Tag Archives: haibun

Kintsugi – Broken Pots and Gold Paint

14 Replies

Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pots.

It’s fine to start with – it’s about mending broken pots, embracing the imperfections, adding to the history of the object and making it more beautiful. It can be extended to include personal qualities like working with your faults and bouncing back from adversity.  Broken items are put back together and the repairs are highlighted in gold.

In Japan it is an ancient art form.

In the hands of the west it has become a handicraft, the philosophy has been cheapened and it is now possible to do courses and buy kits. I checked with one of the courses. Step One of the course is to break a pot, which does not seem true to the original intention (though there were accusations of collectors doing this in Japan in previous centuries). It is also possible to buy kits, one of which gave me a moment of amusement. The feedback indicated that one of the tea bowls in the kit had arrived broken, but went on to point out that this saved a job. Probably the only time an item broken in transport has been well received.

I’m not knocking it, because it can still produce a lovely and artistic piece of work, but I am pointing out that if you are happy with that, don’t dress it up. And if you want to be true to the spirit of kintsugi, don’t break a pot on purpose. Meanwhile, I got a poem out of it. I may get another. Released from the tyranny of submissions deadlines I find I can, once again, write. Definitely time for a rethink.

This is a haibun which mentions kintsugi, though only in  small way. More of it is about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and being married. And, of course, specifically about being married to a woman who stabbed herself in the jugular vein with a piece of broken plant pot because she wouldn’t ask for help. I originally posted a link to it from this post so if you remember it, sorry for being repetitive.

Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940)

 

A Necklace of Thorns

Despite their fame, their paintings and their place in history, Diego and Frida (we are on first name terms in my imagination) still had to chat about the weather, and bicker about who forgot to buy more milk for breakfast. I imagine the weather was mostly sunny, and that it was Diego who forgot the milk. With his affairs and all those frescoes, it must have been difficult to fit the shopping in.

My wife’s throat, spiked with black sutures, is less inflamed today. I check each morning, trying not to let my worries show. Across the toast crumbs, she reminds me that we need more bread today, and I have to paint the garage doors this spring. For a moment my mind flits to a glorious picture of doors featuring Leon Trotsky and Emiliano Zapata against a backdrop of moustachioed revolutionaries. My wife suggests we stick with green.

today
she has her stitches out
I joke I will buy
gold paint to mend the scar
shared history

First Published cho 22.1 (2026)

Zapata and Trotsky seemed to disappear when I wanted them.

 

A Poem and a Commentary

8 Replies

That is the haibun that I mentioned yesterday. It’s 98 words, which is why I don’t mind describing myself as a poet, but hesitate to claim to be a writer.

I’ve just been reading a book on writing poetry.  It is very scornful about Japanese forms, and about tanka in particular. And about the sad old men, he says, that write them. I checked the internet but, so far, have been unable to find evidence of the book’s author setting the world of poetry aflame. This is so often the case.

There is an expression that those who can, do, and those that can’t teach. Or criticise. But teachers and critics both have important places in the world, and both have sets of skills related to the job. People who write books about how to write poetry (and I have read a few now) seldom have much to offer. In the old days you could at least have given the book to charity or used it as emergency toilet paper, but in the digital age these satisfactions are no longer available.

Anyway, the poem – first published in Blithe Spirit, the journal of the British Haiku Society, in 2025 and then anthologised in Contemporary Haibun 21.

Living Art

In the lull between lunch and the afternoon shoppers, one cup of coffee is all it takes to secure two hours of peace. The cafe does not do “cheerful” but you can’t have everything for this price. For happiness and choice you need the more modern American-style coffee shops. Here the choice is limited to “with” and “without” milk. Sometimes I imagine myself in one of Hopper’s paintings, or stare at Rodin’s Thinker on another table. Today, sagging in in summer heat, Dali comes to mind.

bitter coffee
and the radio news
—rehearsing for The Scream

 

Tomorrow, I will publish the other poem that was nominated for the anthology. I actually think it was better than this one, and would be interested in what people think.

For people who like to know a bit more, the idea came whilst I was reading about the life of Edward Hopper. The idea of the half-empty cafe came from Nighthawks and the coffee cam from some tanka i had written on the subject after submitting some tanka written around a theme. I can’t remember the theme. In my hands it became about disappointment, though it may have been something more cheerful originally. I imagined myself in a typical English cafe, rather than an American diner, re-used the coffee/disappointment motif, and thought of Dali’s melting clocks. It was July and heat was on my mind. From there I added a bit more art and that was it.

I had previously submitted it to another magazine. The original version had a different title, a different haiku and 31 more words.  It also only mentioned Hopper. I took out about 60 words, replaced them with 30 different ones and added the extra artists.

Looking at it now, I don’t know how I thought the original version was good enough to submit, but that’s the way it happens. That’s why poems need time to mature. However, if you don’t send them out, you don’t always have the urge to improve.

No photos today. Can’t think of anything suitable to use.

That Whisper in my Ear

6 Replies

Yesterday I received my copy of Contemporary Haibun 21. I may have mentioned a few months ago that I wanted to buy a poetry book from the USA but didn’t want to pay $30 for postage on top of the $30 cost of the book.

My Orange Parker Pen

However, I checked an old email account and found an email with the offer of a $10 discount on the book, because I am in it. Vanity got the better of me, and despite the combined costs being enough to buy two takeaway meals for the two of us, I gritted my teeth and paid the price.

It is “an annual anthology of English-language haibun (and haiga) gleaned from the best practitioners from around the world”. (Haiga are pictures paired up with a haiku for those of you who are lost in the sea of foreign words that begin with hai).

It’s not a bad thing to be in, but when I look, I can’t help thinking about the people who are in it three times where I am only in it once. Are they three times better than me?  How much better do I need to become? Three of them are editors who have been very active in rejecting me over the years. They are also editors of the anthology, so it makes it miraculous that I actually made the cut. One of them seems far too enthusiastic in rejecting me when I submit to the journal where he is a newly appointed editor. He’s new to this job, but I wonder if his zeal will be reflected in the selections next year. If it is, I may be able to save a lot of money.

Two pens – one made by my wife

On the other hand, if they left out the last 50 pages, which are reprints of articles I have already read, it might have been cheaper to print and post.

Tricky.

How much do I crave publication? How much is it worth? Is it worth worrying about when a significant number of the editors are generally not keen on my work? Why does something I should be happy about become a matter for deep thought and depression? If I were Roman general I would have someone next to me whispering in my ear to bring me down to earth, but I don’t, and I can do it all by myself.

The Best Words in the Best Order

13 Replies

‘I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose; words in their best order; – poetry; the best words in the best order.’

S. T. Coleridge

Yesterday I read the words of an editor on the front page of their website. It seems that running a magazine is hard work and takes a lot of time. I had never imagined otherwise. I base this on the fact that I spent yesterday pushing words round paper. By the time I had finished I had taken three unpublishable poems and turned them into one possibly publishable poem and two that were better than when I started on them.

 

Poetry takes time. Lots of time.

I read some background, cogitated, deleted a few words, added a few words, deleted them, went back to the first version, and, in a flash of inspiration, deleted the first verse and the last verse and carried on messing with words.

Then I moved on to the next one . . .

The tricky thing I find, is that it’s surprisingly easy to alter something and make the poem worse.

Sometimes, when I’m in full flow, I can write a whole poem and it doesn’t need altering. I wrote one like that once and it was highly commended in a competition. I need to practice more and try to get back to that.

One of my free verse poems, when edited, turned into a haibun. Not quite sure how it happened, but it just seemed to fall into shape as I edited. It might be similar to what sports coaches call “muscle memory” – I’ve written so many haibun that I can’t write anything else. That’s unfortunate, because, as a previous editor pointed out recently, I can’t write haibun. 🙂

I’ve used pictures of Julia’s woodturning, because it’s very much like poetry. You start off with hope and a battery of skills and, if you are lucky, you end up finding something that is better than you hoped.

Writing and Watching the Time Pass

14 Replies

Despite being very erratic over the last week or two I have mainly kept to the plan, though a post a day has actually meant “averaging” a post a day. Or nothing some days and two or three on others, if I’m honest. I’m currently on 117 posts in 117 days. It is good, but I need this one to keep up.

Stones at Carsington Water

That’s how people do the Buson 100. That’s ten haiku a day for 100 days. I’ve tried three times, completed it twice, failed once. That’s life. However, I’m driven by the hope of improvement rather than the fear of failure so, though I’m not happy to have failed, I’m not going to let it ruin my life. I achieved some improvement in my haiku, then I let it fall away again. I’m not, in truth, greatly enthused by haiku and write them bacause they are necessary if you want to write haibun. The article I first read about it indicated that you could catch up if you got behind, as long as you ended up with 1,000 haiku at the end of it. The link in the post that I have just linked to is no longer available, but this one is very good too.

Stone head – Rufford Abbey

Yosa Buson, an eighteenth century poet and artist, after whom the Buson 100 is named, tried to write ten haiku a day for a hundred days twice and as I recall he didn’t finish either one. He did, however have a lot of other things to do, and he did die in the middle of the second one. He was 68, which will be my age soon – probably an indicator that I should look after myself better and write faster.

It is tempting to set myself a poetry target, but I don’t think it would help. Keeping up with the current regime of one blog post a day and one numismatic article a week are hard enough as it is.

Detail from gravestone – Crowland

More Speed than Usual

7 Replies

Flying Scotsman at NVR

10.45. This is the crossroads of the day. Yesterday I chose to research and write articles, interspersed with reading blogs and replying to comments.  A poetry book arrived, which I skimmed and found to be good. I collected Number One Son from the station – we had tea and watched TV and caught up. At midnight I found myself lacking a blog post. Such are the choices we make. However, I did find time to read some articles on writing haibun. I have made notes as part of my new self-education attempt.

Unfortunately Mallard is not at NVR.

Today I have choices to make again. Julia and No 1 Son have gone off to town. They are travelling by steam railway, as the NVR passes within a few hundred yards of the house and goes all the way to Peterborough.


Photograph is borrowed from Country Life magazine website and Courtesy of The Estate of Steve McQueen/ Sotheby’s.

So, do I fritter my time away or do I set to work and produce something useful? Whilst searching for the NVR site I already browsed and found some new information. Checking the link for the book I noted a couple of openings for poetry submissions. Then I noticed that Sotheby’s are holding a sale of important watches. They don’t seem that important, though they are all well beyond my budget. One, worn by Steve McQueen in Le Mans, comes with a filing box of correspondence and provenance and the upper estimate is $1,000,000. That’s a lot of money just to tell the time. And it’s a lot of money for an undeniably ugly watch.

However, as a piece of film history, and part of the story of a 20th Century icon, it is also a priceless relic. Pricing, as we always said in the antiques trade, is as much art as science. Well, I did, I’m not sure about the rest of them.

Give me a million dollars and I’d be happy to go on a round the world cruise with a £10 watch. The cruise would be so much more relaxing if I didn’t have to worry about losing my watch or having it stolen.

The next post of the day will be a haibun on the subject of auction sales. (Sorry, the day got away from me and it was posted in the early hours of toady, which would have been “tomorrow” when I originally posted about “The next post of the day.)

Photograph is borrowed from Country Life magazine website and Courtesy of The Estate of Steve McQueen/ Sotheby’s.

More Poetry

12 Replies

My Orange Parker Pen

This is a tanka prose that was first published in Blithe Spirit 36.1, the journal of the British Haiku Society, in February this year. It is different from the original version, which was about eggs and lockdown and parents. This is about writing a poem and cooking eggs. It deviates slightly from reality as I mention coffee, where we always have tea for breakfast. Tea doesn’t really smell so I took the lazy way out and said we had coffee so I could add an extra sense to the poem.

But first, a tanka, from the same issue. It is based on the annual culling of the Christmas card list as my circle of cousins decreases.

old Christmas card
displayed again
fading slightly
sent by a man
who will not send another

I thought that’s what it was about, anyway. Julia reads it as a story about the Christmas card I have been sending her since 1988. It’s a good one and the message is still relevant. Why waste money, I ask, on another?

 

Life, seen in a Frying Pan

In lockdown, I decided to make better scrambled eggs and wrote a poem in my head as I stirred and learned. It spilled onto paper, took shape and, like the eggs, looked good. On the first rejection I checked all the words and moved them into better order. On the second I added an anecdote, on the third an allegory. At the fourth attempt I slimmed it down.

After five attempts I wondered if it might be bad, or if editors might dislike poems about scrambled eggs. When you think about it, it isn’t a subject you ever see. Eventually it faded from my mind, as poems like it often do. Recently, stirring eggs and making breakfast for my wife, I breathed in the toast and coffee smells and remembered the first line.

five eggs
two broken yolks
a speck of shell
things which are not perfect
still turn out well

The pen that Julia made at the wood turning group

A Haibun from the Past

17 Replies

Julia on the patio during lockdown

Here’s a haibun from 2021. It had its origins during lockdown as we used to sit outside the back door and dream of freedom.

Across the Valley
From the garden we look down onto a jumble of red tiled roofs and trees and for a moment, I can imagine that we are in the Mediterranean, and not Nottingham. We eat cheese and biscuits, and warm figs, picked straight from the container-grown trees in the front garden. The back garden faces north, which will not do for figs. If I had known we would stay here long enough to become gardeners, I would have bought a different house.


crumbs
on a cracked plate
once I had dreams

First published in Blithe Spirit 31.2 April 2021

Once we were quite good gardeners

Would Larkin call it Quiche?

9 Replies

Swings and Roundabouts, what goes around comes around, as one door closes another door opens . . .

Hot on the heels of my last rejection comes an acceptance. Not only an acceptance, but an acceptance for two tanka prose. Any double acceptance is a red letter day, as I said recently. This one was particularly good, as I had only sent two.

This is when I noticed something strange. The three that had been rejected a couple of days ago, looked poor when they were returned. The two that were accepted looked good when I re-read them. When I sent them off, they all seemed to be much the same level. It looks like I evaluate my work in relation to what happens when it is judged by an editor.

I must guard against this effect when viewing my work.

Here is a haibun that was rejected many times (four, I think) but accepted within hours by the final editor. It changed a few times over its life but the final version was not, as I recall, changed from the version that had been rejected by the previous editor.

Hidden Worlds

He wears a grey gaberdine and rides a bicycle from church to church. In his head he composes poems about sex and tombs. On YouTube he flickers in black and white, like a newsreel from the 1950s. Smiles are clearly still on ration.

Larkin used more bad language than you normally expect from a librarian. This becomes understandable when you find that he started his day with half a bottle of sherry.

monochrome photo
my parents younger than me
1963

Inspired by the life of Philip Larkin

(Published in Failed Haiku – February 2021)

I added the footnote because I had just been rejected by an editor for being obscure( it was a poem about a visit to Adlestrop). The editor who accepted it, did not use the footnote. You might want to read this, if you aren’t familiar with Larkin. I selected 1963 partly because of the poem and partly because of the sound. It wasn’t an easy decision because the rhyme counts against it in Japanese style poetry.

Meanwhile here are some pictures of my latest quiches, complete with ready made pastry cases. When I was a boy quiches were called flans and my mother used to make “egg and bacon pie”, which has been replaced by Quiche Lorraine. Haven’t we changed over the years? Change and improvement, that old thing.

The top picture is what happened to the leftover egg from the quiches. We just ate it for breakfast. The other pictures are quiches with a definite yellow cast to the photo and a couple of pics of the great biscuit disaster. I only had two cutters – the little man and a glass from the cupboard.

There is a lot of spinach in the flans, though you can’t really see it. We’ve also had it in curry this week. It’s going to mess my INR results up but I ordered a 500g bag with the groceries, which is a lot more spinach than it sounds when you actually have to use it. Green vegetables contain Vitamin K, which is the antidote for Warfarin so if you eat more, the INR goes down. You are supposed to eat the same things each week to stop the INR moving. So the choice is this – die of a blood clot, die of boredom, get scurvy. Discuss.

It’s a Haibun

14 Replies

Here’s a poem for you. It was first published in The Haibun Journal in April 2025. I could say it’s a comment on art and the people who think that four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence is music. If I had a Masters Degree, as many poets seem to have, I could probably get away with that.

But I don’t. I have a City & Guilds in Poultry Production, so I settled for writing a piece about being desperate for inspiration. I’m told that writing poems about writing poetry is almost guaranteed to get you turned down because editors see so much of it, so I got lucky here. Well, I got lucky the third time I submitted it, which would make a good case study on persistence.

Originally it was a tanka prose but it became a haibun, removing the tanka and using a haiku that I’d previously had rejected when it was sent to a haiku magazine. “Three Minutes Thirty Three” was originally “Six Minutes Sixteen”, I added the bit about alliteration making it poetry and substituted “watching birds” for “watching daytime TV”. Whether those qualify as improvements I’m sure. There are probably a couple of tweaks I would make if I ever get round to that poetry book, but otherwise I’m happy with it, which is not something I say about all my published poems.

Anyway, this is the finished version. For now . . .

Two Hours Twenty Two

An hour and forty eight minutes pass before I dredge inspiration from the depths. I know this because I set a timer to put myself under pressure to produce. If John Cage can do 4′ 33”, I thought, I can do Two Hours Twenty Two. It’s not accurate, but it is alliterative, which makes it poetry. If I’d set off with Cage’s piece in mind, I would have settled for Three Minutes Thirty Three and passed the rest of the morning drinking tea and watching birds feed in the garden.

a blackcap
sings from tangled thorns
—the stalking cat