At Home in the [Burning] World – Haibun by Dane Cervine

Deep Travel – At Home In The [Burning] World is a book of contemporary haibun by the poet Dane Cervine. Underlying this series of journeys—through the great Midwest of America, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, a bit of French countryside, Italy, then later through New England—is an experience of pilgrimage. The Japanese poet Basho’s famous book Narrow Road to the Interior explored both “interiors”: of countryside and heart-mind. Ancient Zen poets grounded their work in Nature itself, the passing seasons infiltrating words with blossom and decay. Today, climate change appears as the ubiquitous background in many travels. In Deep Travel, this includes a cataclysmic fire in California at the author’s ancestral home, unfolding at the end of his journey in drought-stricken Turin, Italy. The quest: to find a sense of home in this fragile, yet resilient, world.

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AFTER YEARS OF WRITING POEMS in traditional lined or prose formats, I found myself experimenting—while traveling—with contemporary forms of Japanese haibun. The poetic form traditionally involves a journey, reflecting the seasons, and typically ends with a haiku giving some final flourish or perspective to the narrative. My own travels occurred over the course of several years intersticed between the pandemic, and the rise of climate change as a prominent feature of life on Earth.

I’d been preparing for this use of haibun for a decade without knowing it. I’d begun an [almost] daily contemplative journaling fashioned along traditional zuihitsu lines. Zuihitsu, or Flowing Brush, is a classical Japanese form derived from a Chinese literary tradition employing random thoughts, diary entries, reminiscence, poetry, and more. It emerged in the Heian Period (794-1185 AD), first seen in Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book. More modestly, it became the loose framework of my journaling after beginning more serious [and humorous] Zen practice.

My wife and I began traveling again after the pandemic became somewhat endemic. I continued journaling and found that upon return, there were natural occurrences of haibun lurking in the narrative. Revisiting these moments, I would sit quietly till a haiku emerged. The freedom I feel in working with contemporary iterations of these forms reflect a cross-cultural literary inheritance that, like the Arabic ghazal or any number of inspired genres, transform any new reader & writer as much as they are transformed. Our globe is inescapably mycelial in this way, intermeshed beneath the ground of the written word.

What is Haibun?
Haibun 俳文 as a literary form combines prose and haiku. The range of haibun is broad and frequently includes autobiography, diary, essay, prose poem, short story and travel journal. The haibun typically includes a haiku at its end. In this text, I often use quotes from news sources, books I am reading, Wikipedia entries, poem fragments, the occasional black-and-white photograph, and more. These illustrate the striking and intimate features of haibun. Connecting the dots of the wide world.

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Haibun 1

In Chefchaouen, Mohammed pauses in front of yet another blue door lining the curving streets like exits from a labyrinth. Each, a portal to a world I will never know. The doors are decorated with symmetrical patterns of black nails or bolts that, in the old days, documented family births through the generations. Doors that held many generations, doors older than America as a country Mohammed says. Suddenly, I feel blue vertigo as centuries whirl down the alley like wind. Though nowadays, the designs are mainly decorative, he says: families grow and move to other villages, to Casablanca, or across the Mediterranean. Lives like wind. Not a bolt. Not a nail in an old door.

The markets are full of eyes
looking no further than
here

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Haibun 2

We are driven to the Montreal airport by a broad-smiling man from Haiti, who came to America with family before settling in Quebec—his Haitian French helping to navigate this new land. At the airport, Linda and I are struck by how friendly the Canadian airport staff are. Faces, mostly black, accents mostly French, as though understanding the essential fragility of journeys.

As we pass to U.S. Customs, the American staff are dead-pan serious—some fundamental paranoia, perhaps, of boundaries, of what can happen. Linda is randomly tagged for a full backpack search of her belongings, a red stamp put on her boarding pass after (for unknown reason), causing new moments of delay. “A little old lady terrorist alert”, we laughed after. At yet another checkpoint, Linda makes the mistake of answering “yes” about having anything to declare: an orange, prompting a long wait for a supervisor to finally come and ask her about the orange, and that, yes, we’ll have to leave it behind. 

The orange—a language
undeclared

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