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Up Against the Window: American Haibun and Haiga, Volume 1, ed Jim Kacian and Bruce Ross. Red Moon Press POBox 2461, Winchester, VA 22604-1661, USA ([email protected]) 1999 $14.95 plus $5 postage. ISBN 1-893959-08-2

This is an eye-catcher of a book, with its five red peppers on a two-tone blue cover. Inside, the sanserif type, script titles and interspersed haiga make a ready appeal. Red Moon Press can be proud of such an enlivening piece of book production.

A haiku collection can be reviewed within a broad consensus of discourse. But in the more eclectic haibun tradition there are no such recognised markers. Reviewers and editors therefore need to set out some criteria so that their readers are aware of the standards to which they are working. Here I have used four sets of criteria. They are based on Bashō’s view of haibun as haikai no bunsho - ‘writing in the style of haiku’.

First, I would expect direct, concrete, economical imagery, infused with life and energy and eschewing abstraction and intellection. The editors refer to ‘sensibility and revelation rather than narrative and disclosure’.

Second, I would expect haibun prose to be light handed, elusive, open-ended, playful and even ironic, ‘in the style of haiku’. And at a deeper, existential, level should we not expect something of that ambiguity and mystery found in the best haiku? Presumably this is the ‘narrative of an epiphany’ which the present editors claim to have sought.

Third, just as haiku are literature in miniature, with their own internal and external disciplines, so should we expect haibun also to have the complexity, subtlety and unfolding of literary artefacts. Corresponding to the feeling of the ‘haiku moment’ is the emotional experience which itself appears to write, energise and organise the haibun for its writer.

Finally, at least as a bonus, we might hope to find something of Haruo Shirane’s ‘vertical axis’ of myth, literature, history - and life in the postmodern...

So, how did the ‘forty-four of our most respected writers’ measure up to these criteria? Although brief and rather vague, the criteria already quoted from the Preface sounded promising. On the other hand the two previous American haibun collections have been a mixed bag. In view of several haibuneers on this side of the water, Journey to the Interior, the haibun collection edited by Bruce Ross in 1998, was reviewed by Matt Morden more indulgently than it deserved (Blithe Spirit 9/1 March 1999). And then there was that exasperated review by Jim Norton of the 1999 Wedge of Light anthology (Blithe Spirit 10/3 September 2000).

First there’s the bad news, notably the ten travelogues. These range from painfully detailed country rambles, with nature notes and everything but six figure map references, to an eleven page plod around the Kyoto temples (with asides like ‘I find a penetrating aesthetic integration among aspects of the Japanese garden, Noh play, haiku ... and tatami mats’...) The favoured style is flat, discursive - and owlish. The haibun are not rooted in moving themes or sustained by much warmth of feeling. Some parody themselves in their topographical tedium, and it’s even worse when the poet gets lost: ‘Just ahead, the path divides. I choose the left passage, and soon am walking along a leaf-clogged stream. Or perhaps it’s just a flooded area. The water is barely moving. The path I’ve chosen soon peters out behind an old building. I decide to turn around and retrace my steps back to the fork. This time I take the right branching path, and it’s a better one, more smoothly travelled.’ And so on, until she gets back to where she started.

Next there are fifteen single pagers, usually a paragraph and a haiku. Many of these are limp vignettes, like that which reads like a holiday postcard from the Miyako Hotel: ‘We find many wonders: it appears that all the staff speak English; the grounds include a lovely garden with pond and bird sanctuary with labelled trees and bushes’. Four more lines in the same vein are followed by the punch line haiku: ‘Warm water sprays/from the heated toilet seat/modern Japan ya’. (I haven’t space in this review to write about the haiku themselves, but there does seem to be a rough correspondence in quality with the extent to which the prose itself is haiku-like.)

Seven of the shorties, however, I include in my selection of seventeen quality haibun from this collection. They are by Kay F Anderson, Cyril Childs, Liz fenn, Michael Ketchek, Larry Kimmel, William M Ramsey and Alison Williams. All six rate well on all or most of my criteria. They have a warmth of feeling which comes out of the incident which moved the writing, and which gives a poetic quality to their prose and haiku. And all invite space for their readers. Here is the last of the three prose passages in Ramsey’s poem about his Viet Nam veteran father:

He works deliberately. Damping, sanding, staining, oiling, buffing. Loving the wood, at times caressing it so that it will sing out polished lines once sealed darkly in its weathered annual stresses. We labor late, very late, into earth’s great chaotic night He wants to get it right. The way it is in the grain of the pith, in its rains and droughts.

Similarly, the other ten of my top seventeen are all poems composed out of some strong, subtle emotion which manifests my criteria, and which contrasts with the pall of earnestness which hangs over the less successful haibun. They are memorable literary creations. It is significant that two are searing experiences of war (Dennis H Dutton and Jerry Kilbride). Here is a haiku from Dutton: ‘shaving in my helmet/someone else’s face/in the mirror’. And four are vivid childhood recollections of innocence, curiosity and wonder (Tom Clausen, John J Dunphy, Chuck Easter and Michael McClintock). Easter’s two page prose poem is simply a graphic narrative of a Christmas morning family punch-up - but it demonstrates the dictum Show - don’t Tell! The other three are more complex. It would be a pity not to quote the shoot-out in McClintock: ‘Then Marshall Bird seemed to straighten his shoulders. He drew the tail of his longcoat away and back from his right hip, and he brought his eyes down dead level to the street.’

‘Economies of Scale’ by Judson Evans is arguably the best example here of the more surreal kind of haiku prose:

Once looking out a subway window, I saw a man fumble his gorged wallet and lose to a gust of wind a flurry of large bills. The recovery on the platform was choreography for gray suited soloist and a core of bystanders who seemed to radiate and draw to his center like a swirl of metal filings to a magnet. As if it were a shooting, as if he had been shot many times and his blood was spilling...

Apart from McClintock’s yarn, irony is hard to find in this collection and we have to wait right to the end to get a laugh, from Arizona Zipper’s ‘One Act Play’: ‘An oval mirror hangs behind a stuffed bobcat gathering dust on a bookcase. At Seth’s immediate left, below a lit floor lamp, Takemitsu’s short (10’34”) percussive composition Munari by Munari (1967) is playing on a turntable ... The music draws to a close with a lingering, enigmatic vibration, incurred, perhaps, with a soft mallet.’

This takes us to the outstanding pieces by Jack Cain and Dee Evetts, dense, subtle poems which rate highly on my criteria. Cain’s ‘Paris’, especially, is a classic in every sense around which a whole haibun workshop could be built.

The twenty new haiga are by fifteen artists from ‘the foremost practitioners of this genre’. They offer a wide variety of media (ranging from collage to needlepoint), and of styles, (from the traditional to the abstract expressionist), with a haiku worked into each of them. The haiga and haibun work well together in a successful integral book design.

This article champions the view of haibun as ‘haikuprose’, as prose poems which sprout haiku. In particular, I believe this kind of haibun can enlarge and enhance ‘the haiku spirit’ as a distinctive Western literary genre. (Argument and example have been set out in the special haibun issue of Blithe Spirit 10/4 September 2000.) And, by the same token, the contrary view of haibun as a broad and eclectic range of prose plus haiku can, I believe, undermine this potential and bring the form into disrepute.

Finally, the back cover of American Haibun and Haiga proclaims that ‘this volume explores the best contemporary expression of these forms in English’. This will raise many British - and Irish - eyebrows! And confusion is compounded by the inclusion of at least two apparently British contributors. Nevertheless this book is an important landmark in an emergent debate. Post your dollar bills off to Red Moon Press and see for yourself. Volume 2: Stone Frog is already printing.