TWO HYBRID POETIC FORMS

The zuihitsu and the haibun, Japanese forms that combine prose and poetry, have lately been getting quite a bit of attention from poets writing in English. In this post I’ll take a look at them and give a few examples.

We tend to think of Japanese poems as tight, syllable-counting, and focused on nature, but the zuihitsu is a kind of anti-haiku. A long prose poem that brings in personal issues and reflects on the social world, zuihitsus are made up of a series of more or less random thoughts usually written out in prose paragraphs. Occasionally, they can include short poems as well. Kimiko Hahn brought the form into English, and in her book THE NARROW ROAD TO THE INTERIOR (2006), she writes: “I love the zuihitsu as a kind of air current: and what arises is very subjective, intuitive and spontaneous—qualities I trust. It is by its own nature a fragmented anything. I love long erratic pieces into which I can thrash around—make a mess.”

She notes that the zuihitsu was invented by Japanese women writers a thousand years ago, then adopted by some male poets because it allows for a wider emotional range than the traditional forms. She calls it, “A portion of chaos set loose on the page.” The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagonis is considered the earliest example. It’s a collection of essays, observations, and lists about court life, nature, and the human condition. My own zuihitsus tend to run one or two pages, but there’s no limit to the length, and in translation The Pillow Book is over 400 pages long. I number my sections, but numbering is optional and in some of Hahn’s more chaotic zuihitsus the numbering is random rather than sequential.

It’s a form that allows for—even demands—free association. The word zuihitsu itself means “follow the brush,” and refers to a calligrapher’s brush moving freely over the page. Many of Hahn’s zuihitsus read like notebook jottings, and by dating them she indicates that that’s what they are. She’ll include quotations, sections in verse, confessional passages, philosophical ruminations, and whatever else comes to mind. The zuihitsu has room for it all.

Mental leaps are part of the fun. But once I have a draft, I try to organize the randomness and make something that works as a single, somewhat unified (but not too unified) statement. I try to limit each one to three or four subjects, so they’re not totally disorganized. Over the past few years I’ve written a dozen or so. Here’s an example which first appeared in The American Poetry Journal:

ON DYING

1. My mother died five months before the towers fell, thank god. What could a woman of eighty-seven, no longer in the fullness of her mind, have made of it?

2. Out the window yesterday, while Nancy and I watched Washington Week, two robins ducked in and out among the upper branches of a cottonwood. Today we found their nest.

3. I’m reading in a friend’s book his “Blue Windows: A Zuihitsu,” a Japanese form I knew nothing about until we met up at a writers’ conference and he explained: “It’s a numbered list of more or less random thoughts in prose.”

4. Neither of our mothers had to watch those tear-like bodies floating down from ninety stories to their deaths.

5. When giant stars explode into supernovas, they make the stuff of life, expanding outward, forming new stars and planetary systems over billions of years. There must be intelligent life-forms out there somewhere who’ve discovered ingenious poetic forms we haven’t thought of yet.

6. From my mother’s apartment you couldn’t see the towers, but she might have heard the planes approaching and would have had to breathe the caustic smoke and ash. She’d lived through two world wars, taking in the black headlines for Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima. But this was in her neighborhood and worse than anything she’d witnessed in her life.

7. It’s spring going on summer. As the world warms our climate in central Alaska becomes more livable—no more weeks of minus 50 in winter and in summer robins can raise a second brood. Of course in the larger picture this isn’t good.

8. I hate the word “horrific.” Mayor Giuliani dug it out of obscurity to describe the attacks. Nowadays when a sports team has a bad week, the announcers call their play “horrific.”

9. I’d come east to help out as my mother declined and I was thinking, “This is the first human death I’ve ever actually witnessed.” My brother and I shopped for a coffin, and bought the one we thought she might have chosen, a medium-priced shiny wooden one. At the funeral, he placed a large New York Rangers pennant on top because she was a big fan. I read Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” at graveside.

10. My friend’s Episcopalian and was hoping to go to an Easter service during the conference. We checked at the Catholic church in town, since he felt that would be “close enough,” but the times of the services didn’t work. I’m an atheist myself as were my parents before me.

11. Both of my friend’s zuihitsus in his book “World without Finishing” have thirteen numbered paragraphs. I wonder if that’s part of the form or just a coincidence.

12. In his novel Herzog, Saul Bellow describes a Swiss psychologist’s scheme for coming to terms with dying. You should picture yourself in your coffin, lying comfortably back on silk-lined cushions. Try to imagine yourself both present and absent at once, while your friends and relatives, alive and dead, lean over you looking down. Then tell them what you really think of them—get it all off your chest. Bellow makes fun of this idea. Clearly he thinks it’s bullshit and that coming to terms with one’s own death really isn’t possible.

13. My mother’s lips were dry, turning blue, so I gave her orange juice, tilting the cup to her mouth. Her final whispered words were: “More! More!”

*

To be clear, there is no set length for zuihitsus, and the fact that my poet friend used 13 numbered sections for both of his is just a coincidence. That friend, by the way, is Peter Cooley.

Like the zuihitsu, the haibun uses prose and poetry, with the poems often being haikus. The term was coined by Matsuo Basho in the 1600s, and translations of his work brought the form into English. The range of the haibun is broad and frequently includes autobiography, diary entries, essays, prose poems, short stories, and travel journals, but, as opposed to the zuihitsu, each poem focuses on a single topic. Carolyn Kizer is credited with being the first poet to write haibun in English. In her sequence, “A Month in Summer,” she wrote a poem a day, chronicling the end of a love affair.

Here’s one of mine:

THE TORN KEY

As a college sophomore, I drove all night on my way to Chicago to meet up with my on-again, off-again girlfriend, Debby. At a rest stop in Indiana, I napped for a couple of hours and when I woke and turned the key in the ignition, it tore in half.

     I knew no one in 
     Indiana—it seemed like
     the end of the world

When I finally got my bearings, I scrounged a rusty pliers from the glove compartment and retrieved the business end of the key, then thumbed my way to a gas station. The mechanic there had no blanks that would work for an aging Peugeot. But this was middle America where ingenuity reigns. While I flipped through a tattered copy of Sports Illustrated, he filed a narrow furrow in both halves of the key and welded them together using a sliver of steel for the link. Then he dropped me back at the rest stop. When I turned the key and the engine started

     a brilliant blast of 
     hope rang through my arms and legs
     like a trumpet call

*

And here, as a bonus, is a haibun by Margaret Chula. It comes from her chapbook, “Clothes to Go Out In,” a collection of over thirty haibun that was recently published by The Poetry Box.

STICKS THAT STRIKE

	The dragonfly
	perches on the stick
	that strikes at him
		   --Koyo

When my siblings and I did something especially bad, Mother would threaten us with The Paddle. This instrument of torture was a child’s toy of the 1950s—a thin wooden paddle with a small red ball attached to it by an elastic. Mother’s aim was to remove the ball and use the paddle in a not so pleasant way, one or two swats across our bottoms. That particular day was memorable not only because she was spanking David, her favorite, but also because the paddle broke.

We could all see that she was upset, not over the paddle breaking, but because she had used so much force on her darling child. Two days later, David handed her a crude replacement that he had put together down in the cellar: a slab of wood two inches thick with a handle he had taken off one of Daddy’s old hammers. “I broke it, so I made you another one,” he said. Was he innocent or clever, that dragonfly—that young boy?

	dead geranium
	propped up
	with a forked stick

*

Incidentally, next Sunday, November 16 at 4 p.m. Pacific time (3 p.m. Alaska time, 7 p.m. Eastern, etc.), Margaret Chula, Meghan Sterling and I will be taking part in a Zoom reading. My thanks to Lana Hechtman Ayers for including us in her Poem After Poem Round Robin Reading series. Here’s the link to register for the event, which is free:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/TmsgkkHcT_K1Y5plmDlXBQ#/registration

Once you register, you will receive the actual Zoom link to attend the event.