Frogpond 34.3 • Autumn 2011 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

3. What BR reported: The editors’ comments are low key and
a bit airy… and offers as an example an edited closing paragraph
to one commentary: This is haibun writing at its best…
the way it has been crafted and edited by its author… is one of
delight, empathy and insight.
The editor wrote: Commentary in full: I know I am in the hands
of a competent and confident writer while reading this haibun.
Its construction is considered, the dramatic development rewarding,
and the three haiku have been thoughtfully placed to
create moments of contemplation and shifts of scene and time.
“The Sea in Their Blood” is less than 300 words long which
is astonishing given that it is the story of several generations,
from the unnamed “ancestors,” to the narrator’s great-grandfather
and grand-mother, to their son, her grandfather, and to
ultimately herself. The haibun does not feel at all rushed or
compressed because of the careful attention to detail and to
the pace: each word feels deliberately chosen and the syntax
is varied. The best words in their best order, Coleridge said,
speaking of poetry, and some parts of the prose have the quality
of poetry about them. Take a look at the parallelism of the
opening sentence:
There is no famous poet buried in the tiny churchyard of Sagard [/]
the inscriptions on the ancient gravestones are in no way remarkable
and the precision of certain images:
A flock of seagulls pounces down on the newly seeded fields.
What I also like very much about this haibun is the sense of
multiple voices: Yeats’ words in the epigraph, the narrator’s
voice, the gulls’, the godfather’s, the death certificate, with
each voice fleshing out the story a little bit more until I am
convinced by its authenticity and its authority.
This is haibun writing at its best. Not because I feel that autobiography
is the better choice of content, but in the way it has
been crafted and edited by its author, until all the hard work
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
110 Haiku Society of America