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literally, haikai writings is a prosimetrum literary form originating in Japan, combining prose and haiku. The range of haibun is broad and frequently includes autobiography, diary, essay, prose poem,Keene, Donald, 1999. Dawn to the West: A History of Japanese Literature, Volume 4 (Japanese Literature of the Modern Era - Poetry, Drama, Criticism), p.233. New York: Columbia University Press. short story and travel journal.
Bashō's shorter haibun include compositions devoted to travel and others focusing on character sketches, landscape scenes, anecdotal vignettes and occasional writings written to honor a specific patron or event. His Hut of the Phantom Dwelling can be classified as an essay while, in Saga Nikki ( Saga Diary), he documents his day-to-day activities with his disciples on a summer retreat.
Traditional haibun typically took the form of a short description of a place, person or object, or a diary of a journey or other series of events in the poet's life. Haibun continued to be written by later haikai poets such as Yosa Buson,Shirane, Haruo. Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900. Columbia University Press, 2008. . p553 Kobayashi IssaUeda, Makoto. Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa. Brill, 2004. . p. 15 and Masaoka Shiki.Ross, Bruce. "North American Versions of Haibun and Postmodern American Culture" in Hakutani, Yoshinobu, ed. Postmodernity and Cross-Culturalism. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2002. . p169
In the Haiku Society of America 25th anniversary book of its history, A Haiku Path, Elizabeth Lamb noted that the first English-language haibun, titled "Paris," was published in 1964 by Canadian writer Jack Cain.HSA Editorial Committee, eds., A Haiku Path: The Haiku Society of America 1968–1988 (New York: Haiku Society of America, 1994), page 12. However, an earlier example is Carolyn Kizer's "A Month in Summer," an extended haibun with 21 haiku and one tanka, published in 1962. Her piece (identified as a haibun) first appeared in Kenyon Review. Kenyon Review 24:3, Summer 1962, pages 551 to 559
James Merrill's "Prose of Departure", from The Inner Room (1988), is a later example. John Ashbery also included several experiments with haibun in his 1984 collection A Wave.
The first contest for English-language haibun took place in 1996, Wedge of Light. Tom Lynch, Cor van den Heuvel, and Michael Dylan Welch, editors. Foster City, California: Press Here, 1999. organized by poet and editor Michael Dylan Welch, and judged by Tom Lynch and Cor van den Heuvel. Anita Virgil won first prize, and honorable mentions (in alphabetical order) went to Sydney Bougy, David Cobb, and John Stevenson. The contest resulted in the publication of Wedge of Light (Press Here) in 1999. As credited by Welch,High, Graham. "Postscript to Travelling Light" in Haibun Today, 4:2, June 2010: paragraph 7. the first anthology of English-language haibun was Bruce Ross's Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun (Tuttle), published in 1998.Ross, Bruce. Venturing Upon Dizzy Heights: Lectures and Essays on Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. . p95
Jim Kacian and Bruce Ross edited the inaugural number of the annual anthology American Haibun & Haiga (Red Moon Press) in 1999; that series, which continues to this day, changed its name to Contemporary Haibun in 2003 and sponsored the parallel creation in 2005 of Contemporary Haibun Online, a quarterly journal that added Welsh haibun author Ken Jones to the founding editorial team of Kacian and Ross.
Several distinct schools of English haibun have been described, Haibun and Realism I:Some Thoughts upon the Developing Schools of Haibun - Jamie Edgecombe in Blithe Spirit (Journal of the British Haiku Society) Vol 16 No.1, March 2006 including Reportage narrative mode such as Robert Wilson's Vietnam Ruminations, Haibunic prose, and the Templum effect.
Contemporary practice of haibun composition in English is continually evolving.Jones, Ken. "Haibun: Some Concerns," in Haibun Today 9:2, June 2015. Generally, a haibun consists of one or more paragraphs of prose written in a concise, imagistic haikai style, and one or more haiku. However, there may be considerable variation of form, as described by editor and practitioner Jeffrey Woodward.Woodward, Jeffrey. "Form in Haibun: An Outline" in Haibun Today 4:4, December 2010.
Modern English-language haibun writers (aka, practitioners) include Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, Mark Nowak, John Richard Parsons, Sheila Murphy, Roberta Beary, Lew Watts, Rich Youmans (these last three the authors of Haibun: A Writer's GuideBeary, Roberta, Lew Watts, and Rich Youmans, Haibun: A Writer's Guide, Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023. [5]), Nobuyuki Yuasa,Yuasa and Gill, 2011 pp71-76 Lynne Reese,Lucky, Bob. "On Lynne Reese's Forgiving the Rain" in Haibun Today, 7:4, December 2013. Peter Butler,Jessup, Ryan. "On Peter Butler's A Piece of Shrapnel" in Haibun Today, 7:1, March 2013. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,Sherwood, Justin. "Haiku as Queer Tourism: From Bashō to David Trinidad" in New Criticals, 11 December 2013, p. 10. and David Cobb, founder of the British Haiku Society in 1990 and author of Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore, a 5,000-word haibun which has been considered seminal for the English form of kikōbun (i.e., travel diary).Haiku International Association, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Symposium, January 2014.
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