I'm sure most people on the list have read the terrifically interesting
conversation between Peter Riley and Keith Tuma in Jacket #11. I was
browsing thorugh it again the other day, and PR's comments about the
relantionship between his poems and the prose commentary he often brings to
them brought up a question for me: Why is the haibun --not in strict sense
of daybook-haiku, but simply in the broad sense of single works where poetry
and prose are in dynamic relationship with the other-- such an
*underexplored genre* in English-language poetry? I know there have been
examples-- a recent one is Lyn Hejinian's and cArla Harryman's The Wide
Road. But not very many, and this seems surprising, particularly given the
possibilities for cross-fertilization (or cross-ferretization, in George
Bowering's memorable phrase) between say, lyric and theoretical speculation.
Now, I know that Peter's use of prose has little to do with the notion of
haibun! He uses prose in a "supportive," Eliotesque affiliation to the poem,
rather than in an immanent relantionship to the "total work". But his open
employment of prose seems an unusual and fresh gesture, to be sure, and to
point toward other possibiliteis of genre development?
Kent
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