Haibun

is a prosimetric literary form originating in Japan, combining prose and haiku. The range of haibun is broad and frequently includes autobiography, diary, essay, prose poem, short story and travel journal. The term "haibun" was first used by the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, in a letter to his disciple Kyorai in 1690. Bashō was a prominent early writer of haibun, then a new genre combining classical prototypes, Chinese prose genres and vernacular subject matter and language. He wrote some haibun as travel accounts during his various journeys, the most famous of which is Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior). Bashō's shorter haibun include compositions devoted to travel and others focusing on character sketches, landscape scenes, anecdotal vignettes and occasional writings written to honor a specific patron or event. His Hut of the Phantom Dwelling can be classified as an essay while, in Saga Nikki (Saga Diary), he documents his day-to-day activities with his disciples on a summer retreat. Traditional haibun typically took the form of a short description of a place, person or object, or a diary of a journey or other series of events in the poet's life. Haibun continued to be written by later haikai poets such as Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa and Masaoka Shiki. Haibun is no longer confined to Japan, and has established itself as a genre in world literature that has gained momentum in recent years. In the Haiku Society of America 25th anniversary book of its history, A Haiku Path, Elizabeth Lamb noted that the first English-language haibun, titled "Paris," was published in 1964 by Canadian writer Jack Cain. However, an earlier example is Carolyn Kizer's "A Month in Summer," an extended haibun with 21 haiku and one tanka, published in 1962. Her piece (identified as a haibun) first appeared in Kenyon Review. James Merrill's "Prose of Departure", from The Inner Room (1988), is a later example. The first contest for English-language haibun took place in 1996, organized by poet and editor Michael Dylan Welch, and judged by Tom Lynch and Cor van den Heuvel.