{"id":406,"date":"2009-12-04T19:12:23","date_gmt":"2009-12-05T00:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=406"},"modified":"2009-12-07T11:55:02","modified_gmt":"2009-12-07T16:55:02","slug":"editors-picks-haibun-at-hugo-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/04\/editors-picks-haibun-at-hugo-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Editors’ Picks: Haibun at Hugo House"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rebecca\"Hugo<\/a><\/p>\n

This Wednesday, I was lucky to attend Rebecca Brown<\/a>\u2019s haibun class at the Richard Hugo House<\/a> in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood\u00a0\u00a0Haibun is an ancient Japanese poetic form that juxtaposes prose narrative and short haiku. Brown’s interest in the form stems from what she calls “the wonderfully uncategorizeable texts” of contemporary American poets who have taken this ancient form and adapted it to their own literary moment.<\/p>\n

The event was packed, and I shared a tiny table in the corner with three other women, one of whom is an alumni of the University of Washington’s M.F.A. program. \u00a0Years ago, she helped found the program\u2019s literary journal, The <\/a><\/em>S<\/a>eattle <\/a><\/em>Review<\/a><\/em>, and studied with the faculty member who initiated\u00a0The Castalia Reading Series<\/a>, which is also hosted at Hugo House.\u00a0 Also in attendance was the editor of a local haiku journal, and one of Seattle\u2019s resident specialists in Beat literature, who volunteered himself to read an example of a haibun from Jack Kerouac\u2019s Desolation Angels<\/em>, a novel written in 1956 while Kerouac was living in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State. \u00a0Brown\u2019s samples of haibun ranged from pieces like Desoluation Angels <\/em>to\u00a0works by John Ashbery and Basho himself, the poet credited as the originator of the haibun form.<\/p>\n

Rebecca gave us three different writing prompts, each of which was modeled after a different example of Japanese or American haibun, then asked us to read our pieces out loud. \u00a0I enjoyed the generosity of the class’s response to each new piece, and was struck by the beauty of the form’s sudden turns from one literary mode to the next.\u00a0 \u201cMmm, mmm, now that\u2019s good,\u201d Rebecca often remarked after an individual had shared, amidst a warm flood of sympathetic \u201cmmm\u201ds and \u201cwow\u201ds. \u00a0Below is an excerpt of one of my in-class pieces:<\/p>\n

\n

HOW I GOT HERE |\u00a0Three haib\u016bn<\/em><\/p>\n

In the fall we moved to Seattle, so into our boxes went the table salt, the winter coats, the towels, and the wedding dishes.\u00a0 Packing was painful, as packing always is, and the last glimpse of the apartment, newly emptied, wiped down, swept, was cut short by the neighbor\u2019s niece: \u201cYou keeping that bath mat?\u201d<\/p>\n

Boxes piled in the bed of a red pickup<\/p>\n

Miles of freeway winding through the hills<\/p>\n

This city too will forget the nights<\/p>\n

We spent wandering on University Avenue<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The idea of haibun is that it combines prose and poetry to tell the tale of a personal journey, one that is both physical and interior, and marked with moments of insight (haiku) or po<\/p>\n

etic interlude.\u00a0 The haiku interspersed throughout the narrative do not necessarily further the journey, but act as imagistic (re)conceptions of moments that have occurred or are occurring in the narrative. \u00a0In the exercise above, we were instructed to craft a four-line haiku modeled after the one that first appears in Nobuyuki Yuasa\u2019s translation of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches<\/a> <\/em>(Penguin Classics, 2005), <\/em>in which Basho describes a personal object, captures an image from nature, alludes to a force much larger than himself, and finally, ends with a specific reference to a proper noun.\u00a0 I found myself thoroughly enjoying the form, and appreciated learning about a tradition that has its roots in ancient Japanese literature, as well as a rich legacy in Western literature.<\/p>\n

WHAT’S NEXT…<\/p>\n

Later this week I will be attending Larissa Min\u2019s spoken word event,\u00a0Breaking English<\/a>. \u00a0On the event website, Min says, “Breaking English is a creative nonfictional account of my family’s migration from Korea to Brazil and then the US, as a lens through which to examine the experiences of immigration, displacement and remembering.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on that later, but for now, enjoy your weekend, and stay tuned for more\u00a0Editors\u2019 Picks next week!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Wednesday, I was lucky to attend Rebecca Brown\u2019s haibun class at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood\u00a0\u00a0Haibun is an ancient Japanese poetic form that juxtaposes prose narrative and short haiku. Brown’s interest in the form stems from what she calls “the wonderfully uncategorizeable texts” of contemporary American poets who have taken […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[15],"tags":[99,100,101,53],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}