Matsuo Bashō, Suthorn Pho, and Contemporary World Travel Haibun - Bruce Ross

Traveler, there is no path. You make your path as you travel.

          Antonio Machado

The only journey is the journey within.

            Rainer Maria Rilke

We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves
after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

      Marcel Proust

When Bashō (1644-1694) was on his journey recorded in The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, he and his companion wrote on their hats: “Nowhere in this wide universe have we a fixed abode.”(1) This sense of being in an open-ended state of travel is elucidated in Bashō’s writing, centered on the poetics of the haibun form, as a state of internal discovery, and it can likewise be seen in the travel poetry of the Thai poet Suthorn Pho (1786-1855), centered on the poetics of the nirat form, as a record of Buddhist merit. It is alluded to by Machado, Rilke, and Proust, and practiced in haibun-like contemporary world travel writing. The Jains, who influenced both the Buddha and Gandhi, have a sub-sect whose members sleep in a different place each night, emphasizing the internal spiritual nature of their life’s travel. This is picked up in the Thai Theravada forest meditation tradition; the wandering Taoists of early China; the wandering monks of Japan, such as the fourteenth-century Zen master Ikkyū, who poeticizes the journey as “Straw sandals, a bamboo staff, an unfettered life”(2); the Native American Indian vision quest; and the Australian Aboriginal walkabout. Simply put, though, we may further differentiate such travel by contrasting the German Wanderlust, a desire to travel toward something, and the English wanderlust, an impulse to travel as such. Travel writing may focus on a destination or on a state or states of illumination. Shih-T’ou enigmatically notes the relation of the two: if you overlook the Way right before your eyes, how will you recognize the path beneath your feet?

The theory and poetics of haibun-like travel diaries centers on what is before one’s eyes. When Bashō suggests using “fresh and arresting”(3) elements and Pho asserts his “telling it like it is”(4) in their respective approaches to travel writing, they are broaching modern philosophic models of consciousness. Martin Heidegger has defined phenomenology, the philosophy of consciousness, as the process of letting things manifest themselves. Gaston Bachelard’s theory of poetic imagination accordingly has been characterized as “an epiphantic movement – a perpetual play of consciousness that alternately teases out, wrestles with, and recedes from the emergence of an image.”(5) What underlies Bashō’s and Pho’s simple creative premises is the nature of poetic consciousness, what I, in regard to haibun, have termed the “flow of sensibility” in a “narrative of an epiphany.” The second presiding element of this narrative is what I termed “privileging the link,” the haiku connection to the prose. Bashō suggests that great artists must have “a mind to obey nature, to be one with nature.”(6) That the consciousness of nature, its beauty, and the play of memory in that consciousness may take precedence over actual creation is admitted by Bashō, who once was not able to write what he wanted because he was “absorbed in the wonders of the surrounding countryside and the recollections of ancient poets.”(7) Yet at Akashi he wrote a striking haiku on octopuses trapped in underwater pots responding to the moon (published in The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel.) The nirat is defined as travel poetry intermittently engaging memories of a lost or distant beloved, usually in Pho through a present tense metaphor, so in the Nirat Muang Klaeng at Bang Samak, which means “steadfast,” he thought of his “steadfast love.”(8) The poetry linking in Pho are thus memory and present tense nature. Just before Bang Samak, Pho sees “Fireflies settled on a row of Lampoo trees, / Setting them aflame with a shimmering yellow glow,” (9) a haiku-like epiphany.

Bashō succinctly catalogues the reasons for traveling as a destination: “to see the marvelous beauties of nature, rare scenes in the mountains or along the coast, or to visit the sites of temporary abodes of ancient sage.”(10) His travel diaries abound with destinations linked to earlier poets or spiritual masters, places of beauty, temples and shrines, and the like. Pho’s nirat are mostly based on travel for spiritual merit: to retreats, a Buddha relic, a monastery, and so forth. In each writer the destination itself may provide the narrative’s epiphany, or inadvertent openings in the traveling, through memory or present tense experience, might provide an epiphany, expressed as a haiku or acutely heightened prose. Thus Bashō begins his Records of A Weather-exposed Skeleton journey because of an ancient Chinese priest who “traveled thousands of miles caring naught for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon.”(11) So too Pho’s Nirat Phra Prathom, his journey to the reclining Buddha temple for merit, finds him ritually walking around the temple’s pagoda, lighting incense and candles, offering flowers, and paying homage to others with a desire to be linked with them in future incarnations. He finally declares his true interest: “I make merit, so the Buddha helps me/Increase my power to attain enlightenment.”(12) In Nirat Phukhao Thong, his account of traveling to the Buddha relic at the Temple of the Golden Mount, he passes through the district of the Mon people and notices that the women have changed their hair style. His rumination on a world in which people have abandoned the old ways is a metaphysical one, a poetic epiphany, that concludes: “Most people are, therefore, of many minds; / Those of one mind are hard to find.”(13)

These two trained Buddhists living a hundred years or so apart each transformed their respective canon of travel writing, Bashō through his sincerity of treatment and depth and sensitivity of his haiku links, Pho through his simplicity and truthfulness of emotional contact. With regard to the idiom of travel as destination, one remembers the Zen saying, “Paths cannot be taught, they can only be taken.” What to make of the aesthetic intensity of Bashō’s desire to see the full moon over Kashina Shrine, this in response to another poet’s lines on the full moon? What to make of Pho’s sinking heart at the ruins of the temple complex Ayutthaya, which prompts these haiku-like emotional lines, “The Grand Palace and the Rear Palace are a wilderness. / Birds are making noise in the trees. / The old palaces have become a haunt of birds and crows.”(14) Bashō visits his Zen teacher Bucchō’s former hut at Unganji, the willow tree Saigyō wrote about, a ruined castle associated with three generations of the decimated Fujiwara family that prompted the famous haiku on the mutability of ambition, and Eiheiji Temple established by Dōgen, the founder of Soto Zen. Pho visits the Temple of Dawn, Wat Chaeng, with pangs of departing at the beginning of a forced visit to his father in the distant North and thinks sadly of his beloved Chan, literally “moon,” when he sees the actual moon; the ruins of Ayutthaya, which is “as desolate as a jungle”(15): Buddha’s footprint; and a monastery for a three-month rain retreat, vassa, which “to be fair” he leaves to encounter even bad people, “like a lost soul drifting along the river.”(16) In their travels Bashō and Pho encounter untamed wilderness and majestic sparsely populated landscapes and seascapes through which they walked, road horses, or sailed in boats.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries there are more options for Wanderlust. Also, within the context of the postmodern condition, the personal confidence in cultural ideologies has been hard pressed. Why would Westerners from the United States or Canada engage their versions of wanderlust or wanderlust beyond the boundaries of their own countries? Accordingly, it might be interesting to look at contemporary world travel haibun about the countries on which Bashō and Pho based their travel writing, Japan and Thailand. Two Americans have definite poetic connections to Japan. Jim Kacian cites a haiku by Buson in his haibun on the Sea of Japan, “Fields of Rape.” The Buson haiku mentions the moon, and Jim links Buson, not unlike Bashō linking Saigyō, with his own moon haiku in which a koi “shatters the moon.”(17) Lidia Rozmus visits Kameido Temple in the center of Tokyo at midnight and finds that the full April moon seems pale compared to the blossoms reflected in the temple pond. She is in a dreamy state that Bashō would have appreciated.(18) Kenneth Leibman walks Kyoto’s Path of Philosophy one afternoon to enjoy the cherry blossoms in full bloom and offers a haiku on cherry blossoms on an old woman’s blouse.(19) Tim Hawkes also takes in the cherry blossoms, here on a hill topped by a statue of Kannon above the city of Takasaki. The area of the temples around the statue are teeming with people, but the long staircase offers relative solitude, which is linked in Tim’s moss-covered Buddha haiku.(20) Patrick Gallagher experiences Thailand’s Theravada Buddhist emphasis on merit that Pho’s nirat express. Here Patrick notes practices of giving food to monks or setting caged animals free. A haiku offers a third kind of merit: placing gold leaf on a Buddha statue.(21) Bob Lucky amusingly alludes to a famous Zen koan after backing up on a dangerous mountain road to avoid running over a cobra, thus presumably accruing merit.(22) John Brandi offers a neo-traditional haiku while passing through the paddies of Guangxi Province, China:

Strolling a narrow path, a woman’s song lifts from the paddies. She’s harvesting greens into a basket:

the daikon picker
without looking up
knows we’re passing

But he offers a cautionary note: “Zhaoxing, with its idyllic setting and balanced lifestyle, gives hope in our disorderly world; but it also brightens the inevitable mourning a traveler experiences as witness to a planet under siege.”(23) Pat Prime’s “At Guilin” also offers a cautionary note. She feels pain when comparing the uncomplicated life of peasants with her own privileged life. She wonders why she feels pain. Here the postmodern condition impinges upon what the modern West has lost track of. Later under the moon Pat views old men dancing to ward off demons.(24) Jo Pasco is included in a happened-upon prayer flag ceremony above Leh, Ladakh that concludes with throwing three handfuls of flour into the air. Jo reflects: “No longer a stranger, I am part of this hilltop communion as we cast our flour on the wind.”(25) U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, in “On Visiting the DMZ at Panmunjom: A Haibun,” refers to the expected complexity of a divided Korea but offers a concluding haiku that offers the discovery that the moving white form between the guard towers is not mist or a wedding party but “egrets nesting in the willows.”(26) Two haibun writers commune with the Greco-Roman pastoral tradition, Bill Wyatt citing Theocritus on linnets and larks in his visit to Kos and linking Theocritus with a haiku on evening cicadas.(27) Ruth Holzer’s visit to Castelvetrano, Sicily concludes with a haiku separating the Classic tradition from the present, perhaps as a lesson (28):
shattered columns—
among goat dung
the head of Apollo

Steve Sanfield explores his East European Jewish roots and writes a haiku on more recent history, the death camps at Sobibor, where the memorial pines after forty years are “still twisted and stunted.”(29) Two writers commune with the changing and enduring nature of Italian culture, Dave Sutter the former and Ion Codrescu the latter (30, 31):
Two farmhouses:                                                 Murano chandeliers—
twenty feet apart,                                                 golden light slips
800 years apart                                                    from a balcony

Andrew Schelling communes with Yeats at Thoor Ballylee, where a haiku magpie disrupts the experience of a wall shadow “Japanese ghost,” perhaps alluding to a Yeats Noh play.(32) Robert Spiess captures the liveliness of Caribbean island life on Tobago and the mainland traveler’s delight over the unusual (33):
Saturday market:
     A live hen in the scale tray
          –my tomatoes next

Finally, two other writers encounter a bit of mystery in their exploration of Mexico. J. P. Trammel encounters a colony of hermit crabs in the Temple of the Snail on Cozumel and then his “fingertips trace the raised fossils texturing the temple’s weathering stonework,” both metaphors for an enduring presence of the past.(34) Such a presence materializes for Stevan Allred in the Merida market where he encounters Stone Age Lacandon Indians.(35) Such surprising experiences are a common aspect of such intended travel.

When considering travel as a state of being, wanderlust as opposed to Wanderlust, such surprises often become rather states of illumination. The “flow of sensibility” of haibun matches the state of travel. The “privileging the link” of haibun, its haiku, often becomes an epiphany in a narrative of an epiphany. The “flow of sensibility” suggests Bachelard’s reverie or Heidegger’s opening of things. There seems to be an envelope of protection and sometimes grace that surrounds the traveler. The ordinary mental focus is bypassed and an intuitive receptivity takes precedence in what has been termed “altered states.”

Bashō’s travel diaries are colored by his personal and aesthetic moods and his belief system of Buddhism and Shintō. For him one can experience transpersonal states and connect with divine presence. His visit to a former priest’s secluded hut exemplifies this:

The tranquility of the priest’s hermitage was such that it inspired, in the words of the ancient poet, “a profound sense of meditation” in my heart, and for a while I at least was able to forget the fretful feeling I had about not being able to see the full moon.(36)

On his visit to the Ise Shrine complex, the most sacred Shintō site in Japan, Bashō is disturbed that there are no plum trees, which produce the first blossoms in early spring. A priest assures him that there are some behind the house were the holy Shintō virgins live. Bashō’s linking haiku celebrates the sacred symbolism of rebirth associated with the blossoms and the Ise Shrine (37):
How befitting it is
For holy virgins,
A solitary stock of
Fragrant plum.

Visiting the Buddhist complex at Nara on Buddha’s birthday, he is similarly struck with awe that a fawn was born there that day.(38) Likewise on his visit to Ryushakuji Temple he enters an altered state: “As I moved on all fours from rock to rock, bowing reverently at each shrine, I felt the purifying power of this holy environment pervading my whole being.” Out of this state he composes his well-known cicada haiku (39):
In the utter silence
Of a temple,
A cicada’s voice alone
Penetrates the rocks.

His central aesthetic of sabi, a desired state of metaphysical loneliness, is presented while drinking tea and sake in a tiny temple on a small island (40):

“I was overwhelmed by the loneliness of the evening scene.
Lonelier I thought than the Suma beach – The closing of autumn on the sea before me.

Suthorn Pho has transpersonal experiences similar to those of Bashō. These may be teased out of his long travel poems as haiku-like epiphanies on nature, his fluctuating emotional states, or his Buddhist spiritual inclinations. Nature in the Thai forest is inhabited by animated spirits as well as a focus of deep emotion for Pho. Here a three-liner and a two-liner “haiku” serve as examples (41,42):

The pervasive din of grasshoppers stirred our hearts.
On both sides of the way the spirits of the trees were still,
Not swaying their branches as a warning.

Fields stand in a curtain of mist,
Showing endless rows of palmyra trees.


In his Nirat Phukhao Thong he writes what could be taken as a short haibun that resonates with Bashō’s sabi (43):
The sun sets in heavy rainclouds.
Darkness in all directions,
I follow a waterway through paddyfields,
Full of tangential vegetation,
Casting shadows over a waste of water.
The space fills me with loneliness.

In the same nirat, when Pho arrives at the Golden Temple he experiences an ecstatic hallucinatory belief that he has found a Buddha relic in the pollen of a lotus. He takes it home in a bottle and wakes the next day convinced it has been stolen in the night and feels as if he could die, all a metaphor of his elevated state.(44) His commitment to the Buddhist ethic not to destroy or harm life is evoked in Nirat Phra Prathom (45):
I see villagers sinning as fishermen;
They ensnare birds and hunt animals besides,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pity the buffalo plodding stolidly;
They lash it across to make it hurry:
Even if born a hundred thousand times,
I wouldn’t want to be a hire buffalo in a canal.

For Pho, these villagers are losing merit, the key to his Buddhism, which prompts his insight or connection to his belief in Buddhist reincarnation and karma, all of which carries the same pathos of Nietzsche’s breakdown upon seeing a horse beaten.

Such an intensity of insight can be found in modern world travel writing in the haibun form. Three writers on pilgrimages of various sorts to Bashō’s homeland each experience an opening to spiritual reality. In his diaries of travel in Southeast Asia and India, Paul F. Schmidt records coming upon a tiny Shintō shrine while hiking in the mountains. He opens the shrine door and finds nothing. His realization is the liberating Buddhist insight that form is emptiness, and emptiness is form:

For nothingness is always present, surrounds us with calm and quiet, absorbs into itself everything, every past life comfortably resides there, a perfect receptacle for all our ancestors, never over-crowded, vast and pervasive, hearing and absorbing every hand clap.(46)

Tim Sampson follows the established 1400-kilometer pilgrimage to the 88 temples of Shikoku by foot. Two of his haiku attest, not without humor, to his gained insight (47,48):
just one night                                                         dewdop hanging
“The Temple of God’s Summit”                             from a snail hanging
is my home                                                            from a branch

Brent Partridge similarly offers humor and insight to his travels in Japan (49,50):
Miyazaki Shrine—                                                 a timeless river—
protective Gods are awesome,                             pine fragrance on bridge
chickens are happy                                               to the Inner Shrine

John Brandi, not unlike Bashō or Pho, offers a moody insight in his visit to the crumbling Si Satchanalai temple complex in Thailand (51):

Stone radiates into human consciousness, fills the psychic stream, manifests itself as music. We inhale it, sit and converse with it. We press against it, taste the essential elements of magma inside the rock, water oozing from faces carved into pillars, air feeding lichens that scour Buddha’s smile, erase his eyes, burnish his curls. Everything is still, yet it writhes. Form mingles with formlessness. It’s a good place for dreaming:

Buddha too
part of the vanishing
world

In his haibun on a visit to a Chinese mountain temple, Ion Codrescu is continually sidetracked by his meditation on the landscapes through which he passes and the people he meets. He concludes his haibun by painting the landscape, really an act of internal communion, before heading again toward the temple (52):
the last brush stroke—
a dewdrop falls
on my ink sketch

Sita Seng is poverty-stricken and in a Madagascar hotel frequented by prostitutes. Sita’s poverty leads to a transpersonal experience reminiscent of Bashō or Pho (53):

The room has its own bare bulb illuminating the attending mosquitoes. I lie on the bed straightlike for a time. Through the broken weave of the mosquito net I regard the window.

in a square of darkness
I cup the moon in my hands
—cool white

As a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, Stanford Forrester is hurrying back to the town he lives in as darkness falls. What he experiences is a kind of humorous insight into loneliness (54):

As I kept walking, I had a feeling that the mountains were slowly growing taller and the pine was thickening. After a few minutes the road was no longer a road. It became a path, a path I was the only one on and the only sound I heard was a few crickets chirping in the long esparto grass.

New Year’s Eve—
even the crickets
celebrate with song

Tom Lynch in his travel diary Rain Drips from the Trees hitchhikes from Pennsylvania, across Canada, and then to Oregon, camping as he goes. The travel haibun’s conclusion evokes Whitman and is a general epiphany on a timeless moment (55):

Victoria, buy a few peaches, toss pits into the sea. To what avail time, waiting for the ferry.

cross the straits through evening blue venus behind clouds

I lean on the rail. Tonight too, crossing Victoria ferry, white sea gulls high in the air with motionless wings. To what avail space.

The anthropologist Reichel-Dolmatoff lived among the Kogi and Ika Indians of the high Sierra of South America. According to him, as summarized by Wade Davis (56):
These people, who are constantly on the move as they gather food and various resources, refer to their wanderings as “weavings”—each journey a thread woven into a sacred cloak over the Great Mother, each seasonal movement a prayer for a well-being of the people of the entire Earth.

This mythic belief in the far-reaching effect of ritual movement recalls a similar ritual movement, walking across a shallow pool with a lit candle, in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia and sleeping with a witch in a revolving bed to avert a nuclear world war in his film The Sacrifice. It also recalls the Australian Aboriginal belief that their walkabouts to connect with the acts of creation in a dreamtime sustain the world. In the postmodern condition, what is the efficacy of such ritual when the human population and the very planet is in crisis? The examples of insight gleaned by Bashō, Pho, and contemporary travel writers offers the beginning of an answer, whether one believes in the gods, the Great Mother, or an animated nature. Their travels lead to prayer-like connections to the nature of consciousness and the universe, and the celebration of the beauty and awe found therein.

Elehna de Sousa traveled to Molokai, Hawaii to participate in the annual celebration of the goddess Laka’s creation of the sacred hula dance. The celebration is held on a cold hilltop in the middle of the night. Elehna is reluctant to dance but succumbs to the magical nature of the event (57):

We sit with the other halaus, blankets around us, huddled in silence, as the dancers go up in turn, invisible. The atmosphere is trancelike, the rhythm of the kumas drum and the chants mesmerizing. This is kahiko (ancient hula) in its most sacred and powerful form—no lights, cameras or recordings allowed—I can see very little in the dark and feel somewhat disoriented. I dread my turn, but Puna tells me not to worry. She assures me that like everyone else, I too will be invisible, cloaked in the blackness of night.
on the mountain top
first ray of light
—silhouette of a hula dancer

Is not Elehna’s experience an illumination of what is missing in the postmodern condition of over-determined life and emotion? Can it be that travel provides an opening for reverie, epiphany, and the mysterious? And do not these states lead us to the truth of our own path and, beyond, to the truth of our very human condition? But let Bashō have the last say (58):
a wanderer:
let that be my name—
the first winter rain

Notes

1 Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other Travel Sketches, trans. Nobuuki Yuasa (Penguin, 1966), p. 81.
2 Wild Ways, Zen Poems of Ikkyū, trans. John Stevens (Shambhala, 1995), p. xxi.
3 Matsuo Bashō, p. 73.
4 Suthorn Pho, An Anthology, trans. Montri Umavijian (Bangkok Office of National Culture Comission, 1990), p. 57.
5 Caroline Joan S. Picar, “Metaphysics in Gaston Bachelard’s Reverie,” retrieved 7/10/2009.
6 Matsuo Bashō, p. 71.
7 Ibid., pp. 106-107.
8 Suthorn Pho, Nirat Muang Klaeng, trans. H. H. Prince Prem Purachatra (Bangkok National Identity Board, 1984), p. 18.
9 Ibid., p. 18.
10 Matsuo Bashō, p. 85.
11 Ibid., p. 51.
12 Suthorn Pho, Nirat Phra Prathom, trans. Montri Umavijani (Bangkok, 1986), p. 47.
13 Suthorn Pho, An Anthology, p. 68.
14 Ibid., p. 36.
15 Ibid., p. 37.
16 Ibid., p. 63.
17 American Haibun & Haiga, vol. 1, eds. Jim Kacian and Bruce Ross (Red Moon, 1999), p. 54.
18 Ibid., p.88.
19 American Haibun & Haiga, vol. 2, eds. Jim Kacian and Bruce Ross (Red Moon, 2001), p. 72.
20 Contemporary Haibun, vol. 6, ed. Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, and Ken Jones (Red Moon, 2005), p. 31.
21 American Haibun & Haiga, vol. 2, p. 46.
22 Contemporary Haibun, vol. 9, eds. Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, and Ken Jones (Red Moon, 2008), p. 64.
23 John Brandi, Water Shining Beyond the Fields, Haibun Travels Southeast Asia (Tres Chicas Books, 2006), p. 95.
24 Contemporary Haibun, vol. 4, eds. Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, and Ken Jones (Red Moon, 2003), p. 87.
25 Ibid., pp. 82-83.
26 Robert Hass, Time and Materials, Poems 1997-2005 (Ecco, 2007), p. 82.
27 Summer Dreams, American Haibun and Haiga, vol. 3, eds. Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, and Ken Jones (Red Moon, 2002), p. 114.
28 Contemporary Haibun, vol. 10, eds. Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, and Ken Jones (Red Moon, 2008), p. 28.
29 Contemporary Haibun, vol. 4, p. 99.
30 Journey to the Interior, American Versions of Haibun, ed. Bruce Ross (tuttle, 1998), p. 191.
31 Contemporary Haibun, vol. 5, eds. Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, and Ken Jones (Red Moon, 2004), p. 23.
32 Andrew Schelling, Old Tale Road, Poems (Empty Bowl, 2008), p. 22.
33 Journey to the Interior, p. 186.
34 Ibid., pp. 202-203.
35 American Haibun & Haiga, vol. 3, eds. Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, and Ken Jones (Red Moon, 2002), p. 8.
36 Matsuo Bashō, p. 67.
37 Ibid., p. 80.
38 Ibid., p. 86.
39 Ibid., pp. 122-123.
40 Ibid., p. 141.
41 Nirat Muang Klaeng, p. 23.
42 Suthorn Pho, An Anthology, p. 34.
43 Ibid., p. 70.
44 Ibid., p. 75.
45 Nirat Phra Prathom, p. 36.
46 Paul F. Schmidt, Temple Reflections (Hummingbird Press, 1980), p. 26.
47 Tim Sampson, skin half shed (timsampson@hotmail.com, 2005), p. 8.
48 Ibid., p. 14.
49 American Haibun & Haiga, vol. 2, p. 85.
50 Ibid., p. 89.
51 Water Shining Beyond the Fields, Haibun Travels Southeast Asia, p. 135.
52 American Haibun & Haiga, vol. 2, p. 14.
53 Contemporary Haibun, vol. 7, eds. Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, and Ken Jones (Red Moon, 2006), p. 101.
54 American Haibun & Haiga, vol. 2, p. 29.
55 Journey to the Interior, p. 164.
56 Wade Davis, “On Preserving the Diversity of the Ethnosphere,” Shaman’s Drum 80 (2009), p. 36.
57 Summer Dreams, American Haibun & Haiga, vol. 3, pp. 26-27.
58 The translation adapted by the author from Tabito to waga na youbaren hatsushigure.

Bruce Ross is the editor of Journey to the Interior, American Versions of Haibun, co-editor of Contemporary Haibun, and editor of haibun for Moonset. His own original haibun appear in the world haiku and haibun journals. He has also authored essays on the poetics of haibun which have appeared in scholarly collections and world haiku and haibun journals.