Reading Zheng's Haibun

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THE JOY OF READING ZHENG'S HAIBUN

 

Zheng, Jianqing.  A Way of Looking.  Eugene, Oregon: Silverfish Review Press, 2021.

ISBN:  978-1-878851-7-27  $18.00

 

Jianqing Zheng's A Way of Looking, winner of the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Award, draws upon his expertise as a modern poet and his exceptional skills as a photographer to record what transpires as he travels back and forth between China, his native land, and the Mississippi Delta, his adopted home. The form he has chosen for describing the journeying is haibun, the prosimetric literary form popularized in Japan by Matsuo Bashō, a haiku master who wrote prolifically about his physical and spiritual journeys. What is quite special about reading Zheng's haibun is what they reveal to us about poetry anchored in blendings of prose and verse.  The best instances of haibun produce harmony between image-laden prose and the image-conservation of haiku.  The expansive and the concise complement one another and give readers cognitive instruction and sensual pleasure.  Haibun is imbued with psychological manipulation.

 

Prior to Bashō's use of what in the Western world is named prosimetrum, we find it used by the Roman poet Boethius (c. 477-524 A.D.), specifically  in De consolatione philosophiae.  As a pre-Renaissance poet, Boethius did what the later European mind seems pre-destined to do.  He theorized.  He speculated that combinations of  prose and verse cooperate in activating cognitive (rational) and aesthetic (sensual) responses in a reader.  It is doubtful that contemporary theorists would care argue about his points. Centuries after Boethius, Geoffrey Chaucer ( 1343-1400) experimented with prosimentrum, in some of his major poems and in his translation of Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy. Bashō is obviously  more pre-modern than Boethius and Chaucer.  Much to his credit, Zheng maintains fidelity to Bashō's examples, to practice rather than obtuse theorizing in a poem.  Zheng's fidelity is our gain and an instructive lesson about cross-fertilization in poetry over great spans of time.  It is not surprising that numerous Americans who write haiku and variations of haiku are indebted Asian explorations of what is essential in poetry. Recall that Ezra Pound was light-years ahead of T. S. Eliot in discovering the geographical locus of genuine poetry.

 

Zheng's haibun illuminates how to look and what to look for.  Given my many journeys real and imagined in Mississippi,  I am enthralled by "Road to Vicksburg" (55).  The haiku that ends the poem

 

by the blues highway

to casino

a wreathed cross tilts in wind

 

secures the plain but image-heavy prose description of driving and being distracted by viewing road-kill as story.  There is a compelling story of how the distracted  narrator might have been crushed and transformed into road-kill by an eighteen-wheeler.  There are many instances of such mind-engaging haibun in A Way of Looking, and I strongly recommend that readers discover how the prose and poetry enhance our perceptions of things in this world through the voice of poet/photographer.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            April 28, 2021

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