If Japanese literary forms haiku and haibun fascinate you, an upcoming workshop by author Rochelle Potkar may just be the start you need
Rochelle Potkar
Haiku and haibun, two Japanese literary forms, are finding an increasing number of takers in India. While haiku is a poetry form of three sentences, a haibun is prose that ends or begins with a haiku.
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Poet and writer Rochelle Potkar, who recently won the prestigious Open Road Review fiction award, is smitten by the forms and has been conducting workshops to take it to other writers. The next one organised by The Bombay Review is this week.
“When I first tried a haiku, I thought I had got it right but when I showed it to people who write haiku, they told me that it was not really working as every poetry of that form also needs to have juxtaposing images,” says Potkar. It then struck her how writing in these forms is still a subculture and how little do people know about them. These forms, she says, open up writers to a whole new world of literary possibilities.
“I meet a lot of writers who are hesitant poets. If the free verse liberated many poets from the limitations of metre, haibun and haiku will allow a lot more scope. A haibun does not even need to have a concrete ending but can just end with a haiku,” she explains. Many writers, she shares, who are also poets were fascinated to discover a form where they could do both together. Potkar agrees that there is an increased interest in shorter literary forms as more people are reading online. But then even online, the readership for longer writing exists. “If it is well written it does get the attention,” she says.
She is quite moved by the response she has got till now. “It is particularly interesting to see writers as young as in their early teens picking up the form so quickly. It is possibly because they do not carry the weight of knowledge with them, which makes one take time to learn something new,” she says.
The author is currently working on a book of haibun, apart from a novel and a collection of short stories. She will be visiting Tripura on November 22 invited by the Sahitya Akademi to read poetry at the Young Poets in English and English Translation: A Festival of Readings.
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