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In light of the success of our Neverending Chain: Free Renga, I thought we could do the same thing with haibun. This will be a more challenging thread but with the popularity of haibun I think it will be both fun and instructive in terms of getting us to write more haibun and this form is not completely new but it is relatively unknown and deserves exploration.
What is a renbun? Well, the word is a coinage of my own from a portmanteau of the genres renku and haibun, of which it is a mashup: ren 連 (collaborative/linked) plus bun 文(writings/prose) = renbun 連文. This is not a genre that is known in Japan, so use that term with a healthy grain of salt, but the ideas are not so foreign to the Japanese genre as to be untenable. “Linked haibun” I suppose is also an acceptable term.
The idea was first explored by Margaret Chula and Rich Youmans (she has suggested “haibunku” as a name) in their book Shadow Lines. I have not published any collaborative renbun, but I have experimented with it with Jacob Salzer, and my own haibun are influenced by the idea of taking the link and shift, non-linear narrative aesthetic of linked verse and applying it to a longer haibun with multiple prose passages.
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That all said, let's begin! If someone wants to start with an opening prose section, be my guest, otherwise I will start it off later. I don't have the time right now to dig into writing a prose piece but I wanted to get this going.
In light of the success of our Neverending Chain: Free Renga, I thought we could do the same thing with haibun. This will be a more challenging thread but with the popularity of haibun I think it will be both fun and instructive in terms of getting us to write more haibun and this form is not completely new but it is relatively unknown and deserves exploration.
What is a renbun? Well, the word is a coinage of my own from a portmanteau of the genres renku and haibun, of which it is a mashup: ren 連 (collaborative/linked) plus bun 文(writings/prose) = renbun 連文. This is not a genre that is known in Japan, so use that term with a healthy grain of salt, but the ideas are not so foreign to the Japanese genre as to be untenable. “Linked haibun” I suppose is also an acceptable term.
The idea was first explored by Margaret Chula and Rich Youmans (she has suggested “haibunku” as a name) in their book Shadow Lines. I have not published any collaborative renbun, but I have experimented with it with Jacob Salzer, and my own haibun are influenced by the idea of taking the link and shift, non-linear narrative aesthetic of linked verse and applying it to a longer haibun with multiple prose passages.
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A few guidelines for this thread.
1. Alternate short verses with prose passages, as in a haibun. 3, 2 or 1 line haiku are acceptable, as are 5 or 2 line tanka, there is a history of tanka prose as well as haibun and I think it's ok for the purposes of this thread to use whatever kind of short poem the prose elicits, but keep the poems short and in the realm of haiku and tanka.
2. Prose passages must be shorter than 400 words, better to aim for 100-250. Prose poems, medium length poems (6-30 lines) are acceptable as substitutions for narrative prose but in general this is haibun so it will alternate prose and poem. Experimental prose as found in “The Other Bunny” or more traditional diaristic prose are both acceptable. Fiction/persona, or autobiography are both fine.
3. This is a linked form, so link and shift! Do not continue the prose passage from before or have too much similarity between consecutive ku, there will be a slight shift/contrast/juxtaposition with some kind of linkage between each part of the chain and nothing but forward momentum and non-linearity. This is not a “finish/continue the story” kind of collaborative writing but tied to Japanese aesthetics of linked verse which require oblique motion, shifting away from past episodes and “unity in variety.”
4. Quote the previous addition as in the free renga thread. Do not write both a prose section and the responding poem as if you were writing a full haibun: the fun of this activity is to be collaborative and have each others' pieces complete the other the way the two part structure of linked verse works as a collaborative tanka.
1. Alternate short verses with prose passages, as in a haibun. 3, 2 or 1 line haiku are acceptable, as are 5 or 2 line tanka, there is a history of tanka prose as well as haibun and I think it's ok for the purposes of this thread to use whatever kind of short poem the prose elicits, but keep the poems short and in the realm of haiku and tanka.
2. Prose passages must be shorter than 400 words, better to aim for 100-250. Prose poems, medium length poems (6-30 lines) are acceptable as substitutions for narrative prose but in general this is haibun so it will alternate prose and poem. Experimental prose as found in “The Other Bunny” or more traditional diaristic prose are both acceptable. Fiction/persona, or autobiography are both fine.
3. This is a linked form, so link and shift! Do not continue the prose passage from before or have too much similarity between consecutive ku, there will be a slight shift/contrast/juxtaposition with some kind of linkage between each part of the chain and nothing but forward momentum and non-linearity. This is not a “finish/continue the story” kind of collaborative writing but tied to Japanese aesthetics of linked verse which require oblique motion, shifting away from past episodes and “unity in variety.”
4. Quote the previous addition as in the free renga thread. Do not write both a prose section and the responding poem as if you were writing a full haibun: the fun of this activity is to be collaborative and have each others' pieces complete the other the way the two part structure of linked verse works as a collaborative tanka.
That all said, let's begin! If someone wants to start with an opening prose section, be my guest, otherwise I will start it off later. I don't have the time right now to dig into writing a prose piece but I wanted to get this going.
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