the death of his wife and fellow writer Pat Kavanagh.
3. The Loss of Depth. An exploration of the way that photographs can flatten our experience of the world in a similar way to grief.
The book had a profound effect upon me. In a sense, when taken as a whole, it can be read as a metaphor for life and loss: we soar like a balloon when we are young and in love, but ultimately we come back down to earth with a bump.
It led me to develop a three-part haibun that explores a single theme from different historical vantage points—personal past, distant past, the present—with each section capped by a haiku. These “temporal shift haibun” allow me to explore historical incidents and themes, a fascination that I have in common with Barnes. One of them, “Corpse Way,” placed second in this year’s Haiku Society of America haibun contest (see below).
I’ve also recently been experimenting with collaborative haibun, co-writing pieces with my close friend Réka Nyitrai. Réka initiates the prose, I add a haiku and title, and then we BOTH edit the entire haibun into that single, integrated whole I mentioned earlier. For this reason we don’t use italics to identify authorship, as all elements are the result of our collective effort. It’s a different approach, but that foundational three-part structure remains the same. (Editor’s note: the pair’s collection of ekphrastic haibun, Barking at the Coming Rain, was recently published by Alba Publishing; see a review here.)
These are my personal thoughts about haibun. They aren’t intended as guidance or instruction, merely as reflections on my own practice. But I can’t resist giving one piece of advice to aspiring writers of haibun: live widely. Everything we do, see, and think feeds our writing, so the broader our range of interests, the more we have to draw upon. Curiosity is the main driver of all my writing. When I was young, I wanted to be a writer, but I think now this was the wrong target. In a sense it’s like happiness: aim to be happy and you are likely to miss. Instead, if we aim to involve ourselves in engaging activities, the byproduct of that engagement will be happiness. I see my haibun as a byproduct of my interests. My principle target is a full and engaging life. With luck, that will continue to feed the poetry.
The following haibun by Alan Peat won second place in the 2023 Haiku Society of America Haibun Contest. It appeared in Frogpond 46:3 (Autumn 2023).
Corpse Way*
On this long, flat stone—the first of six where the dead were rested—I am sat with my dad, watching crows. Not crows in flight, but walking crows, the ones that move between sheep with that slow, yet determined gait, enlivened now and then with a fluttering hop. This is our regular stop: for tea and biscuits as the views open up.
dawnlight— with no map or compass our whole day aheadA wicker coffin to lighten the load. Too poor for a horse and cart, his neighbors will carry him — sixteen hard, winding miles from Keld to Grinton—over tree roots, across flowing water, then up to the high ground, far from hushed hamlets, where the living might tempt a dead man back. And when they reach St. Andrew’s lichgate, the old warden will lift the lid and, if his body is wrapped in wool cloth, his bones will be fit for the consecrated ground.
less trodden path— the unpicked berries black and shrunkOn the last of the coffin stones I am sat quite alone. It is a fine spot to rest in the gentle lower dale, in the heart of its patchwork of drystone-walled grass. The church door marks the end of my walk. I will pass through it soon enough, but for now I am content to stay seated; happy to listen to the lapwings’ calls.
unmoved for so long— the yew tree I climbed as a boy*Corpse Ways are medieval paths that remote English communities walked to the closest consecrated burial ground.
About the Author
Alan Peat is a UK-based poet and author. His work has featured in Frogpond, Mayfly, Heliosparrow, The Heron’s Nest, Presence, Hedgerow, and Blithe Spirit, among others. He was runner-up in the 2021 British Haiku Society’s Ken and Norah Jones Haibun Award and won a Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun 2022. His book of collaborative ekphrastic haibun with Réka Nytrai, Barking at the Coming Rain (Alba Publishing, 2023) is available on www.amazon.co.uk or by e-mailing alanpeat@icloud.com.