canoe & cloud, Lake Edith, Jasper National Park : r. rasmussen
I don’t intend this blog to be a showcase for my published work. However, in case you want to see some writing by the guy who’s pontificating about haibun and haiku on this blog, here are some recently published haibun:
I’ve spent some time enjoying Nicole’s Haiga pages – the quality, creativity and variety of the images, the placement of the text (font variety, color, size and placement), and the quality of the haiku.
Nicole, if you look at this post, please let me know if it’s okay to also show one of your haiga. Many are favourites so it would be difficult to choose one, but I’d be happy to do it.
Haigaonline is an excellent place to see contemporary haiga of this quality.
This commentary is one of several on the Haibun Exemplars I’ve selected for viewing. It follows well-known poet Robert Pinsky’s idea that to know poetry, in our case haibun, is to do close readings, at least on occasion of writers whose work you enjoy, and that close readings will help improve the reader’s range of writing styles and the quality of his or her writing. -> read more
If you want to learn about poetry — if you want to “access” it — what you need to do is find great poems you like, figure out which are worth rereading and then reread them. ~ Robert Pinsky
Is is safe to say that most writers want someone to read their work. So we send our haibun to friends and family, post it on forums, submit it to journals and publishers, and we create our own blogs to show our work. . . .
For more information and places to send your work -> go here
This post explores Du Fu’s poem “Day’s End” in terms of the key characteristics of contemporary English-language haibun composition. It also explores the value of modelling the work of writers whose poetry touches you as a way of expanding your writing repertoire.
Introduction
Some years ago, I was interested in expanding my reading from Japanese Masters (Basho and Issa) to Chinese Masters and somehow found my way to Du Fu’s poems. It was frustrating that it was so difficult to find the work of Du Fu and other Asian masters in online sources, particularly in light of Harvard professor Stephen Owen’s comment: “We have Dante, Shakespeare and Du Fu (712-770). These poets create the very values by which poetry is judged.” If Du Fu is so highly regarded by the world’s literary scholars, why is it that the Chinese poet-sage Du Fu . . . an immortal in the East Asian cultural sphere, still remains largely unknown in the Western world, and particularly unknown by poetry enthusiasts?
I liked what I found in Du Fu’s writing. As with Basho and Issa, it warmed me to think I could relate to the experiences and poetic sensibilities of a person writing in 8th century China to my own experiences in 21st century Canada. He’d communicated not just from another country, but across a gap 1300 years. Perhaps it’s because the joys and sorrows of the lived life, despite all our luxuries, hasn’t changed that much.
Basho’s contribution to English-language haibun and a definition and examples of Contemporary Haibun with comparisons to other short genres including memoirs, journal entries, travel journals, personal essays and flash or short fiction. . . .
