Summer Musing:
The First Haibun in English

I keep careful records of all books I read, so I can report with confidence that I first read Carolyn Kizer’s haibun, “A Month in Summer,” in February of 1993. That was when I bought a copy of Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1984). In fact, it was the inclusion of this haibun, running to twelve pages, that prompted me to buy the book in the first place. What I did not realize was the historical significance of what I had read, which is that this haibun, as I’ve since determined, seems to be the first one ever written in the English language.

This haibun had initially appeared in Kenyon Review 24:3, Summer 1962, pages 551–559 (see https://www.jstor.org/stable/4334254), easily predating “Paris” by Canadian poet Jack Cain, which had previously been touted as the first haibun in English. Cain’s piece had appeared in Volume 63 (#2, October 1964), published by the University of Waterloo, and was reprinted in Eric Amann’s journal Haiku (II:4) in 1969 (see also https://contemporaryhaibunonline.com/chohtmlarchive/ahhv1/Cain.html). Writing about the history of English-language haiku in the Haiku Society of America’s A Haiku Path (New York: Haiku Society of America, 1994, page 12), Elizabeth Searle Lamb wrote simply that “the first haibun in English” was Jack Cain’s “Paris,” and I had always believed this to be true. But Carolyn Kizer beat him to it, and it’s worthwhile to dive into the details of this groundbreaking haibun to better understand its place in poetic history.

I met Carolyn Kizer a few times—at least once, I believe, at one of Dana Gioia’s summer poet picnics at his home in the California wine country, and in April of 2006 when I was on the board for the Washington Poets Association and we honoured her with the WPA’s Lifetime Achievement Award. On another occasion, on 29 April 2008, in the Seattle area, she signed my copy of Mermaids (“For Michael, all good things!”). At these times, I hadn’t discovered that her haibun was likely the first one ever written or published in English. I wish I could have asked her about that, and about any other haiku or haibun she had written—or if she’d ever been in touch with translator Nobuyuki Yuasa, who helped to inspire “A Month in Summer.” However, the story of her haibun’s origin and its influences is clarified in its first publications.

A few years ago, on reading this haibun again, I wondered when it might have been published before Mermaids in the Basement. That’s when I discovered the Kenyon Review appearance and realized that Elizabeth Lamb’s claim was inaccurate. On the copyright page for Mermaids in the Basement, I also noticed an acknowledgment that “A Month in Summer” had previously appeared in Knock Upon Silence (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1965, pages 19–38; see https://archive.org/details/knockuponsilence0000kize/page/n5/mode/2up). These two publications give a wider view into this haibun.

In Kenyon Review (page 551), unlike Knock Upon Silence and Mermaids in the Basement, “A Month in Summer” appears with the following prefatory note, saying that her piece was written “In haibun, which combines prose and poetry (in the four-line form in which Nobuyuki Yuasa has translated Issa’s haiku).” Here the haibun form is expressly mentioned, underscoring the intention that this was written as such, and directly acknowledges Yuasa (as does part of the haibun itself). In Knock Upon Silence, Kizer provides additional context. In her acknowledgments (page iv), she says the following:

I am grateful to Nobuyuki Yuasa for his superb translation of Issa’s The Year of My Life (University of California Press), which gave me the form for A Month in Summer, and also provided me with the most satisfactory method of writing haiku. . . . But I must single out Donald Keene, whose mind and friendship are the crown of my life and the support of what art I possess.

She says Yuasa’s four-line form for haiku gave her the most satisfactory way of writing haiku, which suggests that she had explored other ways as well. Indeed, her haibun begins as follows (Mermaids, page 75), suggesting her dissatisfaction with the three-line form:

Several years ago, I wrote haiku this way:

The frost was late this year:

Crystal nips the petals

As my lover grows impatient.

I have come to prefer the four-line form which Nobuyuki Yuasa has used in translating Issa because, as he says, it comes closer to approximating the natural rhythm of English speech.

Let down the curtain!

Hamlet dies each night

But is always revived.

Love, too, requires genius.

Perhaps that can stand, also, as my attempt to put “O my prophetic soul!” into haiku.

To start with, I’d like to point out that her first sentence was different when originally published in Kenyon Review in 1962: “Several years ago I wrote this, in imitation of haiku.” By the time this haibun appeared in Knock Upon Silence in 1965, she had revised the line to say “I wrote haiku this way.” It seems that after three years she considered this poem to be haiku, rather than merely an “imitation.” I also note the italicization of “haiku” (either by Kizer or by her editors), indicating that the term was still considered foreign, whereas in more recent decades the term has been so integrated into the English language as to no longer need italicization. This is a reminder of how early this haibun was in the trajectory of English-language haiku.

Another thought is that, in both her three-line and four-line haiku, Kizer pays no attention to 5-7-5 syllable counting that was predominant and presumed correct at the time. This inaccurate constriction was thanks largely to ubiquitous Peter Pauper Press haiku translations that did not reflect the reality that traditional Japanese haiku in Japan count sounds that differ from syllables in English. For someone writing haiku as early as 1962 or earlier, Kizer was a rare writer who showed no slavishness to counting syllables (in the late 1950s, Lorine Neidecker was another). On the other hand, she demonstrated little feeling for the much shorter heft of haiku in Japanese, even beyond the fact that 17 syllables in English uses significantly more words (and thus has more content) than the 17 sounds counted in Japanese. The shortest of Kizer’s 21 haiku in “A Month in Summer” is 17 syllables, the longest 26. The average length is 21.5 syllables, with variable counts per line. The lone tanka is 5-7-5-7-7.

There’s more to unpack from Kizer’s acknowledgments in Knock Upon Silence. The book’s first section, a selection of “Chinese Imitations,” is dedicated to Arthur Waley, a prominent early scholar and translator of Asian literature, who she also thanks in her acknowledgments. That and her gratitude to Donald Keene, another preeminent scholar and translator of Japanese literature, suggests that Kizer was reading a great deal of Asian literature in translation at this time. Her reference to “several years ago” indicates that she was writing her own haiku as early as the late 1950s. Examples of her individual haiku, other than in “A Month in Summer,” are unfamiliar to me, with one exception, but she might still be considered an early pioneer of English-language haiku, or at least of haibun.

In the “Twenty-Seventh Day” entry in “A Month in Summer,” Kizer writes “Why the artifice of this haibun, which I have appropriated from a culture that doesn’t belong to me?” (Mermaids, page 85). Her immediate answer is “Perhaps to lose me. Perhaps because the only way to deal with sorrow is to find a form in which to contain it.” This moment of self-consciousness with the haibun genre suggests a measure of tentativeness, or perhaps a subconscious feeling that she might have been blazing a new trail, with no prior examples to guide her, other than Yuasa’s translation of Issa, and perhaps other translations.

What I have not done here is to offer any critical commentary on the haibun itself, which is too long to quote in its entirety. However, in a New York Times review of Mermaids in the Basement (November 25, 1984, Section 7, page 36; see https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/25/books/women-who-say-what-they-mean.html), Patricia Hampl notes the following:

She is drawn—as her versions of Chinese poems, also collected here, show—to refined patterns. But the long sequence “A Month in Summer” uses the Japanese haibun form, combining prose and poetry. This piece, about a doomed love affair, is less satisfying. Miss Kizer puts her finger on the trouble in a prose-like section that links the haiku in this Japanese form: Why the artifice of this haibun, which I have appropriated from a culture which doesn’t belong to me? Perhaps to lose me. Perhaps because the only way to deal with sorrow is to find a form in which to contain it.

Perhaps. But form is not a container; it is created from a poem’s materials, not for them.

Much of the pilgrimage of these poems moves from grudge to acceptance, from reiteration of griefs to the good grace of letting go. There is a great effort toward humor in these poems. But the tone is uneven; the humor, as well as the outrage, seems arch at times.

Do you agree that form is not a container? In poetry, what else is form but a container? In organic form, the poem’s content may help generate the form, but each new invention of form still contains the content. Nevertheless, if this piece is less satisfying to the reviewer, I suspect that’s not because of this quibble about form. At the very least, the haibun form holds Kizer’s sorrow, in a way that “formless” writing might not. In this sense perhaps the form provides catharsis, at least for Kizer. She says as much, and I have no reason to not take her at her word.

Others take issue with Kizer’s haibun, or at least the haiku in it. An unsigned editor’s note appended to “Haibun: Narratives of the Heart” by Bruce Ross in Contemporary Haibun Online (20:2, August 2024; see https://contemporaryhaibunonline.com/strongemcho-em20-2brtable-of-contents-strong/encore-articles-20-2/bruce-ross-narratives-of-the-heart/) observes that Kizer “referred to the piece [‘A Month in Summer’] as haibun, but the poems themselves are more akin to broken sentences. The haiku in Cain’s ‘Paris’ comes closer to the modern style.” This note does at least suggest that haibun can evolve, as is true in Japanese, not just in English. Perhaps it is more accurate to surmise that Kizer wrote in isolation from the burgeoning English-language haiku community, where many other early haibun writers did not.

In a more positive contrast, consider the assessment of David Rigsbee, who has written An Answering Music: On the Poetry of Carolyn Kizer (Ford-Brown & Co., 1990) and was also married to Jill Bullitt, Carolyn’s daughter (though now divorced). He wrote the following (page 27):

The second part of this four-part book [Knock Upon Silence] is a journal poem, “A Month in Summer,” written in the style of the Japanese poet Issa’s A Year in My Life [sic; Yuasa’s translation says “of” rather than “in”]. Like the latter’s book, which is a quest for illumination, Kizer’s homage is a [sic] likewise a search for enlightenment in a contemporary context, the breakup of a love affair. Combining prose with poems, the whole plots a trajectory that begins in bewildering hopefulness and ends in the recognition of a personal unreality. Taken as a whole, “A Month in Summer” is an [sic] cumulative assault of great intelligence and consummate restraint mounted against the gradual evaporation of meaning.

Rigsbee also adds that “Though of necessity compressed, ‘A Month in Summer’ is highly nuanced and leaves the impression of wholeness we get from good novels” (page 28). If I might add anything about this haibun’s 21 haiku (and one tanka), they feel somewhat wordy and “Western” for haiku, presenting mostly conjecture and conceptualization ahead of image-focused experience, as in these two examples (Mermaids, pages 84 and 86):

The terror of loss:

Not the grief of a wet branch

In autumn, but the absolute

Arctic desolation.

I realize now

The dialectic error:

Not love against death,

But hope, the bulwark.

If the reader were not told that these were haiku, I cannot imagine any seasoned haiku writer being able to recognize or admit them as such, despite the author’s assertion that these are haiku. In the context of a haibun, however, the repeated switch from mostly prose (but occasionally lines of longer poetry) to indented short poems does provide an attempt at leaping that typifies haibun. It would take more careful reading to analyze how much she employed or was aware of the expectation to link and shift between the prose and poems, but I suspect that any such leaping is incidental or accidental, yet perhaps also intuitive.

Although Kizer does not seem to account for the traditions of seasonal reference (kigo), objectivity, and a two-part juxtapositional structure (equivalent to using a kireji, or cutting word), among other haiku strategies, here’s a poem that’s at least more experiential, somewhat more in line with most literary haiku as practiced in Japan and North America, except for the past tense in the third line (page 76):

Lights in every room.

I turn on more!

You sat with one hand

Shading your eyes.

What brings this poem closer to haiku is its choice to stop. It doesn’t tell the reader what the poet is thinking but limits itself to imagistic description. This is how, in the words of Louise Glück, a good poem should summon feeling (or idea) rather than impose it.

The larger success of Carolyn Kizer’s “A Month in Summer” is the weaving together of poems and prose and the poet’s willingness to explore a Japanese way of poetic writing on a confessional topic. At the very least, she also embraces the haibun’s ability to oscillate between prose and poetry, and between contemplation and image, exploring a dynamic fluidity. She may have been unaware that what she was writing had seemingly never been done before in English.

Before I conclude, a teaser. In Knock Upon Silence (page iv, on the copyright page), Kizer acknowledges that “A Month in Summer” appeared not only in Kenyon Review but also in Encounter. I have not been able to track down this publication, but because she lists Kenyon Review first, it may be safe to assume that publication in Encounter came after Kenyon Review. Whatever the case, this publication may reveal differences in the text, which could also be explored in comparing the other three publications. This haibun also appeared in Cool, Calm, & Collected: Poems 1960–2000 (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2001, pages 99–110), which also included one poem titled “After Bashō” that appeared in a chronological section of poems published in “The Eighties,” thus long after “A Month in Summer” (217):

Tentatively, you

slip onstage this evening,

pallid famous moon.

It’s interesting to note that this poem, surely intended as haiku, abandons her previous preference for four lines, but does still sidestep the strict 5-7-5 syllable pattern she had avoided earlier, being one syllable short in the middle line.

One other observation is that Knock Upon Silence and Cool, Calm, & Collected (but not the Kenyon Review publication or Mermaids in the Basement) both include the following note about “A Month in Summer” (on pages 85 and 491, respectively): “The final passage in A Month in Summer, in quotes, is from Bashō’s prose poem on The Unreal Dwelling (Genjūan no Fu), as translated by Donald Keene.” Perhaps it’s of little consequence, but we may wonder why she refers to Bashō’s piece as a prose poem rather than as a haibun. Perhaps because Keene did? However, Bashō’s Unreal Dwelling, while short, sits just as firmly in the haibun tradition as his more famous Narrow Road to the Interior (Oku no Hosomichi) or Issa’s Year of My Life (Oraga Haru). And yet, haibun has much in common with prose poetry, and may easily be considered its progenitor, a torch that Kizer picked up with her haibun. It seems, though, that she never kept running with this torch, and apparently did not publish any other haibun.

It could be, of course, that Carolyn Kizer’s “A Month in Summer” is not the first haibun in English—whether first written or first published. If an earlier haibun comes to light, I would be delighted to know about it. But for now, I believe that the first ground broken in English-language haibun, even if tentatively, was by Carolyn Kizer.