MTB: Zuihitsu, Following the Brush

Hellooo, dVerse Poets! Welcome to Meeting the Bar, where we work on poetry forms and skills. I know many of us are participating in NaPoWriMo or other poetry challenges this month, but I hope you will at least look at this new-to-me form called the zuihitsu. I don’t think we’ve ever tried this on dVerse before.

Zuihitsu is not a new form. According to the Poetry Foundation’s glossary:

It is “a Japanese hybrid form that can be traced back to Sei Shōnagon’s 10th-century text, The Pillow Book, zuihitsu is often translated from the Japanese as “following the brush.” This capacious genre incorporates nonfiction, musings and confessions, poetry, and miscellany to create a spontaneous, layered text.”

I think it is most helpful to look at examples. Here’s the beginning of a poem by Jenny Xie.

Read the rest of the poem here.

You can read more examples by several poets here

Here is an interview about the form with poet Kimiko Hahn

So, for the prompt–
Just have fun with this one. To start, you can use a line from a poem, the news, a song, or think about a walk you’ve taken . . .go from there. I think you could also begin it as an ekphrastic. You can write paragraphs and fragments—follow the brush and see where it takes you!

For the sake of those reading, let’s keep these zuihitsu to one page. 😊

If you’re new to dVerse, here’s how to join in:

*Write a poem and post it to your blog.
*Enter your name and direct link to your poem into Mr. Linky.
*You will also find some other amazing poems! Please read and comment.
*Provide a link to dVerse so others can find us too.
*Drop in to say hello in our discussion below.
*Have fun!