Ray Rasmussen: All Things Haibun Blog
Haibun and Articles about Haibun and Tanka Prose
Welcome. My intent is to show examples and to discuss contemporary English-language haibun and haiga which necessitate also exploring haiku (haibun prose’s and haiga image’s little partner).
Pamela A. Babusci: Haiga Gallery
Nicole Hague-Andrews’ Haiga pages
Ray Rasmussen: A Covid Summer, 2020
[other haiga themes along with examples by other haiga practitioners will be added from time to time]
As is the case with haiku and haibun, contemporary English-language haiga is only recently adapted from the early and contemporary Japanese forms to fit Western poetic and artistic sensibilities. The internet is rife with pronouncements, prescriptions and orthodoxies about the relationship of image and haiku. Does the haiku serve as a metaphor for the image, or does it jump-shift to form an oblique association with the image, or does it simply serve as a kind of caption for the image? And the usual arguments about the haiku itself are also are in abundance, e.g., whether the haiku should be able to stand on its own, sans image. For now, it’s likely that English-language western haiga practice will continue to evolve and gain in practitioners.
While the original Japanese haiga were usually a combination of monochrome (grey-scale) brush paintings with kanji-type characters and calligraphy for the poems. Contemporary haiga as shown in various publications such as Haigaonline employ paintings of various media, photographic images and digital artworks.
In short, as with any evolving form, one hopes for creative image-making and pleasing to the eye artwork along with poems that are poetic and stimulating to the mind.
Asian practitioners employed a “chop” – a symbol representing the author. If well done, the chop itself has some beauty and lends an association with the lengthy tradition of Asian art.
| Haibun Exemplars | Haibun Commentaries | Haibun Close Reading Guide |
Commentary by Ray Rasmussen
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
| Haibun Exemplars | Haibun Commentaries | Haibun Close Reading Guide |
The Rogue River falls shown above is, in my estimation, nature’s exemplar of a waterfall. I’d also like to say that it’s a photographic exemplar, aka an excellent photograph, but for that it’s my own shot of the falls. Thus someone else will have to praise it or buy it or publish it for it to approach the lofty rank of exemplar.
On this page, over time, I’ll post a number of haibun by writers other than myself that in my view are both well done and help to show the variety of styles that represent contemporary English-language haibun.
For some of these exemplars, I’ll offer commentaries – close readings to explore what makes them work well enough to have been published by a journal editor.
Of course, my tastes in this selection are showing, which is why I think it’s important to post published works where an editor independent of the writer saw fit to select the piece for the enjoyment of his or her readers.
If you read any of these, please use the comments window where they appear to tell me what you think of them and a bit about why.
With The Heron’s Nest Editor Fay Aoyagi and Haijin Chad Lee Robinson
Early on in my haiku and haibun journey, editors rejected my haibun and several advised me to read haiku, saying that I’d not be able to write a good haibun until I had mastered the haiku part of haibun’s prose-haiku partnership. I had already looked at the many definitions of the two related genres (haiku and haibun), but found definitions lacking in specifics and mostly useless except as a rough guide, particularly the formulaic definitions like number of lines and syllable counts.
So I read a lot of haiku, both those of the Japanese masters and of the published works contemporary haijin and learned I simply didn’t get much out of them except that most didn’t follow the 5-7-5, 3-line, short-long-short structure learned in English classes.
And I mostly wondered why the editors picked the haiku featured in their journals. I concluded that haiku are not only difficult to write, but they are also difficult to read and understand, to “get the poetic spark,” so to speak. A problem was that I had a tendency to read them once quickly and to read too many at a time. In short, I was merely glancing at them, expecting a spark to jump out at me. I wasn’t engaging in what might be called “deep reading.”
I decided that in order to better understand haiku and thus, to be better able to write a worthy haiku and haibun, I had to first hone my haiku reading skills. In this way, I might be able to appreciate and understand why the editors selected some and not others, and particularly why they didn’t accept mine. And that’s what this three-part series is about – How to do a deep reading of haiku for better understanding of the nature of haiku.
Continue reading -> Part 1
Haiga is a mix of image and either haiku or tanka poetry. Its origins are in Japan where poet-artists used a mix of brushstroke painting and calligraphy to compose their images and poetry . . .
Continue reading . . . -> Hiaga #1
Ray Rasmussen: All Things Haibun Blog 