Hi there. I'm returning after a hiatus too. The term haibun caught my eye so I looked it up and now I'm deeply impressed! How long a piece is your haibun? I'm pretty curious about it (and will go farther back in your timeline to see if I can learn more).
At the moment it's only c.350 words long and it's SFnal in direction as I wanted to see what I could do with it (and because I love Mars I decided to set it, more specifically, around that). I started off reading Basho's haibun to get a feel for how it should go and then tried it myself with varying degrees of success. I try to keep within the 5-7-5 syllable format for the haiku although some people say that if you're writing haiku in English then you don't need to be as strict but I think that it's a good challenge to see if you can make it work, sound good, poetic/ lyrical and still keep within the constraints set by the original Japanese practitioners.
The fact that you've crafted 350 words of Mars science fiction in an ancient Japanese poetry form is just so wonderful, I can't find words for it.
I've heard that the 5-7-5 structure becomes somehow "irrelevant" in non-Japanese languages, but I agree with you about constraints, challenge and creativity.
(I feel the same way about Drabbles. The term doesn't just mean "kind of short," damn it! It means exactly 100 words! :D)
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I try to keep within the 5-7-5 syllable format for the haiku although some people say that if you're writing haiku in English then you don't need to be as strict but I think that it's a good challenge to see if you can make it work, sound good, poetic/ lyrical and still keep within the constraints set by the original Japanese practitioners.
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I've heard that the 5-7-5 structure becomes somehow "irrelevant" in non-Japanese languages, but I agree with you about constraints, challenge and creativity.
(I feel the same way about Drabbles. The term doesn't just mean "kind of short," damn it! It means exactly 100 words! :D)
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