By Bacopa Literary Review Poetry Co-Editor Oliver Keyhani
To walk through your dead self is no easy feat. Haley Winans gives us a personal epic, something dark and yearning, something burning. Every line takes us into a fractured landscape, a mind with all its tangles; the direction is never decided. Sometimes it winds back upon itself, sometimes it skips into another dimension, but always there is the strange and unfathomable-- the self--that watches, experiences, and cracks like leaves.
The Haibun consists of one or more paragraphs of prose—imagistic, hallucinatory, and/or story-like, sometimes referred to as prose in a haikai style, coupled to one or more haiku. The form is exceedingly versatile, but both elements must complement each other. In Winans’ haibun, there is the self, but also the other, a “he”, defined by wants, a heart “covered in antlers”, and a tongue that moves as a “loaded gun”. The imagery is provocative, but not sentimental or maudlin.
It’s always difficult to tell submitting poets what it is we look for. We do want variety: of forms/styles, of voices, of tenor. But formal poetry also involves a significant amount of craft—how the story evolves, its meter, rhyme, and flow, a surprising comparison or juxtaposition, a message, meaning, or emotion, that can be deeply personal, but must also be able to touch a universal aspect in us all. Winans succeeds in this, evoking an imaginative experience in the reader. Such an arrangement of sense, rhythm, and sound is a prime example of the type of work Bacopa encourages.
Haley Winan's piece "Burning Haibun at The Creek" was Bacopa Literary Review 2023's Formal Poetry Award.
About the contributor: Haley Winans is a garden-lover and bunny mom from Annapolis, Maryland. She has poetry published in Slipstream, The Shore Poetry, and elsewhere. She's in the University of Memphis MFA Creative Writing program. She's a founding co-editor of Beaver Magazine. During undergrad, she studied Environmental Studies and Creative Writing, with a focus on environmental justice, sustainable agriculture, and poetry. Find her on Twitter @winans_haley.
