More
than Raisins in a Cake
This
well-produced, nicely printed chapbook affords readers a
pleasing glimpse through one of English-language haibuns
most interesting magic doors, the one belonging to William
M. Ramsey. In my view, Ramsey is one of the few haibunists
to exhibit range in subject matter, who consistently shows
some intellectual gravitas, and whose work within
Asian literary forms, genres, and traditions appears scrupulously
to avoid the stink of Zen, that smelly essence
made popular by American commercialism and the Feel Good
Movement. Ramseys processes of thought and imagination
show it is possible to be a mystic without also being a
pain-free, escapist air-head.
Our
peek into Ramseys metaworld, which he
describes as an imaginative, composed
world that is about reality but not literally in
and of it, is memorable if brief. The chapbooks
seven selections range from the short U-Boat,
The Swimmer, and Egg Hatching, to
the medium length Buying a Soul, Ants,
and the multi-part Gurdjieff, Zen, and Meher Baba.
Carefully placed into this mixture as a thought-piece is
the one-page poser Twelve Proofs of Gods Existence.
All of these haibun have appeared in Modern Haiku,
with Egg Hatching making its first appearance
in Raw NerVZ. This latter titlejust three short
paragraphs and a haiku at the endmakes a good introduction
to Ramseys style, and to his use of the haibun for
transmuting rather ordinary subject matter into a fascinating
contemplation of the transcendent. The opening paragraph:
In
the barns dimness we watch an errant angel forsake
its heaven. The pale sky falls away in chips. A fierce
beak cracks a smooth porcelain no longer worth preserving,
tears a legal parchment no longer valid. Once enclosed
in oval, snug perfection, urgently now the chick thrusts
and pierces into this world of time, desire, and decays
attraction.
The
haibun develops like a sonnet, intertwining the central
image of the emerging chick with the poets innermost,
metaphorical speculations. The haiku that ends the piece
is imbued with far more meaning and emotional freight than
it would carry if read independent of the foregoing prose:
wet
tremblings
in straw and eggshell bits
a blind peep
Like
good poetrythe kind we return to, reread, and ponder
overeach of the haibun in this book swims like a well-crafted
fish into the deeper waters of the intellectual and emotional
sea. They are not poetry, prose, or prose-poetry: they are
haibun, and as such they help define the genre in
English as something more than superficial, cursory descriptions
or narrations in which haiku appear like raisins in a cake.
Ramseys
haibun prose is different from what we are accustomed to:
It collides with itself and our own expectations; it sets
in motion ripples that lap and fold, and that occasionally
produce the rock-breaking quake. Ramsey never writes an
inert sentence; his structure and language are tight but
not austerethere is supple richness in his phrasing
and words. The haiku function and contribute to the whole
of each piece in a variety of ways: as counterpoint, as
implicit metaphor, as a tight, close-in focus, or as concrete
objective correlative. In the longer, four-part
haibun, Gurdjieff, Zen, and Meher Baba, the
haiku are syntactic extensions or continuations of the prose,
as in this excerpt:
a
beetle eating
what is leftglinting
copper green on dung
and
i smile knowing that nothing on earth, not even waste,
is waste, and all is somehow incredibly rare, and i will
tell this to my wife if she is strong today. Minutes later,
bent at work in one of the bins
turning
compost,
my smile twitches at a toad
speared on the fork
Unlike
many purely narrative haibun, which tell a story or relate
an incident, Ramseys haibun are more akin to impressionistic
essays into the less discursive nuances of mind and heart.
His themes are found most frequently in the puzzlements
of contemporary life, in which material wealth surrounds
us yet leaves us beggared in the soul.
The
chapbooks end-piece is a question-and-answer, interview-formatted
essay titled Depth Charges about the art of
haibun, written by Ramsey with Rich Youmans. Youmans, the
Leap Press editor and publisher of this volume, has elsewhere
demonstrated his interest and understanding of the contemporary
English-language haibun. His essay, The Marriage of
Prose and Haiku: Linking in Haibun, which appeared
in Acorns Supplement #3, In Good Company: An Exploration
of Haiku-related Linked Forms, was one of the better,
more sensitive discussions of haibun to be published anywhere
during 2003.
Overall,
Ascend With Care makes a very promising start to
Leap Presss future plans, which include publication
of a series of similar chapbooks featuring English-language
haibun by some of the genres best practitioners. I
intend to read them all.
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