Writing Haibun and Parenting Like a Poet

My daughter is both woman and girl, loving me and needing to find space from me, and I am teacher and student, confident and terrified.

Parenting becomes more complicated—harrowing, even, though that’s a bit dramatic—when my daughter turns nine and we move away from the polar shifts of young childhood (awake/asleep, hungry/fed, silly/serious, peals of delighted laughter/body-racking sobs) to something more inscrutable: subtle shifts of mood and temperament, distance and differentiation.

Where I was once able to solve her every problem—here is a cracker, take a nap, let’s dance, I’ll rock you to sleep—I no longer have a strategy, much authority, or a plan of attack. Sometimes I am the problem; most of the time I can’t identify the problem, much less solve it. Beyond frustration and confusion, I am heartbroken at the loss of parenting that feels, in retrospect, to have been easy and fun.

We slip from nine to ten to eleven, circling the drain of teenagehood, which I hear from other mothers, gaunt and grim-eyed as they recount the daily indignities, to be irredeemable. Each day she is less and less the carefree little girl who adored and needed me, but nor is she a young woman ready to decide for, solve for, or comfort herself. Or rather, she is both these things at once: girl and woman, child and adult. A hybrid.

My friend tells me parents should speak 50 percent less, that we should leave more space for silence or for the words of our growing daughters, which makes sense in this world where women are constantly being silenced; besides, what teenage girls want to hear our hard-earned wisdom when they feel they are the first to face their particular problems?

I understand this intellectually, but at the same time, words feel like the only thing I have left to offer. My daughter no longer needs the comfort of my body, my sustenance, my embrace, my kiss on her scraped knee—so how do I aim for 50 percent less of the only tool I still have to mother with? I wonder about this as I am driving her home from school and am locked once again in an endless loop of explanation: what she should do and how, who she can be, and, oh, how was her day. Even as the words escape my mouth, I want to suck them back in, but I keep pouring them out desperately, hoping to find the combination that rights everything, unlocks the holy castle, returns us to some simpler way of being together, both of us able to get what we need.

Because I am a poet, I think this compression of language should come more easily to me. Isn’t this our craft? When it comes to what I say to and about my daughter, I know I should be a whittler, but instead I am grandiose: lost in long sentences, explanations . . . basically, prose. I want to write about all of this, but how?

It is then I learn about the haibun, a hybrid poetic form, the perfect combination of long, prosey lines followed by a compressed gem of haiku, the only amount of my voice I suspect my daughter wants to hear, if indeed she wants to hear anything at all.

Matsuo Bashō is the Japanese poet who popularized the haibun form in the seventeenth century, and like many ancient poetic forms passed down through generations and across cultures, it has evolved in the appropriative English where I nestle mine. Its basic structure—beginning with prose (frequently describing a place, journey, or scene) and concluding with a haiku—has endured over centuries. Bashō’s collection of haibun, The Narrow Road to the Interior, published posthumously in 1702, charts his 156-day journey by foot from Tokyo to Oku, a poetic pilgrimage of sorts on which he famously realizes “the journey itself is home.”

When I begin writing my own haibun, I look to poet Kimiko Hahn, who in 2008 wrote a book named after Bashō’s original text. Hahn combines prose, poetry, and first-person narrative in a contemporary way that affirms my interest in the haibun, showing me a path. Her thoughts on the flexibility of the form excite me, as she observes there are “common characteristics of modern haibun in English, but no characteristic is an inviolable rule.” Structure without inviolable rules is fertile ground for poets, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, another guiding light, reminds us the haibun form “especially and brightly lends itself to experimentation.”

Some poets play with the tension between voice or intention in the poem’s two parts, creating a tonal call-and-response, marking transition, illustrating distance. I like this idea of a tension inherent in form; to me, it reflects the tension inherent in any close relationship: gravity, love, language. In the right light, tension could just as easily be described by balance. A haibun is balance and tension, long and short, traveling and still.

This liminality is what draws me to the form as a way to record this bittersweet place where my daughter and I find ourselves as we begin to navigate her teen years and find ourselves straddling a line of sorts, still steeped in our early joy in one another and yet alive to new complications. The haibun embodies duality: prose and poetry balanced, coexisting, which is what we, too, are trying to do. She is both woman and girl, loving me and needing to find space from me, and I am teacher and student, confident and terrified.

Within our individual selves we are like haibun, expanding and contracting across new thresholds and experiences. And together we are also like haibun, our conversation a call-and-response across a boundary as it is being drawn, two distinct voices with different registers and sizes, both trying to occupy the same space.

She is both woman and girl, loving me and needing to find space from me, and I am teacher and student, confident and terrified.

My first haibun comes together in the arc of a regular morning when my daughter is twelve, the most liminal of ages, on the cusp of being a teenager in earnest. Someone has coined the word tween for this stage, which strikes me as diminutive and yet apt: She is between so many stages at once. Morning, too, is a liminal space; we are still groggy from sleep and dreams, not yet part of the day, which includes so much forward motion: closet, bathroom, bus, school and its many warrens and duties, home again.

As I record the morning later in my journal, line breaks are a tyranny—the story is whole and long, enjambed completely, and I am only tempted to break when it comes to the transitions. These breaks must be the place for haiku, I think to myself, and suddenly I am seeing the journey and the poem the way Bashō does, both of us using haibun to record what we find as we make our way through rough terrain.

For a few months, the ideas for haibun come to me almost every time my daughter and I are together: watching a movie, sharing a swim, ill with norovirus, bickering on the way to school. These moments carry the weight of our ever-changing dynamic. But of course, these moments are fleeting—I feel them slipping by in the teen years more quickly than I ever did in those hours with a two-year-old marching through a day’s transitions on a razor’s edge. Those long-ago poems, often scrawled on any nearby scrap of paper, were short, their lines abrupt and improvised, which means I’m practiced at brevity.

But it doesn’t make the haiku easy for me at first. I try to work within the historical form and its possibilities, but I struggle to employ them within the haibun, to know what to do with them as brief codas: Do I try a different voice? Strive for the imagistic? Find an analog for the poem’s narrative in nature?

As it turns out, this lack of certainty is similar to what I feel in parenting, and that recognition is liberating. I experiment, I make mistakes, I succeed, I fail. Eventually, I find my way. I practice the haibun, and I also listen and look for what’s to come, what other poetic form or way of being might make itself available to me, to us, once we’ve exhausted this phase.

I miss a lot of things about early parenthood: my good intentions, her tireless energy and enthusiasm, the easy hugs and bodily closeness. It is sometimes painful to behold little girls in saggy leggings and funny T-shirts, those kid-skinny limbs and the way they closely orbit their mothers, knowing that time is definitively over for me. And I’m reminded I need to pay attention to this moment, too, before it is gone.

I sit beside my own daughter as she is today, face awash in highlighter and contour, eyes fringed in mascara as she smiles into her phone with a love and adoration once reserved only for me. There’s so much to learn, so much to record and reflect on before it is gone, swallowed by the inevitable—perhaps even forced—journey toward our shared adulthood.

So for now I have the haibun: this hybrid poem form that lets me map the road as I walk it, describe the people and customs I encounter, the things I feel and think and do. This form that has given me a way to understand the liminality within my daughter, within myself, within our dynamic. This form that has allowed me my wordy meditations, all my unbroken lines, and room for a little note, TL;DR, for my daughter at the end.

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To read a haibun by Amanda Moore, click here.