Fluorescent lights buzz
Shadows etched in my face
Gray winter day
Visiting Anna in Alaska over Christmas break altered my sense of winter forever. She spent hours every day over a light box to keep depression at bay. We weren’t far enough north for the sky to remain dark, but noon was gray. We weren’t in Southern California under cloudless blue skies anymore. Seeking light became a part of my days. Fred Myers was big and bright and full of holiday music. We lit candles for dinner every night. If we went out I climbed into quilted pants, a parka, and lined boots. When there wasn’t a party to attend, Anna drove the car, icy roads and all, to search for a moose or to park in a clearing to wait for the Northern Lights. I never did hear their music.
My first encounter with haibun was during a summer stay, as a teenager, with my grandmother in San Diego. There were only two poetry books on her shelves: A Net of Fireflies, haiku translated by Harold Stewart, and Bashō’s The Narrow Road to Oku. I don’t know what happened to those copies; I bought my own long ago.
I incorrectly remembered my first Bashō as the translation by Donald Keene, illustrated by Miyata Masayuki, a master of kiri-e (collages.) The earliest publication date I can find for this version is 1996, around the time I was forty. This Bashō is a work of fine book art. Japanese text on the left, the English on the facing page. Each entry in the travel journal is followed by a haiku (Japanese in a single column, English below) from that entry paired with an illustration. I’m on my second copy of the Bashō, having left one in the pocket of a plane during a business trip.
I too keep journals, so many journals, especially when I travel. Some of them have been in the form of haibun. A haibun according to Bruce Ross in How to Haiku : A Writer's Guide to Haiku and Related Forms is
In diary haibun the things we record are more poetically
expressed and perhaps more charged with emotion than
an ordinary diary, for here we are consciously tending
to a poetic record of our inner self, whether we travel
across a country or stay right at home.
Recently I was asked to put together a short series of standalone memoir writing classes. One of them began with a survey of what participants knew about haiku. After I provided some guidelines and a photograph, we wrote a group example. They each wrote one about a landscape they remembered from a trip. Then with that as a starting point, each wrote a prose passage related to the journey.
I provided them with several examples, one from Basho and several from recent literary journals. As a test for the lesson plan, I chose a photograph taken of me in Fairbanks; Alaskan Diner was the result. For me, starting with the haiku provided a focus that limited my urge to write down every detail from the whole trip. Our visit to a snow-wrapped hot spring might provide another focused excursion.
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