It has stopped snowing. Night is lazing into morning, and the snow reflects sunlight in the quiet. I listen to the light on our white walls, to the empty silence of flown birds, to the snow at rest.
I want to begin again, to accept the invitation from a plot of untrammeled land. That place along the river where in warm weather everyone seeks solitude but can’t find it because everyone is there looking for it. The snow will be there. And also the light and the quiet.
The tires carve deep ruts into the snow on the drive through the neighborhood, edging around corners, gliding down the long two-lane road to the tiny parking area. I park and stand for a moment, looking across the meadow at the row of trees along the river. I consider where to make my path across the field of brilliant white and angle a diagonal off to the right. The snow gives way to my steps like skin to touch. On the other side of the meadow, I look back at the line of foot holes pocking the snow like needle marks in a makeshift seam, more jagged than I thought I’d made it.
This is the way of wandering, the way of the soul. The title character of the Old English elegy “The Wanderer,” written sometime before the late tenth century, is called eardstapa—one who steps on earth. He wanders through life at the whim of wyrd, experiencing the joys of companionship, the sorrow of losing comrades in battle, the grief of friendless exile. Ultimately, the wanderer accepts that to be in the world is to know unrest—“All shot through in misery in earthly realms, / fortune’s turn turns the world under sky. / Here the cash was a loan. / Your friends were a loan. / Anyone at all, a loan. / Your family only ever a loan— / And this whole foundation of the earth wastes away!”1
We have always wandered. And our wandering takes us into the world’s own wandering – the vortex of unrest we aim to escape – on a quest to find and know the soul. Stirring that vortex is the realm of humankind. For Romantics like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), nature was a path that sidestepped the snares of human concerns, en route to the universal destination:
Wanderer’s Nightsong II (1780)
Over all the hilltops is peace [Ruh], in all the treetops you hear scarcely a breath the birds are silent in the woods. Wait now, soon you too will rest.2
In twentieth-century America, spiritual wanderlust found a foothold in the Beat poets’ embodied quests for self. “The road is life,” opines Jack Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, in On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958). The spiritual call inspired Gary Snyder’s visits to the American Pacific Northwest, Japan, and India. Snyder synthesized his studies of Zen in Japan and his observations of nature derived from his time as a logger and ranger in Oregon and Washington in The Back Country (1968) and Passage Through India (1983). Snyder’s travel companion Allen Ginsburg was a legendary globetrotter, and his work reflects the inspiration of those travels.
Outside the Western tradition, the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉, 1644-1694), was an inveterate wanderer whose travel diaries, in particular The Narrow Road to the Deep North (奥の細道, published 1702), birthed the genre he called haibun. Full of the geographical romance of his own experiences on the road, Bashō’s haibun have deeply informed the English-language haibun tradition, in which narrative autobiography and travel-themed writings are common. Bashō’s haibun transform the geographical journeys they describe into metaphors of the wandering self, elevating their meaning above any rules of form or technique extrapolated from them and applied broadly to the haibun genre. But Bashō’s great gift was neither mapping physical landscape, nor inventing a prescription for what makes a good haibun. His gift was wandering and, through a mixture of poetic genres and techniques, setting the impressions of his wanderings free to wander on the page.
II.
The river glides silent under a film of frazil. We move in opposite directions—the water south, I north. There’s nostalgia in going separate ways yet always side by side, my steps swishing a chain of footprints in the powdery snow along the riverbank, the river slipping along in its bed. Over eons it has worn this bit of bank away from the giant roots of a century oak, has elbowed swiftly to the west here, then just as swiftly to the east.
Up ahead a cluster of birds hops and flutters. A few steps closer, I count nine rock pigeons pecking under chokeberry bushes. The birds are the colors of the hips of clouds. Now and then a blaze of iridescent teal or lavender flickers at their necks. The pigeons peck in ever-shifting angles, competing for frozen seeds and berries, seemingly mindlessly combing over the same ground. I notice that one bird likes to go way under the branches of the bushes, then come back out, then go back under in a garland pattern. Two other birds are always together in a pair, one retracing the other’s steps. The same few birds scrum tightly in the middle of the flock. Movements that had first seemed random and automatic now seem intentional, individual, distinct.
There are more than 300 species of pigeon in the world today.3 Each species has a distinct appearance and, in many instances, distinct behaviors. To be “pigeonholed” is understood to be constrained, implicitly in a pigeon loft with many other identical boxes, each holding other identical pigeons. While the holes in a pigeon loft are made to be identical, ascribing to the pigeon the rigid limits of the pigeonhole that would contain it, the actual bird in each hole is a unique being with distinct ways of being in the world.
The essence of haibun is the mixing of genres and the spiritual and psychological wanderings of the poet’s soul, as manifested in a haibun’s language, in the journey of ideas on which it takes the reader. It has been said that genre is more a pigeon than a pigeonhole. Any genre—novel, sonnet, ghazal, sestina, haibun, etc.—can embody or thwart expectations, work in ways conventional or innovative. Most of Bashō’s haibun were inspired by geographical travel, but they together do not constitute a prescription to pigeonhole the haibun genre as travel writing or narrative autobiography, to insist it manifest only in prose and haiku, or to resist bringing into haibun elements from other traditions of genre or form that might serve well the wandering freedom of the text. The hybridity of Bashō’s haibun—their mixture of exterior and interior (geographical and psychological) elements and of literary genres and forms—speaks not to the genre’s limitations, but to the latent potential of its freedom.
Typical understandings of haibun often overlook the expressive potential of the genre. A post about haibun on the website of the Academy of American Poets reads the trope of travel not as a metaphor for the wandering of the soul, but in a literal sense, expounding on landscapes and seasons in various geographical places:
How to write about place when one feels inextricably connected to certain landscapes that shift and change more often than the seasons? Yet, because of my relatively brief time spent in any one location for long, I am like clover—roots plentiful, covering a great area, but short in length—easy to remove and attach again in any given space. How can a poem situate itself without being fully entrenched? How to make the reader travel without getting lost?4
Should the writer even try to write a haibun that “makes the reader travel without getting lost?” The paradigm of haibun-as-travel-writing suggests a fairly specific understanding of travel. Travel in the twenty-first century might conjure images of airport security checks, boarding gate lounges, and screens listing arrivals and departures. Or it might suggest the one-way bus ticket to Wherever, the Uber ride home from the bar, or the walk to the neighborhood ice cream shop.
All of these types of journey have predetermined geographical destinations. Wandering, however, suggests the absence of destination, open-ended passages where our lives, tossed about amid our own acts of will and events beyond our control, might zig or zag. Odysseus has a destination: to return to Ithaca. His journey to that destination takes a decade, and he eventually does make it home, reuniting with the stalwart Penelope and, with their son, Telemachus. What makes the epic is its high-stakes Mediterranean meanderings.
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (published serially 1759-67) has a goal, but a narrative destination, not a geographical one. The title character sets out to tell his life story, beginning from the story of his birth. And as in the Odyssey, the narrative ambles through all manner of verbal and graphical diversion. Tristram’s story proceeds as a network of streams, branching out into topics as wildly unlikely as Hafen Slawkenbergius’ historical excursus on noses, even rushing over language completely in drawings of squiggles and whole pages inked completely black. Turning classical tradition on its head, the book ends in medias res, digressions with no end in sight. At the end of nine volumes, the story of Tristram’s birth is left untold. The interest and power of Tristram Shandy’s prose comes from its constant narrative subversion, its refusal to adhere to the linearity of typical prose. Sterne broke the rules of narrative and out poured new possibilities for storytelling in prose.
In the nineteenth century, the flâneurs had wandered the streets of Paris aimlessly, observing the world around them. Baudelaire brought the idea of the flâneur to the fore in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), describing a man of curiosity and aesthetic sensibility who perambulates the Parisian cityscape “to distill the eternal from the transitory” in search of “modernity.”5 In the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf embraced the possibilities of aimless city walking in “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927). Woolf trumps up an excuse for the long walk through London in search of a lead pencil. But the real aim of the walk, Woolf writes, is to “indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter—rambling the streets of London.”6 And the peregrinations through “the splendours and miseries of the streets” lead ultimately back home:
Spread out behind the rod of duty we see the whole breadth of the river Thames—wide, mournful, peaceful. And we see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person—and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves.7
The flâneur literature in English extends to the present day. In her extended essay Flâneuse, Lauren Elkins continues the tradition of Woolf’s female London walker to the twenty-first century, chronicling her amblings along the streets of New York, Paris, London, Venice, and Tokyo, and engaging with Woolf and other famousflâneuses of the past.8 Other authors have also turned to aimless city walking as a context for engaging with a range of issues, including racial, ethnic, and sexual identity; immigrant experiences; and ecology.9
Anglophone writers of haibun often look to Bashō’s travel writings as examples, extrapolating from them what haibun purists have come to regard as rules, and skipping over three centuries, a hemisphere, and the vast cultural divide that intervene between the Japanese master and the English-language literary tradition up to the present day. Genres that have already informed the English-language literary tradition are waiting to more deeply inform contemporary haibun.
III.
Warmed by the sun, the skim of ice is gradually vanishing from the water. The river ripples in strands twisting over rocks, gliding in the glove of gravity that helps define its course. Amid skeletons of ash and elm and maple, beech trees display leaves as memento mori. Somewhere beneath the snow is a litter of samaras, moss, and crumbled bark, a spiny mess of sweetgum pods, the promise of snowdrops.
“As was instructed, I lifted up my eyes / to shadowed gorse and patchy yellow pine,” begins the poem that introduces the British writer Maitreyabandhu’s A Cézanne Haibun (2019), “… that I might purify myself again. / That horse chestnut, the heart’s meandering / the rancid mess of it while songbirds sing / a song that I have talked about too much….”10
A personal exploration of the life and art of the post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, Maitreyabandhu’s haibun wanders through scenes in the natural environment around a cottage in ruins—perhaps one of any number of cottages in Cézanne’s paintings—connecting personal experiences with recollections from Cézanne’s life and paintings. The haibun begins on one of the speaker’s daily walks in the place near the cottage:
Every day now I go down to the ruined cottage to take in the view—spear grass (well, that’s what I’m calling it), flax, a great coppery thistle losing its head to every breeze that comes along. The month stretches ahead like an idling train, each day an empty carriage. One tap. No electricity. A few dark pans. The phone wrapped up in a sock. […]11
The first haiku-like stanzas appear in a pair right after the opening prose paragraph and intermingle the everyday items in the cottage’s kitchen with objects and people in some of Cézanne’s paintings:
The coffeepot reminds me of the coffeepot in Woman with a Coffeepot,
his portrait of a teaspoon, a teacup, and (probably) Madame Brémond.12
Throughout the haibun also appear short poems that, in form, depart from haiku completely:
No one knows what to do with us, even the gods have given up— a flutter in the juniper, a tipsy tail, an echo as the valley falls asleep.13
Some English-language haiku and haibun specialists might quibble with the haiku and poems in other lyric forms in Maitreyabandhu’s Cézanne haibun. Many of the three-line poems read more like sentences in short lines than haiku with the kire (切れ, “cut”) and imagistic juxtaposition central to prevailing definitions of English-language haiku style.14 That view, however, mistakes the pigeonhole for the pigeon, fails to consider the multitude of language subtleties that constitute this particular haibun’s way of wandering and taking shape. In the paired three-line coffeepot stanzas, everyday objects spill from one stanza to the next, and from cottage to painting, thereby bringing the world of the author and reader closer to Cézanne’s. In their three-line forms, these stanzas carry the suggestion of haiku, and together shapeshift into a six-line imagistic lyric. But the more important work these paired poems accomplish is to introduce the intriguing possibility of crossing between the twenty-first century world of things and the life, mind, and paintings of Cézanne.
Throughout A Cézanne Haibun, by way of an abundance and fluidity of kire, the speaker finds himself crossing the borders between multiple worlds, constantly cutting back and forth between his physical surroundings, imaginings of the world of Cézanne’s life as pieced together from the artist’s writings, the worlds in Cézanne’s artwork, and the world of personal memory. This passage near the end of the haibun—as in the rest of the work, which is too long to quote in its entirety—is imbued with the spirit of kire, the freedom to cut across geographical, temporal and genre boundaries and wander between exterior and interior (physical and psychological) spaces, between this temporal world and Cézanne’s times, between present-day observation and historical recollection. The spirit of kire functions as invisible hinges on which the doors swing freely between the speaker’s worlds, interior and exterior, physical and imagined:
Waking up to the usual sore belly and stiff neck, I mull over my failure and the failure of mulling over my failure, the vanity of it, et cetera. Then I’m like a young bachelor, leaving the washing up in the sink. The sun is out, florid and stroppy as usual, not a hint of breeze. ‘The only thing such a temperature is good for is to expand metals and make beer merchants happy.’ According to Bernard, who was probably romancing, Cézanne called out ‘Pontier! Pontier!’ on his deathbed. August-Henri Pontier (Director of Musée Granet) refused to allow any Cézanne canvasses [sic] to enter the Aix museum during his lifetime. Pontier died in 1926 by which time the town could no longer afford them. ‘All my compatriots are arseholes compared to me. I should have told you I received the cocoa.’ (Cézanne’s final letter to his son, 15th October 1906).
The grapes are caught in the act of disappearing, moving, as Rilke said the angels moved, between the living and the dead.15
The passage moves fluidly in a series of cuts from one exterior or interior space to next. Beginning in physical and psychological interior spaces, the speaker awakens and lapses into rumination. Then a cut from those interior spaces to the outdoors and the fierce sun and still air. The speaker shifts back in time to Cézanne’s world in a paraphrased recollection from Cézanne’s friend and fellow painter Émile Bernard, then with the historical detail of Pontier’s prohibition of Cézanne’s work. Then a swift cut from the speaker to Cézanne’s own voice, which in the passage from the letter to his son, swings from a coarse generalization about humankind to a straightforward acknowledgement of cocoa in the same breath. Aided by the concrete detail of the cocoa in the quotation from Cézanne’s final letter to his son, the speaker jumps into the realm of disappearing grapes somewhere beyond this material world, in the space “between the living and the dead.”
Water’s wandering shapes a river’s course, and it is the soul’s wandering that shapes A Cézanne Haibun. A haibun is a pigeon, not a pigeonhole. This haibun’s wanderings invite the reader into the author’s process of integrating Cézanne’s artistic vision with his own experiences, of trying to see the world in light of the life and work of an artist who perceived the contours of reality taking on new shapes in the face of modernity and released them with unprecedented rawness on his canvases.
Shape is both a metaphorical and visual result of wandering and the mixing of genres in my own haibun “Kintsugi.” The title refers to the Japanese tradition of mending broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with gold powder, thereby beautifying the mended piece’s imperfections. The brokenness suggested in the title is carried through the haibun’s lines. But where one might expect narrative prose, the language of this haibun wanders into the realm of lyric, images from the physical world wandering from one to the next, inhabiting each line in dualities that shape the betweenness of things. All the lines together metaphorically shape the contours of a life rich with sweetness and soot and longing and, in their disposition on the page, visually shape a vessel with flaws and gaps (kire) in the wide spaces between the ends and beginnings of semantic lines of text. The concluding haiku reveals what fills those spaces, redeeming their seeming imperfections as the stuff of a life lived with deep intention and awareness:
Kintsugi
IV.
My steps slow at the curve around a magnificent ash tree. The sun peeks higher through the fringe of leafless limbs along the river. The meadow opens off to the right into a broad field. Recollections of summer: buttercups and clover speckling the expanse of grass, neighborhood kids darting and squealing in impromptu touch football games, dogs in mid- air jubilant for frisbees. Engulfed in the emptiness of winter, I angle into the sun-widened cold, somewhere into the silence of the snow.
Notes:
“The Wanderer,” trans. Ophelia Eryn Hostetter, Rutgers Old English Poetry Project. Accessed 27 Feb. 2025.
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” trans. Jonathan Mayne, in From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence E. Cahonne (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996): 136-144, p. 142.
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” in Virginia Woolf: Collected Essays, Vol. 4, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967): 155-66, p. 155.
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” p. 164.
Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
See, for instance, Teju Cole, Open City (2011); Zadie Smith, NW (2012); Tao Lin, Taipei (2013); Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016); and Yara Rodriguez Fowler, Stubborn Archivist (2019), among others.
Maitreyabandhu (born Ian Johnson), A Cézanne Haibun (Sheffield: The Poetry Business, 2019), p. 4. Maitreyabandhu is also the author of After Cézanne (Hexham, UK: Bloodaxe, 2015), a multi-voiced collection of lyric poems inspired by and exploring the painter’s work.
Maitreyabandhu, A Cézanne Haibun, p. 5.
Maitreyabandhu, A Cézanne Haibun, p. 5. Berthe Brémond worked as Cézanne’s housekeeper for the last seven years of his life, until his death in 1906.
Maitreyabandhu, A Cézanne Haibun, p. 18.
For the Haiku Society of America’s definition of haiku, see “Haiku,” in Definitions of Haiku and Related Terms: Report of the Definitions Committee, September 18, 2004. Accessed 25 Feb. 2025.
Maitreyabandhu, A Cézanne Haibun, pp. 24-25.
Jennifer Hambrick, “Kintsugi,” Frogpond 45.1, Winter 2022.
About the Author
Jennifer Hambrick‘s poetry collections include In the High Weeds (NFSPS Press), winner of the Stevens Prize; the haibun collection Joyride (Red Moon Press), winner of the 2022 Marianne Bluger Book Award; Unscathed (NightBallet Press); and a silence or two (Red Moon Press) . A classical musician, public radio broadcaster, multimedia producer, and cultural journalist, she lives in Columbus, Ohio. jenniferhambrick.com.
I really enjoyed this. Very enlightening. Thank you 🙂