I am very sure that my esteemed viewers will be surprised at the very caption of this week’s Sunday Story in the Envius Thoughts! Yes.
There are oceans and seas all over the world. We know Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and Southern oceans each having its own seas numbering 21, 25, 9, 8 and 6 respectively besides 6 landlocked seas!
Normally we have heard the language and its rich literature in the form of prose, poetry and dramas are vast like an ocean!
I used to quote that “Art and Literature of the highest order cannot flourish in a world which is increasingly becoming mechanical and the society a rocket!
To disprove the statement we come across LITERARY REVOLUTION as Industrial Revolution, or Cultural Revolution,r Economic Revolution or Fashion Revolution!
Literature in any language is growing fast and more so with ENGLISH-naturally!
We know there are several Gene-res in English poetry:It is not a fun!
Poetry
20th-century lyric poetry
Biker_poetry”
C
D
E
F
G
I
J
L
M
O
P
R
S
T
V
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X
We are familiar with HAIKU, TANKA, SENRYU etc.- short verses of Japanese origin.
You may be wondering what the TITLE of the story to do with these matters.
I am glad to share with you my literary lovers all over the world about the new and innovative form of HAIBUN- which is a combination of Haiku poem and prose and the practitioners are known as Haibuneers.
I know of one poet of repute by name Rochellie Potkar from Mumbai author of “The Arithmetic of breasts and other stories”, “Four Degrees of Separation” is the alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Fall 2015. Widely anthologized, her prose has been read and interpreted by actors and dancers on stage in Iowa and Portland. She was the 2016 winner of the Open Road Review short story contest. Her poem Cellular: P.O.W was shortlisted for the 2017 Hungry hill international poetry competition., Ireland. She is he 2017 recipient of the Charles Wallace writer’s fellowship, University of Sterling.
I came across a review of her book PAPER ASYLUM and on pursuing, I have landed myself in her wonderland of HAIBUN! This Sunday story is its result
We know HAIKU, TANKA, SENRYU etc.- short verses of Japanese origin.
In fact Haiku is a short verse in 5-7-5 format- three lines of 5,7,5 syllables. Nowadays these Haiku poems have become very popular in several languages.
You may be wondering what the TITLE of the story to do with these matters.
I am glad to share with you my literary lovers all over the world about the new and innovative form of HAIBUN- which is a combination of Haiku poem and prose and the practitioners are known as Haibuneers.
I came across a review of her book PAPER ASYLUM and on pursuing, I have landed myself in her wonderland of HAIBUN! This Sunday story is its result!
Let us hear about her book in her own words:
Haibun in Me
I remember a day in Hyderabad when I was
introduced to my first book of haibun. I began
reading it to kill time before a literary event, but
couldn’t put the book down. I am not a reader who
can be enthralled easily. Anything can distract me: a
film, a phone call, a friend, a better plan, the aroma of
food . . . But here, within 250 pages were 120 haibun,
sketching universes of revelations in synopsized
depth—summarized lifetimes, told with lucidity, in a
frame no longer than a page that set tales adrift with
a lingering aftertaste of haiku.
I read 120 haibun that day, traversing ages,
continents, and eras through confessions, memory, and
the anecdotes of pain and pleasure. I remember feeling
enriched, as though I had read 120 novels or watched
120 films, through slow-moving window frames of
worlds, going far into the multiplicity of slant, idiom
and thought-thread. By night I had haibun fever. This
has to be it! I told myself, where the storyteller and the
poet merge into a sangam on a page.
We know the haiku: two images juxtaposed in a
fragment (one line) and a phrase (two lines) that link
and shift. The haibun, then, is prose poetry interspersed
with haiku. Written in a first-person narrative, in the
present tense, it can range from autobiography to
Diary writing, essay to travel-journal writing. Like the
haiku, the haibun begins in the everyday events of life
and can be described as a narrative of an epiphany. The
practitioner of haibun is called a haibuneer. There
can be 100 haiku in a haibun, but we generally find
one or two. The haiku forms an integral part of the
haibun and follows the same link and shift inherent
to all Japanese short poetry forms, including haiga,
tanka and senryu. While the haiku links and shifts
between its phrase and fragment, the haibun does so
between its title, prose, and haiku. The link and shift
apes the continuity of life’s wheel, keeping in motion
the navigation to new territories of notion, imagery,
and feeling.
Once a guru said that to practice Japanese poetry,
>one must celebrate and curate nature, becoming
ornithologist, zoologist, biologist, spiritualist, psychologist,
and painter—all at once. If poetry is a niche
genre in the world of literature, the Japanese forms
are more so. The haibuneers and haijins the world
over are a subculture practising in quietude, with
limited printed-book possibilities. In India, a couple
of hundred members constitute an online Facebook
group, INhaiku, and converge every day to weigh
words like goldsmiths, for brevity between lines 1, 2,
and 3 of the haiku.
Every time I enter a new college classroom for a
workshop and tell students that to write haibun they
can be a bit of a storyteller, personal diarist, traveler,
chronicler, and poet, there is a sigh of relief that runs
through. No one feels excluded.
I think the time for haibun has come, given the
small reading screens and attention deficits. Or the fact
that this is an accessible form allowing its practitioner
to intersect story and poetry, besides acquiring ediblesounding
titles like haibuneers and haijins, while
practicing the art of word zen.
Since I write in other forms, I think it’s interesting
to mention that in relation to free verse poetry, I
have found the haibun to have sentences stacked
horizontally. While comparing it to flash fiction, the
‘Act 3’ is a haiku.
St. Xavier’s College was the first in Mumbai
to include the haibun in its syllabus under Emerging
Poetry Forms, whereas Wilson and V.G. Vaze colleges
welcomed the haibun through workshops by me.
But I am probably a late-comer to this bandwagon
of haiku and haibun practitioners, probably an even
later champion. The stalwarts in India who have
affected me, and to whom I pay my obeisance, are
Angelee Deodhar, Johannes Manjrekar, Kala Ramesh,
Geetanjali Rajan, K. Ramesh, Gautam Nadkarni,
Paresh Tiwari, Raamesh G. Raghavan, Akila
Gopalakrishnan, and the many whose works I come
across in international journals and magazines.
A special note of thanks to Kim Richardson for
going through an earlier version of this book and
saying, ‘Your haibun are good, and I don’t say that
lightly. You “get” the form.’ I have never forgotten
those words. My deepest gratitude to Michael
Rehling, Christopher Merrill, and Gabriel Rosenstock
for writing a quote for this book.
A must-read book is the Journeys series, edited
by Angelee Deodhar, while online archives of
Contemporary Haibun Online, Haibun Today, and Cattails
are the other sources to deepen one’s morning zen.
>Rochelle Potkar
We shall see more on this wonder in the part II in due course.Thanks and goodbye till then.
We shall be with our routine thoughts on Monday!
(TO BE CONTINUED)
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