Haibun / Hybrid
4.28.09
There is a good deal of chatter and blogging and general what-not (poetic and academic) about hybridity. But I wonder if this is something new? What does hybridity even mean to a Eurasian, born in the middle of the twentieth-century? I mean, one has only to look towards non-Western forms to find some of what is being re-invented.
I have written elsewhere about the zuihitsu and how this century-old form feels a lot like Williams’ Paterson or perhaps today’s “lyric essay.” I’ve considered how the monostich most engages me as a tanka—and rendered as one-line instead of the five-lines found in translation.
