My first haibun accepted!

I am incredibly proud that my poem “Homecoming” will appear in the fall 2025 issue of Drifting Sands Haibun: A Journal of Haibun and Tanka Prose. I’m taking a course in poetics and learning more about forms, and I happen to have a few poems written that are refusing every form I test on them–sonnet, tercets, free verse, prose poems, nothing feels right. I decided to take one of them and test it as a haibun, a form I have never worked with before that involves, essentially, a prose treatment followed by a haiku. (Please note this is simplification of the form to such a degree that it misses the point of the form–I recommend you spend some time reading haibun, both Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Sketches, and the way contemporary poets approach it.) I was amazed to place “Homecoming” the same day I submitted it (a rare bout of instant gratification when it comes to submissions), and now I feel brave enough to take the othe two poems I have that do not want to be sonnets or any of my usual poke-a-poem forms. I’ve been writing a lot more lately about nature and engaging with specific flora and fauna as I revisit my favorite landscapes in memory and writing, so perhaps it’s not so odd that I find myself turning to Japanese forms where nature figures so prominently. I find the Japanese forms require me to really slow my frantic brain down–the way working in form usually does for me–and calls me to discipline my attention in a new way.