Ray Rasmussen
Larry Kimmel's "Evening Walk": Moving Beyond Standard Haibun
Introduction: Variation in Haibun
Publications during English-language haibun's growth spurt from the 1990s to present (1) reveal a great deal of experimentation, so much so it led Haibun Today Editor Jeffrey Woodward to comment:
Haibun as a genre is fluid and ill-defined, volatile and subject daily to change, invisible to the public-at-large and widely misapprehended by haiku editors and commentators. Haibun is richly varied, by its foremost practitioners, in matter and technique but paradoxically Lilliputian in character when this achievement is measured against what appears to be its inexhaustible promise. (2)
It’s no surprise that the easily observed variation in both subject and form has led to an ongoing discussion about what haibun is and isn't. Indeed, examine any journal, anthology, collection, personal blog or haiku association website and you'll find pronouncements about the definition of haibun and how it differentiates itself from other genres. This isn’t to say that expressing opinions about haibun’s characteristics is a bad thing to do or even premature in haibun’s short history, just that that’s all they are, opinions about a form that is currently evolving. Nor does it mean that anything goes.
Journal Editors, for example, have preferences for content and style of both prose and haiku and often will express those preferences in the journal's submission pages.
As for reasons for the plethora of definitions, for one thing, journal editors need to tell writers what they’re looking for; for another, writers who produce collections tend to explain haibun to whomever might read their work, largely because most people have never heard of the genre; and, new writers require some guidance in order to create something akin to a haibun, as opposed to, for example, flash fiction with a 3-line ditty attached at the end.
Having observed a high degree of variation in subject and form of published haibun, Haibun Today Editor Jeffrey Woodward quipped:
. . . one is more likely to confront a unicorn than any consensus of the structure and nature of haibun. (3)
And Michael McClintock, an undisputed master of the genre, suggests that if we consider the attempts at definitions of poetry and literature, we need not be overly concerned about pinpointing haibun at this stage:
… beyond the rudimentary “a haibun is prose and haiku” kind of treatment … preoccupation with defining haibun is, I think, a non-starter, just as similar preoccupations have been for virtually all literature and, indeed, all art. . . . A “rudimentary” description is all you need; each piece of art either contributes to, or in some small way offers, its own definition. (4)
Despite the variation in style and content, as Woodward states:
No form of haibun will be encountered more frequently than … the basic unit of one paragraph and one haiku. (5)
Woodward labeled this form "Standard" and described several variations based on where the poem is placed, for example, before or after the prose. To test his assertion about frequency, I extended his definition of "Standard" to two short paragraphs or a long one coupled with one or two poems wherever the poems are placed and sampled the recent issues of Contemporary Haibun Online and Haibun Today. And, indeed, 86 % of the contents fit the standard tag. An inspection of the haibun in Modern Haiku's latest issue (47.2, Summer 2016) reveals a similar pattern – eight of the ten are "Standard."
While the term “Standard” doesn’t necessarily connote a pejorative, Woodward and Ken Jones have argued that lengthier and literary (poetic) work is needed for haibun to find its place in the world of poetry. By “lengthy,” Woodward means something other than "standard" haibun – "the stock haibun formula: one paragraph, one haiku, fini." (6) And Jones expanded on the need for literary writing:
A large proportion of Western haibun are bald narratives rendered in colorless and banal prose, with a bland earnestness devoid of feeling, irony or any subtlety. Their inconsequential themes meander nowhere, and many read like nature walk guides, or holiday letters, or just casual, prosaic anecdotes. (7)
In my view, lengthier haibun, if well written, would provide welcome variation from the predominant short pieces that, as one reads through the journal, begin to feel more like a series of haiku moments, snippets so small that they more resemble a few strings of haiku than fuller accounts of life experiences.
Of the several hundred practitioners of contemporary haibun, only a dozen or so regularly publish lengthy haibun and many of those are writers of haibun’s cousin, tanka prose (8). My personal rationale for producing mostly “Standard” haibun is that I don't easily sustain a long storyline and I'm not a writer of prose poetry. As my internal excuse maker puts it, the heart of haibun is an autobiographical story, and it need not be long or literary, just written well enough to be engaging.
I: Comments on a Longer than Standard Haibun
Despite my excuse making, I think a close examination of longer pieces is worthwhile to serve as models for those of us who tend to write exclusively in the standard form and may wish to produce more expansive pieces. In short, why not use the structure, if not the words, of some of our successful writers of non-standard haibun? If this sounds like a call for a bit of copycatting, it is. But I'll defer the issue of the whys and why nots of derivative writing more fully in the last section. For now, the focus is to explore the style and structure of a haibun that I admire by Larry Kimmel. His "Evening Walk" (9) is worthy of a close look not only for its length and lyricism, but also for Kimmel's approach to interweaving prose and poems. In short, if you want to compose longer pieces, his is one approach worth examining.
Evening Walk
The heat still rises from the fields and road mingling the essences of grass and dust. I enjoy these solitary walks after a day of manuscripts and notes.
her diary—
if only I hadn't forced its tiny lock . . .
The dog runs ahead, circles, explores a field of buckwheat, then checks back with me before another tongue-flapping foray. He always returns as if to explain himself and ask permission.
once in a moonlit orchard
what might have been . . .
A great dead tree stands in arrested motion, as if tossed by an airy turbulence, the perfect sculpture for a stormy life, its barnwood gray set off by forest green.
jazz
and the neon, nylon nights—
your fame is everywhere
old friend
I am stretched with longing
Today, I noticed that autumn's tarnish has touched the tree outside my window. In a month or so, it too, will show its structure.
And the autumn woods
so lovely that you want
but don't know what it is
you want—
it only makes you sorry.
The serene violence of the sunset, that flared briefly like an opened forge, is now replaced by a gray veil.
stemless in the dusk
the Queen Anne's lace float—
the path grows luminous
The dog has gone ahead now, not asking for my permission. He will be waiting at the back door. I crest the last hill to home and see an orange moon low in an orchid sky.
as night takes over . . .
walking knee-deep
in the chirring
of crickets
Kimmel's haibun has two distinct streams: 1) a series of short prose paragraphs related to his observations of the external setting of his walk, and 2) a series of poems, one after each paragraph, related to his internal musings. In my view, either stream could serve as a satisfying haibun. As shown below, stripped of the poems the prose becomes a lyrical narrative of an evening walk. Any of the poems might suffice to complete the piece and I've arbitrarily included the last one.
Evening Walk (1 Paragraph of Prose + 1 Poem)
The heat still rises from the fields and road mingling the essences of grass and dust. I enjoy these solitary walks after a day of manuscripts and notes. The dog runs ahead, circles, explores a field of buckwheat, then checks back with me before another tongue-flapping foray. He always returns as if to explain himself and ask permission. A great dead tree stands in arrested motion, as if tossed by an airy turbulence, the perfect sculpture for a stormy life, its barnwood gray set off by forest green. Today, I noticed that autumn's tarnish has touched the tree outside my window. In a month or so, it too, will show its structure. The serene violence of the sunset, that flared briefly like an opened forge, is now replaced by a gray veil. The dog has gone ahead now, not asking for my permission. He will be waiting at the back door. I crest the last hill to home and see an orange moon low in an orchid sky.
as night takes over . . .
walking knee-deep
in the chirring
of crickets
Alternatively, the poems, placed together as a sequence and eliminating the prose, could also serve as a hybrid haibun.
Evening Walk (Poem Sequence)
her diary—
if only I hadn't forced its tiny lock . . .
once in a moonlit orchard
what might have been . . .
jazz
and the neon, nylon nights—
your fame is everywhere
old friend
I am stretched with longing
And the autumn woods
so lovely that you want
but don't know what it is
you want—
it only makes you sorry.
stemless in the dusk
the Queen Anne's lace float—
the path grows luminous
as night takes over . . .
walking knee-deep
in the chirring
of crickets
Kimmel's poem sequence represents a series of musings about loss, regret and longing. In case you're concerned that I've labeled his haiku/tanka sequence a haibun, consider that in Modern Haiku editor Roberta Beary's recently released memoir Deflection, roughly one third of the pieces are haiku/tanka sequences. (10) Furthermore, both poem sequences and free verse are now showing up in most of our journals, albeit infrequently.
My point isn't that Kimmel's haibun is best or equally effective either as standard prose plus a poem or as a poem sequence without prose. Haibun's uniqueness from other forms such as prose poetry, memoirs and creative non-fiction is that it has both prose and haiku and/or tanka poems and, when done well, the sum of the two is greater than the parts. Nobuyuki Yuasa has this to say about the marriage between prose and poems:
I should like to impose one severe restriction on haibun: that it has to be a blend of haiku poetry and haiku prose; the interaction between these is haibun's greatest merit. In good haibun, the prose deepens the understanding of the poetry, and the poetry gives greater energy to the prose. The relationship is like that between the moon and the earth: each makes the other more beautiful. (11)
Kimmel's structure has prose focused mostly on the external world – that which he sees, hears, smells while on his walk – and poems focused mostly on the internal world – his musings about relationships, regrets and loss, past and present. And isn't this how we humans typically experience our meanders in the external world? While we may take walks with the intention of enjoying the outdoors, our minds insist on attention to inner dialogues, attention to the chirring of crickets. Oftentimes I take an hour-long walk and spend but a few minutes in the external world I'm traveling through. Thus the ginko – the haiku nature walk – a meditative approach designed to assist in making a shift from the inner dialogue to being more present in the external world, and thus to capture phrases for haiku composition that focus largely on showing that external world. (12)
While there's a good deal of poetic phrasing in Kimmel's prose and poems, it's both how they intertwine and the difference in subject matter between the prose and poem themes that caught my attention. Contemporary Haibun Online editor Bob Lucky has described the importance of a link-shift between prose and poem as follows:
I can read hybrid poems in which the prose is nature writing, erotica, fiction, diary/journal, science fiction, epistles, murder mystery, historical essay, etymological musing, personal essay, prose poem, or recipe and as long as the haiku has that magical link and shift, that it resonates with the prose, illuminates the prose, then it reads like a haibun to me. (13)
Consider the striking shift in subject between Kimmel's first paragraph and its following poem:
The heat still rises from the fields and road mingling the essences of grass and dust. I enjoy these solitary walks after a day of manuscripts and notes.
her diary—
if only I hadn't forced its tiny lock . . .
The prose is largely focused on the external world as observed by Kimmel. Escaping from a day of heady work on manuscripts and notes, he takes us directly into the walk and then shifts to the poem which contains his internal musings about events in his life – in this case regrets about having looked at a daughter's or lover's or spouse's diary and perhaps having damaged or lost that relationship.
The shift is so abrupt, a reader might wonder, where's the link? – how did he get from prose to poem? While the poem's subject takes the prescribed step away from the prose, it's a big step. My take is that the mingling of grass and dust could serve a metaphor for the present and the past. In this case, life now (grass) versus his regret about a past action (dust). But do we really need to infer a metaphor to make a connection between prose and poem? Perhaps, while walking, he's simply mulling over his past relationships for whatever reason. Don't we all do that from time to time?
The next pair shifts back to the external (prose) and again returns to the internal (poem):
The dog runs ahead, circles, explores a field of buckwheat, then checks back with me before another tongue-flapping foray. He always returns as if to explain himself and ask permission.
once in a moonlit orchard
what might have been . . .
As I relate to the prose, the dog's circling is an apt metaphor for what my mind does when internally wandering through past and present relationships or work or family issues. The poem again takes us to something in Kimmel's past, a sense of loss about what might have been – perhaps a lost romance, perhaps related to the material in the first poem, perhaps not. Thus, the relationship between prose and poem becomes more apparent in that a pattern has been set between prose (present/external) and poem (past/internal).
The third prose/poem repeats the pattern:
A great dead tree stands in arrested motion, as if tossed by an airy turbulence, the perfect sculpture for a stormy life, its barnwood gray set off by forest green.
jazz
and the neon, nylon nights—
your fame is everywhere
old friend
I am stretched with longing
The words, “dead” "arrested motion" "turbulence" "stormy" show a troubled, perhaps even depressed (“barnwood gray”) internal world. And the external/internal structure is further reinforced as the poem shifts to what seems to be yet another relationship, the fame of an old friend and Kimmel's longing for either a similar fame or for the lost relationship or both. While the subject of the poem seems unrelated to the previous ones, would it matter that he’s musing about different regrets in his life?
The next pair of prose and poem again show is a play between the external and internal:
Today, I noticed that autumn's tarnish has touched the tree outside my window. In a month or so, it too, will show its structure.
And the autumn woods
so lovely that you want
but don't know what it is
you want—
it only makes you sorry.
The poem in this case shows a different content – a bit of philosophical musing based on Kimmel’s present feelings as he walks as opposed of recollections of regretful events in his life.
The fourth pair, however, represents a further change in the poem’s focus:
The serene violence of the sunset, that flared briefly like an opened forge, is now replaced by a gray veil.
stemless in the dusk
the Queen Anne's lace float—
the path grows luminous
The external can again be viewed as a showcase for the internal feelings that Kimmel has with respect to his memories. Where we might expect something like "the beauty of a lavender sunset" we have instead the "violence of the sunset" and "a gray veil." But in this sequence, the poem shifts to also using the external to show the internal. That is, instead of telling us about his internal musings, Kimmel is using "stemless" and "the Queen Anne's lace float” as metaphors, perhaps for a feeling of rootlessness and how the mind tends to range above the external world like a cloud. Interesting the word “luminous” … perhaps something illuminated or settled?
And the final pair also follows that change to an external/external pattern.
The dog has gone ahead now, not asking for my permission. He will be waiting at the back door. I crest the last hill to home and see an orange moon low in an orchid sky.
as night takes over . . .
walking knee-deep
in the chirring
of crickets
The prose shows an orange moon low in an orchid sky and conveys a sense of peace and beauty and that the dog has run ahead, is waiting at home while the poet remains knee deep in the chirring of crickets. Is the chirring now soft and pleasant or noisy and insistent? Has the walk produced some settling of the internal turbulence? Are such chirrings about loss and regret ever settled? Or are we always “knee deep” in them? That's up to each of us, Kimmel's readers.
Woodward has called structures like Kimmel's, "Interlaced or Alternating Prose and Verse Elements." According to him:
This follows the universal form of call and response, with the two elements, prose and verse, playing the role of chorus and anti-chorus. The steady alternation of prose and haiku poses a special difficulty, particularly where the distribution of the two elements is symmetrical, that is, where one paragraph is repeatedly answered by one haiku. Careful consideration must be given, by the author of such a work, to varying sentence structure and prose tempo from paragraph to paragraph. If this task is neglected, a rhythm is soon established like that of the metronome, and the arrival of each subsequent haiku is not only easily predicted by the reader, but also increasingly met with resentment as an unwanted disruption in the narrative or exposition. (14)
Kimmel's work is quite successful with its play of call and response. He avoids metronome monotony by shifting from an external focus in the prose to an internal focus in the poems, by varying the length of the poems, and by using different subjects both in the prose's present observations and the poem's memoirs. The prose passages also show variation in shifting between the natural elements (weather, grasses, tree, sunset) and the activities of the dog. The poem passages are further varied because while they express a common theme of loss, sadness and aloneness, they seem related to different relationships and times – snippets from a lived life. And there’s the variation in lineage: we have 2, 3, 4 and 5-line verses. Difficult to get into a metronome feeling when reading them.
Part II: Modeling Larry Kimmel's Haibun
Kimmel's haibun follows commonly employed practices such as succinctness, haiku-like phrasing, a mix of concrete description coupled with poetic, but not overly ornamented flair, and an emphasis on show, as opposed to tell type phrases, all characteristics that Ken Jones has signaled as critical for successful haibun composition. (15)
Beyond that, his haibun has a structure not found in many haibun. In addition to it's length (6 short prose paragraphs plus 6 poems), he utilizes an alternating prose/poem sequence and the poems are of different lengths, representing both haiku and tanka verses.
To use Kimmel's structure as a model, one would take a walk, note both external elements and internal musings, and alternate between short descriptions of the external and poems that report the internal.
Why Model someone else's writing?
One reason to model the work of others is to expand one’s writing range. In explaining how to write haiku, Jim Kacian suggests the following:
You'll know it when inspiration strikes. Something moves you in a way that it hasn't before, or you see something in a light you've never before considered. It sticks in your mind's eye, and insists that you look at it. It's knotting, clotting, taking shape. All you have to do is attend to it. (16)
Applied to modeling a haibun, if someone’s writing has touched you, either because of its content or poetic character, as Kimmel's did me, there’s likely to be something important for you in it, something related to your own musings. These can lead to the subject of a haibun just as a fresh experience such as a walk in the woods can.
A second reason is to increase one’s range of style options. My initial attempts at writing haibun prose were unconsciously modeled on the practices of novelists and short story writers. In addition, shortly into my writing journey, I started gleaning a number of "How To" articles and books on writing. In short, we writers are already sub-consciously, if not consciously, modeling the work of others. For example, when a “How To” book explains the importance of the opening lines of a prose piece and shows good and bad examples drawn from various greats and not so greats, they are inviting us to model the styles used in those works. To move beyond these general ideas about good short story writing, I also began doing close readings and sometimes writing commentaries on the work of haibun poets whose work touched me for whatever reason.
A third reason is that by going beyond a surface reading of other writers’ work and delving deeply into how they accomplished it, you will also necessarily be delving more deeply into the writers' experiences. In short, to more fully understand Bashō's work or in the present case, Kimmel's, it may be useful, if not essential, to do much more than simply read the work a few times.
Is Derivative Writing Somehow Wrong? Should It Be Published?
There’s no doubt in my mind that trying to imitate a successful writer can improve one’s style range. But there’s a concern about submitting derivative works for publication because the editors or readers might view them as mere copying or as plagiarism. Lurking like small dark shadows surrounding derivative work are common pronouncements such as, “It’s important to be original” and “We should write in our own authentic voices.” Also lurking is the notion that modeling is, indeed, the same as copying. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “derivative” as “imitative of the work of another artist, writer, etc.,” and adds this pejorative, “and usually disapproved of for that reason.” (17)
Counter to these pronouncements is the argument that all art is derivative—that in one way or other we have all been influenced by the literary works we read that preceded the impulse to pen our own experiences. Indeed, the advice editors are apt to give to aspiring writers when rejecting a haibun is one that I received in my first journal submission: “You should read a lot more haiku if you want to compose good haibun.” Isn’t this a short cut for saying, Let the style of your successful contemporaries and the masters of the genre influence you. Use their work as a model and perhaps you too will be able to compose a worthy, aka publishable, haibun.
Numerous arguments can be found on the Internet for engaging in derivative work subject to following copyright guidelines, including this one:
Artists . . . have used methods of appropriation throughout history, finding inspiration in the works of others, building upon their work, using borrowed elements from their work, and combining it with their own creativity to produce new work. This is how art evolves. In fact, it’s how we evolve. No scientist works alone without incorporating theories proven earlier; no philosopher debates positions previously unstated; no inventor creates the unimagined. Rather, they absorb the things around them and transform that knowledge into new concepts, ideas and products. (18)
In this context, Cor van den Heuvel has this to offer about modelling in haiku composition:
The writing of variations on certain subjects in haiku, sometimes using the same or similar phrases (or even changing a few words of a previous haiku), is one of the most interesting challenges the genre offers a poet and can result in refreshingly different ways of ‘seeing anew’ for the reader. This is an aspect of traditional Japanese haiku which is hard for many Westerners, with their ideas of uniqueness and Romantic individualism, to accept. But some of the most original voices in haiku do not hesitate to dare seeming derivative if they see a way of reworking an ‘old’ image. (19)
Of course, this begs the question as to whether the imitative writers should attempt to have their work published. In my view, there are three things to keep in mind. The first is that an acknowledgment should be provided so that readers and editors can understand that the piece is modeled on the work of another writer. A typical way this is done is by adding a footnote such as “After Bashō’s ‘Hiraizumi.’” The second is to “own” the piece. This is accomplished by putting your own context and sensibilities into the other writer’s structure and to use your own words and phrases or by citing any ‘borrowed’ phrases or passages. Wikipedia’s cautions are these:
For copyright protection to attach to . . . derivative work, it must display some originality of its own. It cannot be a rote, uncreative variation on the earlier, underlying work. The latter work must contain sufficient new expression, over and above that embodied in the earlier work for the latter work to satisfy copyright law’s requirement of originality. (20)
Closing Comments
The close reading of Kimmel's "Evening Walk" has led to a desire on my part to imitate his structure with content of my own. So I'm drafting the piece from time to time as a reflection of my morning walks with my dog, Kali. As I walk, I take note of the external – just as one would do on a personal ginko. And I observe my internal dialogues while walking. My plan is a mix of short, narrative paragraphs, each followed by a poem relating to those internal dialogues. While this sounds fairly straightforward, I'm several drafts in and experiencing both writer's block and a (computer) trash bin full of rejects. Still, that’s almost always the case when I’m writing a new piece and having a structure to aim at has been helpful. Who knows, the piece may get there and I may send it off to an editor.
And if you, reader, are like me, primarily writing “Standard” haibun, why not give it a try?
Notes and References
1. For a discussion of the development of English-language haibun, visit Ray Rasmussen’s “English-language Haibun: A Short History” which appeared in Angelee Deodhar (Editor), Journeys 2015: An Anthology of International Haibun, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.
2. Jeffrey Woodward, “Editorial: Haibun Today? And Your Point Would Be . . .,” Haibun Today, November 22, 2007.
3. Jeffrey Woodward, “Review of Contemporary Haibun, Volume 8, 2007,” Lynx: A Journal for Linking Poets, AHA Poetry Website. 4. Michael McClintock, "On Journeys 2015: An Anthology of International Haibun," Haibun Today 10:2 June 2016.
5. Jeffrey Woodward, “Form in Haibun: An Outline,” Haibun Today 4:4, December 2010.
6. In our email correspondence, Jeffrey Woodward has often railed against what he calls “Standard Haibun” and the “stock haibun formula: one paragraph, one haiku, fini,” and has lamented the timidity of haibun writers in sticking with standard haibun and not risking more expansive work. (posted with permission)
7. Ken Jones, “Introduction,” from Arrow of Stones, Published by the British Haiku Society, Oct. 1, 2002.
8. To create an admittedly crude estimate of the number of currently active writers of haibun, I surveyed recent issues of the two journals devoted to haibun (and tanka prose which I’ve included as haibun) and that carry the majority of the years published haibun, Contemporary Haibun Online and Haibun Today. I found that while there were over 100 pieces in the two issues, they were written by only 82 poets. It’s tempting to multiply that number by 4 issues and guess that the number of writers contributing to the two journals in a year would be 4 x 82 = 438. However, a quick look at 3 other recent issues of each journal revealed that only about 20 more writers would be added because the same writers tend to appear repeatedly. Next I examined the three main print journals that carry haibun, Modern Haibun, Frogpond and Blithe Spirit, and found an additional 32 haibun, but these were written only by 23 writers whose work did not show up in the two online journals. So now the total of current (or this year’s) active writers would total a little 82 + 20 + 23 = 125. Add to this writers whose work appears in a number of other online and print journals and the total would undoubtedly increase, but again one would expect some overlap. So an estimate that haibun has only a few hundred active writers seems reasonable for purposes of this essay.
9. Larry Kimmel, “Evening Walk,” Point Judith Light (1996). Kimmel’s haibun was used herein with his permission.
10. Roberta Beary, Deflection, Paperback, Accents Publishing, April 15, 2015.
11. Nobuyuki Yuasa in Blithe Spirit, V10, N3, Sept 2000
12. Definitions of the ginko (or ginkgo) haiku walk abound on the Internet. If interested try, "Rewire Your Day with a Haiku Walk," Rewire Me Website. 13. Bob Lucky, “Introduction,” in Angelee Deodhar (Editor), Journeys 2015: An Anthology of International Haibun, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, September, 2015.
14. Jeffrey Woodward, “Form in Haibun: An Outline,” Haibun Today 4:4, December 2010.
15. See Ken Jones’ Corners, Articles Section, Contemporary Haibun Online.
16. Jim Kacian, “How to Write Haiku,” Retrieved February 12, 2013 from the New Zealand Poetry Society Website.
17. Retrieved January 28, 2013, from The Oxford English Dictionary.
18. “All Art is Derivative,” taken from the Marilyn Manifesto Website. 19. Cor van den Heuvel, The Haiku Anthology: Haiku and Senryu in English, New York: W.W. Norton, 1999, p. ix-x.
20. “Derivative Work,” taken on June 22, 2016 from the Wikipedia Website. |
