We are pleased to open this issue with translations of 3 Basho haibun by Pulitzer Prize winner Franz Wright. His new collection of prose poems KINDERTOTENWALD(Knopf) he believes to be his best book. Recently Poetry Magazine gave Mr.Wright the Barbara M. J. Wood Award for best poem or group of poems published in the magazine in the past year, a collection of 6 pieces from KINDERTOTENWALD. A new manuscript,a combination of prose and verse poems called F, will appear from Knopf in 2013. And in 2015 yet another collection will appear from Knopf entitled CHANGED. Franz Wright is a great admirer of Japanese poetry. He has previously published a collection of translated haiku of Buson.
Also, in this issue we have the first ever haibun by internationally acclaimed poet Dorianne Laux. I came upon two poems by Dorianne, one a prose poem, the other free verse, that were published in a blog. reading them I felt they could be reconstructed to create an excellent haibun.
In I worked with her on the
editing and this is what resulted. Dorianne‟s haibun will appear first, but so that writers can understand the process undertaken to transmute free verse poems into haibun, Dorianne‟s haibun will be followed by the original poems as they appeared on the blog. Dorianne's most recent book of poems is The Book of Men, W.W. Norton.
And of course, I believe the other haibun poets included, some well-known, some relatively new, offer a range of accomplished styles and thematic considerations. Enjoy,
Richard Krawiec: Haibun Editor ***** “I‟ve loved the concept of the short poem since I began to write, and consider it the ultimate challenge
for a lyric poet: to write with absolute simplicity and clarity and not to go past, say, twelve lines. A wonderful book of American poems, none of which is longer than twelve lines: Charles Wright‟s CHINA TRACE, published in 1976. Wright may have had the shorter masterpieces by Du Fu and Li Bo, e.g. The ultimate short poem is one line long, and Charles Wright has one or two of those in his book. After that, it‟s the haiku, as far as I know. There are a lot of misunderstandings regarding the haiku, the most common being that it is a “nature poem”, and while I am not at all sure I understand what people mean by nature poem, I think it is supposed to signify a poem that takes place far from urban scenes (one has only to think of Baudelaire, perhaps the greatest lyric poet in any language—he wrote primarily poems set in the big modern city—to debunk this theory), and always deals with the world outside and around us, excluding that other, so to speak equally infinite though invisible universe of feelings and thoughts within us. My idea is that the greatest haiku serve as a sort of bridge between the two worlds, a bridge or perhaps a kind spiritual equivalent of a mathematical formula, odd as that may sound. It seeks, in any event, to create new things or objects that did not exist before, Char‟s “gift of the creature to the Creation.” In a great haiku, there is the sense that words have been used, paradoxically and mysteriously, to convey a wordless state of mind in which the walls between what we call outer and inner worlds dissolve and the two become indistinguishable, one; or to uncover startling and previously unsuspected connections between things which superficially appear to be very different. Basho, like Shakespeare (and writing about the same time) took a form of popular entertainment and raised it to the level highest levels of art.
My father used to enjoy remarking that his friend Robert Bly‟s main ambition in writing was to turn the Iliad into a haiku! There is a serious idea at the heart of this very funny thought. I think there are poems with three verses, a certain number of syllables, and so forth that has the same mass as a play like Lear, a novel like The Sound and the Fury, even an epic poem by Virgil or Dante.
There‟s a quote by Charles Mingus, the great bebop bass player and composer, that I keep over my desk. Anybody can play weird, that‟s easy. What‟s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple--awesomely simple—that is creativity.”
Franz Wright, 2011 4
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