Writing Prompt: Burning Haibun

If you find yourself wishing to write a burning haibun, here are the rules:

A burning haibun must be composed of three (or more) parts—an initial prose poem, an erasure of that prose poem, and an erasure of the previous erasure down to a haiku. Additional segments of erasure may be integrated, but keep in mind the continuity of the piece.

The erasures are intended to be sequential and persistent. Once a piece of text has been blacked out, or burned away, it should not return. Furthermore, each erasure should represent some form of reorientation from the previous section, altering the meaning, tone, etcetera.

The focus of a burning haibun—in contrast to traditional haibun—should be on an interior landscape, by which I mean the landscape of memory. Though the form emerged from a meditation upon the contours of traumatic memory, you should by no means feel confined to writing within that space.

Somewhere within the poem’s text, something must burn.

A small hint: Although the first burning haibun was written in a linear fashion, in my subsequent uses of the form, I instead began with a haiku in mind. As I wrote the first section, I would seed these words into the new composition, allowing the first erasure to act as an improvisation between two pre-established points. I have found this to be a more efficient and satisfying approach to the confines of the form.

A more recent burning haibun—published above—which explores my early transition through the Bruce Springsteen song “Dancing in the Dark,” grew outward from an initial haiku. More accurately, it sprang from the realization that the lyrics I had fixated on during this period of my life, “Check my look in the/mirror, I wanna change my/clothes my hair my face,” could be shaped into a haiku; the most honest point the poem could arrive at was the place it began.

I encourage you to try both approaches, one beginning from the prose poem and writing toward unknown wreckage, another from the concluding haiku—the message hidden in the poem’s ashes.