Debbie Guzzi's Blog

What wonderful writingeveryone who tried the form haibun in the Mix It Up Contest did!!! So wonderful
in fact that I am doing a new contest using the haibun form again! I do not want the hard work you all put in polishing your haiku to be lost. Your Prose Poetry was exquisite and such a pleasure to read, so enjoyable for a word hound like me. I wanted to let you know how proud I am you participated in the learning process.

[Please note, I did not require season words in your haiku which pushed some of them into the more modern category.]

Below from Wikipedia you will find more complete info on Haibun.

PLEASE keep going! The new Contest will focus on SPRING.

[The term "haibun" was first used by the 17th century Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho, in a letter to his disciple Kyorai in 1690. Basho was a prominent early writer of haibun, then a new genre combining classical prototypes, Chinese prose genres and vernacular subject matter and language. He wrote some haibun as travel accounts during his various journeys, the most famous of which is Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior). Basho'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, Kobayashi Issa and Masaoka Shiki.

 Haibun in English

Haibun is no longer confined to Japan, and has established itself as a genre in world literature which has gained momentum in recent years.

The first contest for English-language haibun took place in 1996, organized by Michael Dylan Welch,* and judged by Tom Lynch and Cor van den Heuvel. Anita Virgil won first prize, and David Cobb won second prize. The contest resulted in the publication of Wedge of Light (Press Here) in 1999. The first anthology of English-language haibun was Bruce Ross's Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun (Tuttle), published
in 1998.]

*Charles Henderson,Yasmin Khan, Poet Kash, Dane-Ann & a few others have been under the
tutelage of Michael Dylan Walsh for about 2 years now of an on and the haiku
Checklist I asked most of you to print out is written by him.

I have posted comments on some of your writes and I would like you to TRY to write your Prose Poetry [ie: the narrative part] in THE PRESENT TENSE. Bring us to the moment of the memory with you and ILLUSTRATE it with your haiku, bringing in the SIGHTS, SOUNDS, SCENTS, and Tactile feel in the story.