Kent: at the risk of a little 'auto-puffery', can I suggest my own Trem
Neul (kindly included by Alison in the fourth issue of Masthead) as an
attempt, in part, to tease out some of these possibilities of hybrid
verse/prose form, echoing not only Basho, but also middle-Irish forms which
interweave the two. The experience of a specific, nineteenth-century,
journey is central.
And, David, if you're exploring European/Japanese analogues at the time of
Basho, you might be innerested in Ihara Saikaku who, apart from a few
solo-haiku marathons, passed his time writing the fictional autobiography
of a prostitute, and some get-rich-quick manuals in the manner of Defoe.
Cheers,
Trevor
>The classic example of haibun, Alison, is Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep
>North. There are numerous translations. One of my favorites is Cid Corman's,
>though the title is different in his version. Basho's is a
>poetic/philosophic daybook. The experience of the journey, you could say, is
>given as the narrow "plot"; the deep north is where the text goes.
>
>I was vaguely thinking of haibun as unused possiblity for contemporary
>poetry in that "narrower" sense-- not as a textual canvass upon which poetry
>and prose are collaged, like in Patterson, say, but as a kind of drama
>against which the "I" wanders forward and with a sense of assumed purpose or
>destination, but without the strictures of Western "plot". In fiction, the
>Japanese came to develop this idea into "shishosetsu" or "novel without
>plot". Akutagawa Ryunosuke was a central proponent of the mode, and there
>was a great debate in the 1920's between defenders of the shishosetsu and
>proponents of "Western plot" like Tanizaki Junichiro.
>
>So I'm wondering if "shishosetsu" is a general idea within which some
>generic experiment by English-language poets might take place.
>
>Kent
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