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Comments on Haibun in Progress (BS 12/3)

I can’t see much difference between the two versions. The second is at times reminiscent of David Cobb, while the first is presumably Jo Pacsoo herself. Even the first is fairly taut, not ‘self-indulgent’, except you could say there are too many ‘I’s in paras 3 & 4  [‘In shock’ - well yes, that’s too strong], and the last paragraph brings in two (needless?)  complications: suddenly this all goes back 36 years, and the ‘In England I have become a foreigner through marriage’ personalises Jo Pacsoo, who has up to now been just the necessary registrar of all the happenings. I guess Jo wants to say that she is a foreigner in both places, but of different kinds; but I think she’s paying too much for a slight gain...

I think that Jo is right to say that ‘over-brevity can become incomprehensible’ - or at least, because there are no pointers, it takes as long to sort out the interpretations that fill the vacuum as it does the multiple directions of lush prose.

I believe there isn’t, and never was, a haiku or haibun prose [see Presence #14]... There is haikai prose - see Haruo Shirane Traces of Dreams - which goes from plain to highly coloured and of which the clipped style is one version. The verses in haibun give it an advantage over similar kinds of writing in European languages, and the only requirement for it is (as Henry James said of the Novel) that ‘it should be interesting’.  I think both versions are interesting, but on the whole prefer the first with its redundancies, to the second, where the hacking still shows.

ripe green apples
cluster besides clusters
of hawthorn berries