My interest in erasure stems from my work as an artist. I am involved in work that deletes various texts, and am excited by the subtle play that erasure seems to create when executed in certain ways. My work is not about the suppression of text, or the negation of what the text represents, but is about obscuring the words in order to create a different relationship between the text and the viewer. – Richard Galpin, from ERASURE IN ART: Destruction, Deconstruction, and Palimpsest

Hello dVersians! Welcome back after the holidays break. This is Li(sa) and it is my pleasure to host Haibun Monday today. To celebrate the incrementally lengthening days as we begin 2025, please give your hostess (me) requests for drinks/eats from the fully stocked beverages cabinet and the magic cupboard.

While looking for something different but still within the parameters of haibun, I came across a form called, burning haibun, discussed here in, “Writing from the Ashes: On the Burning Haibun,” written by Torrin A. Greathouse:

The burning haibun is an alteration of the traditional haibun—a Japanese haikai form originally popularized by Matsuo Bashō in the seventeenth century [that is] composed of a prose poem and a haiku [senryu] that functions as a kind of capstone or postscript, either amplifying or complicating the prose portion’s contents but employing greater segmentation. I was originally drawn to this form by the duality of its nature, defined both by the expansiveness of the prose poem and the terse compression of the haiku [senryu], allowing me to marry my competing maximalist and minimalist aesthetic impulses.

Making two key interventions upon the haibun, the burning haibun integrates erasure to fundamentally alter the form’s structural potential. Rather than the poem’s haiku [senryu] existing exterior to the initial text, the haiku [senryu] is derived, through a series of erasures, from the initial text itself. The haiku [senryu] is a kind of hidden message, a moment of stark truth concealed beneath the lyricism of the initial text. The second intervention is that, unlike traditional haibun, which often exist as travelog[ue]s or meditations upon an external landscape, the burning haibun’s focus is upon the interior landscape of memory—an environment often rendered fragmentary by trauma.

Tonee Mae Moll describes burning haibun as a poetic form that “begins with a haibun that documents an interior journey, then undergoes two rounds of erasure until what remains is a haiku [senryu].”  Tonee gives her example, with Burning Haibun as Portrait: 9 months on HRT, Georgia on MS Word.  In another post, Torrin gives an alternate way to create one by using a favorite song’s lyrics to inspire prose and distill it down to the lyrics.

Googling for examples, I found many excellent choices, but because they are rather lengthy am not including them in this post. I would encourage you to google like I did to check them out. Here is one I wrote today:

Hold Tight

A struggle in 2024, a struggle since 1993, when I stopped smoking cigarettes and stopped starving myself. Letting go of a pack a day and fasting left a vacuum that filled with food. Hikes and bike rides, step aerobics and Lake Michigan body surfing, couldn’t – and can’t – keep up with calories.

Like coats of paint on an old house, layers of poundage coat this corpus. Weighed down, worn down, my moving parts are tested. Knees groan, ankles throb, orthopedics strain, teeth chew to dust.

Heaviness enshrouds like blanket of gray January. Martinet intellect screams, “It’s time to get this fat ass in gear!” Drowning chorus of a thousand voiced cruelties pounds me into dilemmic inertia; mindlessly chewing another slice.

Limbo suckles, dark, forever-hungry presence that season cannot transcend. Holding tight until spring, may it bless with burbling fount for silence in songs of returning birds.

struggle when letting go
   vacuum filled layers worn
      moving parts chew dust
enshrouded blanket screams
   drowning cruelties slice
      limbo suckles
holding tight may bless
   for silence in songs

letting go, filled
worn parts enshroud cruelty
hold tight for silence

Now it has come to the place where I lay out your choices to inspire you today.  Please choose one (or more) of these options:

1:  Write a burning haibun based on an interior journey you’ve taken.
2:  Write a burning haibun using the lyrics from a favorite song to inspire you.

If you choose #1 or #2, please show all of the incarnations, from original prose, to first erasure (or bolding words, as done above) to the second erasure verse using the chosen bolded words, to the final haiku or senryu (aka personalized haiku)

If you’re not feeling adventurous, please choose #3:

3:  Write a haibun on any topic you choose.

Burning haibun is a brand new form for me and in the world of poetry in general.  Let’s try to have fun with it and do a little soul searching at the same time. 

• Pen a burning haibun poem choosing one or more of the given options to guide you.
• Post your piece on your blog and link back to this post.
• Place the link to your actual post (not your blog url) on the Mister Linky page.
• Don’t forget to check the little box to accept use/privacy policy.
• Please visit other blogs and comment on their posts!
• Have fun (but only if you want to!) 

PROMPT ENDS SATURDAY AT 3PM NYT

top image: One of Eddie Martinez’ White Outs