Notes on Haibun (and its connections with Object-Oriented Writing)

Overshadowed by haiku—to which it is related, an extension, a mutant outgrowth thereof—the haibun is a prosimetric form pioneered by Matsuo Basho as a way of documenting, through prose, his travels, while invoking the essence of the places he traversed via verse—typically the three-line hokku, aka the modern-day haiku. For Basho, the focus was mainly on travel; and, while the haibun tradition has mostly stuck to its origins as proto-travel writing, some have adapted it for other topics. (For John Ashbery, who included several haibun in his 1984 collection A Wave, the form is more important than the subject, which, in typical Ashbery fashion, is purposefully elusive.) Diaristic musings on peregrinations in prose would be followed by a hokku that either arrested or connected the passage to a next one, as in linked verse. In fact, verse’s interweavings were quite loose—Basho would also incorporate haiku written by his travel companions—not so unusual, given that the linked-verse tradition

Overshadowed by haiku—to which it is related, an extension, a mutant outgrowth thereof—the haibun is a prosimetric form pioneered by Matsuo Basho as a way of documenting, through prose, his travels, while invoking the essence of the places he traversed via verse—typically the three-line hokku, aka the modern-day haiku. For Basho, the focus was mainly on travel; and, while the haibun tradition has mostly stuck to its origins as proto-travel writing, some have adapted it for other topics. (For John Ashbery, who included several haibun in his 1984 collection A Wave, the form is more important tha