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A good haiku should always be able to stand on its own--without title, without footnotes, without any hemming and hawing of preliminary explanation. And yet, from the very beginnings of haiku--before it was even
called "haiku"--poets have also been setting their poems within longer prose works. Some of this activity, of course, is no different from what we might find in any other literary context: poets adding poems to their letters, diaries and other writings. Indeed, some of the most well-known haiku in the Japanese tradition first saw light as part of longer works, particularly Matsuo Basho's famous travel diary,
Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi), and Kobayashi Issa's bittersweet journal
The Spring of My Life (Ora ga haru).
But beyond these more traditional prose forms, haiku poets also gradually developed a whole new genre of writing in which poems are no longer so much "set" in a prose context, as
arranged as equal partners with prose in a dynamic interplay in which the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. And so was born
haibun, a hybrid art of poetry and prose.
Haibun and Other Mixed Forms
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contemporary haibun online
• An online magazine specializing in haibun as a rigorous literary art. Along with the "haibun selections" for each issue, the site also presents a number of excellent resources explaining the nature of haibun, and how to write it. Scroll down for "Essays and Interviews by Editors" and "Editors' Thought Pieces."
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Simply Haiku Archives
• Archives of the online magazine
Simply Haiku. Starting in 2004, haibun has been a regular feature in each issue; note also the many excellent critical articles in the "Features" section.
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Haibun Today
• An online haibun journal run in blog format, with regular postings of new works and critical material on a near-daily basis. Represents a substantial community of poets working in the form today.
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Matsuo Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North
• An extraordinary website presenting five different,
complete translations of Basho's classic journal (click on the various names in the "Translations" list in the left-hand column of each chapter page), lavishly illustrated with photographs, maps and artwork, and annotated with a full discussion of each short chapter. (Also includes the Japanese original, in a scanned text for universal browser-friendliness.) Arguably, the
Narrow Road is not a fully developed
haibun in the modern sense, but it is nonetheless "required reading" as the revered forerunner of the genre. And the site is a superb resource.
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[This message has been edited by Stephen Collington (edited October 21, 2008).]