contemporary haibun online 21.3, Dec 2025
Two Favorite Haibun: The Existential Shrug
Allusion, metaphor, and irony in contemporary haibun
English-language haibun has always been a hybrid creature—restless, elastic, improvisational. Michael Dylan Welch, in his introduction to Wedge of Light, traced its migration from Bashō’s travel diaries to North America and notes how quickly the form adapted to new idioms.1 Jeffrey Woodward, in his essay “Haibun Minus Haiku,” described haibun as “haiku-like prose with or without one or more haiku,”2 while acknowledging that the form, as practiced in English, has taken on new voices and tones. Woodward argued that haibun need not contain haiku, so long as its prose remains “haiku-like” in its ellipsis, paradox, and understatement.
Not everyone welcomes that elasticity. Writers such as Suzette Richards caution that overt metaphor or allegory risks violating haibun’s humility, urging prose that stays, in her phrase, “subtle and respectful” toward its Japanese roots.3 Haibun’s modesty, she reminds us, was never meant to be a blank check for experimentation. Yet even within that restraint, the form continues to evolve. As Bob Lucky has observed, English-language haibun “has been enriched, but it’s also drifting away from its meaning, or at least its definition in Japanese.”4 The conversation has become less about orthodoxy than about tone—how to balance irony and reverence, intellect and immediacy.
Two haibun illustrate that balance for me: Keith Polette’s “Rock On”5 and my own “Thought Bubbles.”6 They meet in what I call the “existential shrug”—a dry acknowledgment of human absurdity rendered through wit and restraint. Polette’s is learned, allegorical, volcanic; mine, domestic and self-effacing. Both rely on allusion and irony to locate humor in futility.
Rock On
The igneous rock is cooled magma turned solid. The igneous rock, under due consideration, calls to mind Ignatius Loyola, that rascal theologian from the Basque region of Spain, who hard-hammered intellectual rigor into the pursuit of divinity.
interview questions—
the sharp pebble in my shoe
on a winter morning
The sedimentary rock is formed by a slow break-down, a long erosion, a weary wearing-away. The sedimentary rock is the “couch potato” of the rock family, sitting for decades on the sofa, like that uncle who showed up one day and never left, his hairline receding each year like a pale moon slowly rising out of his forehead, as empty pizza boxes pile up on either side of him; he is all Ishmael: waiting to be plucked from the sea after his disastrous voyage.
lunar eclipse
the overlap of languages
Rosetta Stone
The metamorphic rock comprises most of the Earth’s crust. It is, by all accounts, the Franz Kafka of the rock world, putting pen to the earth’s hard core to conjure into being that dubious character, Gregor Samsa, who turned one morning into a giant insect, who then spent the rest of his short life trying to regain a rock-hard existence, only to realize, too late, that his life was constantly shifting, constantly changing like the great stone that Sisyphus was forced to roll up the hill ad infinitum, until one night, with an apple (oh, Eden’s marble fruit!) lodged firmly in his backplates, he turned stone-still, pure obsidian, as if he had been transformed into something harder than granite by Medusa’s gaze.
old gritty day—
dark basalt being blasted
into bits of gravel
Polette’s haibun delights in erudition without drowning in it. His geological lexicon doubles as metaphysical inquiry: each rock type becomes a station of human experience. The piece begins as mock lecture and ends as burlesque—Ignatius of Loyola and Franz Kafka sharing a jackhammer. The humor is professorial yet self-aware, revealing how knowledge calcifies into absurdity. Each haiku works as a hinge of tone: the first compresses discomfort into a shoe; the second turns translation into eclipse; the third reduces cosmic labor to gravel. The final image, basalt blasted to dust, converts Albert Camus’s eternal laborer in The Myth of Sisyphus into comic entropy. The stone doesn’t merely roll downhill; it explodes in laughter.
“Thought Bubbles” emerged as a quiet reply to “Rock On”—a counter-tone rather than a counter-argument.
Thought Bubbles
Cleaning the fridge, I’m reminded of King Creon’s stables. But then I remember Hercules was set free at the end of his labors, so maybe that’s the wrong analogy. Which brings to mind the trials of Sisyphus—the endless, thankless monotony of his toil—admittedly on a more cosmic scale than mine, but still the same relentless cycle of joy and suffering inherent to the known universe, down to the Planck scale.
As I lean my shoulder into a mustard stain on the second glass shelf, I mull over the Laws of Thermodynamics, Chaos Theory, how the Tao Te Ching anticipated most of this stuff centuries ago. Yeah, it’s that kind of afternoon.
on my windowsill—
this little pile of bird shit
washed away by rain
Where Polette builds layers, I let them dissolve. The setting is resolutely banal: refrigerator, shoulder, stain. Scientific diction—Planck scale, Chaos Theory—collides with the domestic. The gesture is comic, not satirical: a cosmic lecture delivered with a sponge. The haiku provides the punctum, what Rich Youmans calls a “knothole through which the world becomes part of the wood.”7 The bird dropping is that peephole, a tiny aperture through which entropy turns tender.
Both haibun use irony as empathy. Neither voice seeks transcendence; each finds dignity in futility. Our tools are Western—metaphor, allusion, irony—but our aim remains what Makoto Ueda called “the feeling of incompleteness that expands in the reader’s imagination.”8 That expansion is the light between thought and thing, the margin where meaning erodes into humor and humor into grace.
Youmans’s insight that good haibun “expand the possibilities of a narrative by taking the reader outside of it” articulates why these two pieces, though playful, stay within the form’s ethos of detachment. The existential shrug isn’t apathy—it’s acknowledgment: the moment the rock and the refrigerator become one, and we keep working anyway.
____________________________________
Endnotes
- Welch, Michael Dylan. “A Survey of Haibun Definitions,” Introduction to Wedge of Light, Press Here, 1999; rev. 2014.
- Woodward, Jeffrey. “Haibun Minus Haiku,” Haibun Today, Nov. 2007.
- Richards, Suzette. “Haibun—Subtle and Respectful,” PoetrySoup Blog, Aug 9 2025.
- Lucky, Bob. “Two Favorite Haibun: On Going a Journey,” contemporary haibun online 21.2, August 2025. (See footnote 7.)
- Polette, Keith. “Rock On” Soundings (Brunswick, ME: Shanti Arts Publishing, 2024).
- Dee, Billie. “Thought Bubbles,” Drifting Sands Haibun no. 24, 2024.
- Youmans, Rich. “Why I Write Haibun: An Apologia,” Modern Haiku XXVII, No. 3, Fall 1996.
- Ueda, Makoto. Matsuo Bashō (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1982), 122.
Selected References and Further Reading
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Vintage Books, 1955. [Defines the Existential philosophical ground of the absurd.]
Cobb, David. “A Few Timely Heresies About English Haibun.” Blithe Spirit, V. 10, No. 3, September 2000. Republished in Haibun Today 5.4, December 2011. 2016. [Challenges orthodoxy with humor.]
Kacian, Jim. Border Lands. Winchester, Virginia: Red Moon Press, 2006.
Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Harper & Row, 1988. [Source of paradoxical acceptance central to modern haibun tone.]
Lehmann, Kat. “Two Favorites: On Structure—An Exploration into Haibun’s Fourth Element.” contemporary haibun online,18.2, August 2022. [On title and layout as integral to meaning.]
Lindquist, Kristen. “Two Favorite Haibun—On the Importance of Good Storytelling.” contemporary haibun online 19.1, April 2023. [Explores narrative voice and authenticity.]
Rasmussen, Ray. “The Role of Modeling in Haibun Composition.” Haibun Today 7.2, June 2013. Republished in contemporary haibun online 19.1, April 2023. [Influence and craft through example.]
Ueda, Makoto. Matsuo Bashō. Kodansha, 1982. [Foundational study on incompleteness.]
Welch, Michael Dylan et al., Wedge of Light. Press Here, 1999. [Seminal anthology marking the rise of English-language haibun.]
Woodward, Jeffrey. “Haibun Minus Haiku,” Haibun Today, Nov. 2007,
Youmans, Rich. “Why I Write Haibun: An Apologia,” Modern Haiku XXVII, No. 3, Fall 1996. Republished in Wedge of Light, Press Here, 1999; rev. 2014. [Advocates haiku as, to quote Raymond Roseliep, “peepholes into the absolute.”]
